The Athletic on Shea Patterson

My sense is Ole Miss is trying to weather this storm and get to the other side.  Based on the options -- support, oppose, neutral, no comment -- my guess is they will express neutrality or no comment.  Then it's in the hands of the NCAA.

I can't begin to guess what those bureaucrats will do.

in a court case testifying about their behavior when they already released their players to transfer anywhere? My answer is 0% Chances that more NCAA issues are uncovered? More than 0%.

The chances that the NCAA wants to defend their transfer rules in court using the facts of the Ole Miss case? Again, my answer is 0% The chances that the case would move to a broader examination of their transfer rules? Considerably more than 0%.

The NCAA will write their ruling in a way that narrowly defines the exception they are allowing. It won't set a harmful precedent. A court case might.

Even if the NCAA and Ole Miss thought they would prevail in court, they know they would endure a lot of bad publicity. The risk-reward ratio is completely against their contesting the waivers. 

Both Ole Miss and the NCAA have incentive to get past it quickly. Angelique agrees with me on this that the more dangerous precedent would actually be set in a court of law. If the NCAA makes a decision outside of court that Shea can play, they retain the right to make individual varying decisions on a player by player basis going forward. However, if it goes to court, a legal precedent can be set that takes that power out of the hands of the NCAA and opens them up to all sorts of problems going forward. Equally as important is the fact that there is great incentive on the part of both Ole Miss and the NCAA to avoid discovery and depostitons. If they allow that to happen, they can be asked about anything and everything. So just from a common sense legal standpoint, this is a loser case given the way the Houston Nutt case went, for both Ole Miss and the NCAA. My guess is that they will look to move this forward as quickly and quietly as possible and not look back. If I had to predict, I would say there's a high percentage chance Shea is eligible next season.

I'd say Ole Miss will most likely make no comment, which works just as well for the NCAA in making their decision.

Second, this establishes no precident with respect to simply colleges misleading a recruit as egregious behavior. For instance coaches mislead players all the time that they are going to be there long term even if they are already in talks to get a job elsewhere.

The precident it could establish, that I think we are all fine with, is with respect to misleading players about serious NCAA violations, not the new color of next year's uniform or the player's likelihood of serious play time.

Is that like the rest of the beat, it's pretty homerish. Custance isn't doing what a responsible journalist does by accurately recognizing the team is in shambles. He does a good job with the access he gets but he may as well be employed by the team because it's more on the PR side than the journalism side.