Ole Miss has 90 days to respond to the NCAA’s accusations, including the nastiest of all, the dreaded “lack of institutional control”—the one Ole Miss will fight hardest here. They should fight that one, and with reason. There is very little evidence that Ole Miss, or any other big FBS program, is out of control when it comes to recruiting. This is the way things work, and have always worked in the SEC and well beyond.
To the contrary, the same schools showing up every year in the recruiting rankings indicates this is a pretty predictable market for talent, and that the biggest issue a member school or competitor might have with an Ole Miss is a.) public disclosure of black market wages, or b.) paying beyond scale and upsetting everyone else’s salary caps.
That’s it. Beyond that, the rest is a shammy defense of a particularly skinflinty strain of amateurism, or personal invective against Hugh Freeze.
To be fair, Hugh Freeze did and does make it really easy to do that exact thing. He coaches in a very kickable dirt-poor state known mostly for exporting catfish and soybeans, and at a university known for importing a well-off undergrads from the Nashville and Atlanta suburbs for what they think is going to be a four year overnight stay inside a Luke Bryan video. That might not be what it is—there’s less flannel, for one—but it’s what people think Ole Miss is. Let’s put this gently, too: Their academic standards for football players are forgiving, and their academic assistance for them once enrolled is very, very generous.
The point is: If you were going to pick a cartoon punching bag of an SEC school to bag on, it would be Ole Miss, and its most cartoonish huckster ideal of a coach would look and sound a lot like Hugh Freeze.