Why Ole Miss won’t support Patterson is petty, wrong
There are two reasons, and two reasons only, why Ole Miss would oppose a waiver request from its former star quarterback Shea Patterson to be eligible immediately at Michigan after he transferred there this winter.
The first is pettiness, a tradition ingrained into the college football consciousness as marching bands and bowl games.
The second, though, is mind-boggling: Even after getting kicked in the gut by the NCAA for lots of rules violations and mocked nationally for its bungled, years-long campaign to blame its cheating habit on Houston Nutt, women’s basketball and track,
Ole Miss still doesn’t believe it did anything wrong.
“There’s no reason to put lipstick on this pig,” said Patterson’s attorney, Thomas Mars. “I’m convinced that ‘doing the right thing’ never even crossed anyone’s mind in Oxford when the decision-makers at Ole Miss were deciding what to say to the NCAA about Michigan’s request to allow Shea to be under center next season. The only reason Ole Miss is trying to stop Shea from being able to compete this fall is pure spite.”
You’d think by now that Ole Miss would know better than to put its institutional conduct under the microscope again. The world of college sports, by and large, has moved on from the mess left behind by Hugh Freeze. The NCAA levied a two-year bowl ban last fall, the school promoted Matt Luke to head coach on a permanent basis and the program, while not in great shape, is far from a smoking crater. Heck, 247 Sports even has Ole Miss’ 2019 recruiting class ranked No. 1 as of today. (Even though that ranking is a mirage — Ole Miss currently has 15 verbal commitments while the traditional powers have barely gotten started — it’s clear they’ll be able to operate despite NCAA sanctions.)
The worst, more or less, should be over for Ole Miss. If there was ever a time to grit their teeth, rubber-stamp Patterson’s waiver request, start to rebuild some goodwill and just move the heck on from the entire thing, it would be now.
To be clear, Ole Miss doesn’t get to determine whether Patterson will be eligible right away at Michigan. Only the NCAA staff can do that. The school does, however, have a choice whether to support his waiver request, which could factor into the decision. At this point for Ole Miss, supporting Patterson should be an easy call.
But Ole Miss just can’t bring itself to do that, so here comes Mars again advocating on behalf of another high-profile client, and if you forgot what happened the last time the school tried to push back against him, it ended up firing a popular coach and issuing a public apology that, if given months earlier, could have avoided the entire mess.
It’s not that Mars, an attorney for the Arkansas-based Friday, Eldredge & Clark firm, has some kind of vendetta against Ole Miss.
But he does have a basic understanding of the truth: In February 2016, school officials launched a deliberate public relations campaign to downplay the severity of the accusations made by the NCAA in a notice of allegations in order to help save a skittish recruiting class right before national signing day.
That was true the day it happened, it was true on the day Ole Miss finally apologized to Nutt as part of a settlement to end his lawsuit and it remains true today as Patterson tries to persuade the NCAA to let him play immediately.
Ole Miss athletics director Ross Bjork said in a phone conversation he could not discuss specifics of what the school submitted to the NCAA because of privacy laws. But he offered the following statement:
“We would not oppose a waiver of the year in residence requirement based on a legitimate reason for any student-athlete who wants to transfer from Ole Miss. So the waiver in question, the way it was written, we had no choice but to respond the way that we did, and anyone who left our program, we wish them the best academically and athletically, and at this point it’s not really our matter. It’s an NCAA and Michigan matter at this point.”
The argument Ole Miss has consistently made about February 2016 is that the information it conveyed to recruits and the media about its pending NCAA case was essentially true at the time, that there was no way to know the case would mushroom following Laremy Tunsil’s social media accounts getting hacked on NFL draft night a few months, which opened the door for NCAA investigators to go back in looking for more.
Though Mars isn’t making Ole Miss’ response public, one can infer from his comments that the school is defaulting back to those semantics games about what it revealed to recruits and the media in 2016. But the big-picture narrative Ole Miss tried to spin was unmistakable: They wanted people to believe the NCAA allegations, as they related to the Hugh Freeze football program, were going to be no big deal.
While the school is correct that they couldn’t have known a set of more serious violations would be coming (along with a self-imposed bowl ban) in early 2017, there was plenty of evidence in the first notice of allegations that Ole Miss football had a serious problem. In addition to the years-old academic fraud stuff that was tied to a former Nutt staff member, there were multiple Level 1 allegations along with others of a less-serious variety tied to the Freeze regime that painted the picture of a staff consistently and systematically cutting corners in order to get recruits and their families on campus outside the bounds of the rulebook.
It might not have been as explosive as the alleged $10,000 payment to Mississippi State linebacker Leo Lewis, who eventually became the NCAA’s star witness in the second notice of allegations, but there was more than enough to establish a pattern of conduct that the NCAA Committee on Infractions could use to hammer Ole Miss if it had wanted to.
And that’s the thing: Nobody knows what would have happened had the NCAA not gone in for a second investigation. Maybe Ole Miss would’ve gotten off with some minor recruiting restrictions and penalties for assistant coaches. Maybe a bowl ban was in the cards either way.
Regardless, uncertainty wouldn’t make for an effective recruiting pitch to someone like Patterson, who was the No. 1 quarterback prospect in the country at the time. So instead Ole Miss made up its own story to help secure his (and other) commitments, and the story turned out to be misleading.
But even years later, Ole Miss apparently can’t bring itself to admit that and would rather see Patterson punished for deciding he’d rather play football somewhere else. Who could have guessed Ole Miss would save the most shameful part of this story for the last chapter?