Ole Miss Sort of Confirms Laremy Tunsil Texts, Definitely Confirms Idiocy of NCAA

Here is a story that could only originate from college athletics. According to Outside the Lines, Ole Miss has confirmed that the text conversations between Laremy Tunsil and an Ole Miss official that were posted to Tunsil's Instagram account the night he was (eventually) drafted did in fact happen. But! The school is "still looking into whether the messages were altered before they were published." Got that?

Apparently, in the two weeks since the draft, Ole Miss was able to verify that the conversation shown in screen grabs happened, but I guess they just don't know how much of it happened, or which parts of it happened. Never mind that Tunsil himself already admitted it was real. Surely an institute of higher learning has bigger fish to fry, but how hard is it to confirm the authenticity of conversations that one of your own employees was party to?

We know who Tunsil was texting—unless that was the doctored part!—because it says right in the screen grab that he was asking assistant athletic director John Miller for help paying his mother's rent and electricity. Presumably someone at Ole Miss knows where the assistant athletic director's office is, yes? Or, if they don't know where his office is, maybe they have a phone number or email address where he can be reached? Just in case Ole Miss hadn't been able to get to it, I emailed Miller and asked if he could verify the authenticity of the screen grabs. He did not immediately respond, so maybe that's where Ole Miss was running into trouble.

The great thing about this, though, is that it shows just how stupid the NCAA's rules on amateurism make everyone look. Obviously Ole Miss knows exactly what happened. It would be great if they could just say, "Hey, yeah, we did it. Every school does it. This is how it works." But they can't. Instead, they have to do damage control behind the scenes and make sure they don't get torpedoed by the NCAA. This investigation should have taken five minutes. The most difficult part of it was probably figuring which of the 105 guys on the roster they had to look into. "What was his name?" "I forget, he was getting money." "Thanks, Bob! Really narrows it down!"

So now we have an actual, accredited university, where people go to get bachelors and advanced degrees, trying to protect itself from sanctions in the most preposterous, existential way: "Sure, it happened. But does anything really happen?" You can't blame Ole Miss for going meta, though—they have an entire operation to consider. This is the system all schools and athletic departments live under. Rules are rules, but they almost always broken, and only occasionally enforced when it becomes embarrassing for the people in charge.