McCready: The good, the bad and the unspoken of Ole Miss' 2016 class

OXFORD, Miss. – There is recency bias in college football recruiting.

It comes with the territory.

In the frenzied period leading up to National Signing Day, the focus is on the prospects who have not yet committed or who might flip to another program, not on the kids who haven’t wavered from their decisions in months.

National Signing Day is to college football what the NFL draft is to the pro game, as the sport goes and the coverage increases, the attention placed on the prospects waiting until the end to choose a cap or eat a cake or jump out of an airplane isn’t going to be all that balanced in the whole scheme of things.

Had Ole Miss landed Shea Patterson this February instead of last February, Wednesday would have been cause for great celebration in Oxford. Had Greg Little chosen Ole Miss Wednesday instead of in November, ESPN’s Chris Low’s tweets from inside the Ole Miss war room would have reflected jubilation and not disappointment.

So that’s a dose of perspective.

Ole Miss, as of this writing, is No. 7 nationally (and hey, third in the SEC West) in the Rivals.com team recruiting rankings. By any measure, that’s strong.

The Rebels landed the nation’s best quarterback, best left tackle, another Rivals250 offensive tackle (Bryce Mathews) three four-star wide receivers (A.J. Brown, Dekaylin Metcalf and Tre Nixon), a Rivals250 running back (D’Vaughn Pennamon) and a trio of tight ends, including Evan Engram clone Jacob Mathis.

Defensively, the Rebels landed a top-50 player in defensive tackle Benito Jones, a top-100 safety in Deontay Anderson and a handful of players the Rebels have been high on for the past 18 months – guys like linebacker Donta Evans , defensive end Charles Wiley and safety Greg Eisworth.

There’s a second dose of perspective. If you’re an Ole Miss fan down in the dumps about the events of Wednesday, you should broaden your scope.

However, Ole Miss can’t ignore Wednesday. It happened, and it was ugly. For the third straight year, the Rebels didn’t finish particularly strong.

Ole Miss went to bed Tuesday night feeling it had Shyheim Carter in the fold. Carter signed with Alabama early Wednesday, a loss that magnified Rivals100 cornerback Nigel Knott’s decision to sign with the Crimson Tide earlier in the week.

A bigger blow was the loss of five-star Jeffery Simmons to Mississippi State. For at least the past six months, Ole Miss felt it led for the Macon, Miss., defensive end. The Rebels went to bed Tuesday feeling it was in the driver’s seat for his signature. They were more worried about Alabama than they were Mississippi State. Then on Wednesday morning, Simmons stepped to the dais in a black and gold sports coat and cast his lot with the Bulldogs.

Ole Miss lost long-time linebacker commitment David Luafatasaga to Utah on Wednesday. Five-star defensive end Jonathan Kongbo chose Tennessee over the Rebels. Five-star linebacker stayed home and signed with UCLA.

Imagine how bad Wednesday would have been if Ole Miss weren’t cheating so rampantly, right? Right?

In case you’re blind to sarcasm, I’m being facetious. But seriously, those misses left the Rebels’ class awfully thin at linebacker and cornerback and a defensive end short. Ole Miss had room to sign as many as 31 players on Wednesday. The Rebels signed 24, making one wonder if they wish now they hadn’t cut Rivals100 wide receiver Mykel Jones loose a week ago.

Hindsight is perfect, of course, and again, criticizing a top-seven class is nitpicking. The Rebels will have to aggressively address defensive needs in December and again next February, but Freeze called Wednesday’s haul his deepest class, top to bottom, since arriving in Oxford four years ago.

Wednesday’s finish does beg a question, however, and it’s one that’s not remotely politically correct. On Friday, Yahoo’s Pat Forde broke a story about a letter of allegations served against Ole Miss by the NCAA. Even though subsequent articles minimized the exposure against Freeze and the football program, the Rebels spent a good bit of the last five days doing some damage control. As he said Wednesday, that issue “didn’t help” down the stretch.

The NCAA question will loom over the Rebels for the next 90 days, at least. Ole Miss needs to address it aggressively and publicly. The accusations of widespread cheating are ridiculous and agenda-driven.

Let’s make one thing clear: There’s no such thing as a clean football program. However, if the Rebels were throwing buckets of cash at recruits in the manner that some in the media and many in fandom allege, days like Wednesday wouldn’t keep happening.

Ole Miss needs the NCAA case resolved, packaged neatly and filed away. The Rebels have already started on the 2017 class, and there are reasons to believe similar success is forthcoming. That’s how championships are built – one class at a time.

The one Ole Miss signed Wednesday was special. It’s one that can be a pillar of a championship program. Wednesday just served as a sobering reminder that taking those final steps towards contention can be brutally difficult.