A Michael Buffer wannabe proudly declared, "And now a five-star prospect from Batesville, Mississippi...Tony Conner" to a crowd of inebriated Ole Miss fans and students as Conner, the local stud, strode onto the stage.



It was Ole Miss' big official visit weekend back in January 2013, and the school pulled out all the stops. The big group of top recruits that weekend included Conner, Robert Nkemdiche, Laquon Treadwell, Laremy Tunsil and Chris Jones - all five-star prospects and all but one would go on to sign with the Rebels.



One-by-one their names were announced to the popular Oxford college bar as the young celebrities they were, the crowd begging them to come to Ole Miss. A group of older boosters hung off to the side, eying the greatest collection of recruiting talent the Rebels had ever assembled in Oxford. All the while, Ole Miss assistants quietly monitored the proceedings from upstairs, watching their top recruiting targets dance shirtless on stage to the adulation of the fans.



Ole Miss went on to sign the nation's eighth-best recruiting class that year, an achievement that generated a lot of good publicity for the school. But that recruiting class attracted the NCAA to set up shop in Mississippi and could ultimately cost Hugh Freeze, Ross Bjork and others their jobs at the school.



The program received an amended Notice of Allegations Wednesday which alleges that Ole Miss paid between $13,000 and $15,600 to a recruit who ended up at another school, among other serious charges.



If the lack of institutional control charge and the head coach responsibility legislation stick, Freeze will likely be out of a job and Bjork might not be far behind. Ole Miss football program will be cratered and will have little shot at competing in the ultra-competitive SEC West for years.



It'll represent a precipitous fall from grace for Freeze who had emerged as one of the SEC's most promising coaches.





**



There are multiple remarkable stories surrounding that 2013 Ole Miss class but none more so than the signing of Tunsil, a five-star offensive tackle out of Lake City, Florida. All the big schools wanted Tunsil who was viewed as a plug-and-play Day 1 starter wherever he landed. Unlike Nkemdiche, Conner or even Treadwell, Ole Miss didn't have a natural connection to the top 10 recruit.



Ole Miss wasn't given much of a shot for most of Tunsil's recruitment, with Georgia and Alabama considered the early favorites. But Freeze and defensive line coach Chris Kiffin convinced Tunsil to take an official visit the same weekend as their other top targets.



And sometime between arriving on campus and dancing on stage, something changed.



Days later, Georgia went in for an in-home visit with Tunsil's family expecting the five-star to reaffirm a silent commitment he had already given Mark Richt's staff.



Instead, the Georgia coaching contingent walked in to find the entire Tunsil family decked out in Ole Miss gear. The Georgia coaches were livid, according to multiple accounts. Word quickly started spreading through the college ranks, and there was a general feeling amongst coaches that Ole Miss had gone too far.



Tunsil went on to have a very good career for the Rebels but was in the news twice for the wrong reasons. First, he was suspended for seven games after he was caught using three loaner cars over a six-month period without payment. Then there was the much publicized NFL Draft disaster when someone hacked his account and revealed text messages that showed him asking Ole Miss associate athletic director John Miller and former staffer Barney Farrar for money to pay bills.



Tunsil later admitted to taking money in a surreal press conference at the draft.



Ole Miss, in a 20-minute video released Wednesday, said that the Tunsil draft day crisis didn't factor into new NCAA allegations, but it gave the NCAA an opportunity to keep digging into the program. The NCAA immediately started asking around about Tunsil after he admitted at the draft to taking money while at Ole Miss, according to multiple sources.



More than anything, it was more bad optics for a program in the middle of a years-long NCAA investigation.



As one college coach put it to me, "Everyone does it, but they got caught on national TV, and it was embarrassing honestly."



**



It's hard to blame Freeze or his staff for trying to recruit the best recruiting class possible at a school that typically isn't relevant on the national scale. The program achieved considerable success because of that 2013 recruiting class, namely winning consecutive games against Alabama in 2014 and 2015 and earning the program's first Sugar Bowl berth since 1970. But it's easy to wonder if Ole Miss hadn't signed Tunsil, whether it'd be in this current mess.



It's not as if Freeze and others involved in the program weren't aware that there could be negative consequences. One local Mississippi power player even warned an Ole Miss assistant that they were sloppy and it could come back to bite them. The Ole Miss assistant shrugged off the advice, confident that the staff's approach was bulletproof.



That mentality was reflected throughout the program. It all started with the head coach who, in a now infamous tweet, challenged anyone with knowledge of recruiting violations to alert the school's compliance department. Rival coaches couldn't believe that Freeze would be so brazen to dare people like that publicly.



It didn't stop there.



Up until that depressing 20-minute video on Wednesday, Freeze and Bjork were publicly defiant over the NCAA investigation. There was a cockiness to the coach and athletic director pair as they went on the aggressive to anyone who dared impugn Ole Miss' good name. All the while, they downplayed the severity of the charges behind the scenes to reporters who happily took them at face value.



Years down the line, Freeze and other members of his staff may look back and wonder if they had been humbler, if they hadn't been so greedy, maybe they could have avoided the NCAA's vice grip.



Instead, Freeze and Ole Miss flew too close to the sun. Similar to the warning Robert DeNiro's character delivers about spending money following the Lufthansa heist in "Goodfellas," if you are going to color outside the lines, you have to be tactful about it. Ole Miss was never going to get the benefit of the doubt; it was new money, and to outsiders, looked like it just bought a fleet of luxury vehicles.



Once Ole Miss announced that 2013 recruiting class, it was a certainty that the NCAA was going to snoop around. The more and more they looked around, the more resolute investigators became in extracting a pound of flesh. Based on the allegations, it appears it was able to do that and more through offering immunity in exchange for information.



Ole Miss is now on the ropes though it has vowed to fight the most serious NCAA allegations. The school has already imposed a one-year bowl ban though there are more serious punishments hanging over its head. If its unsuccessful in its Committee on Infractions hearing, as most expect it will be, it will be because Ole Miss made too many waves too quickly in 2013.



And because of that, the music has stopped and the dancing is over in Oxford.