It was fun while it lasted, wasn't it, Ole Miss? The two wins over Alabama. The two New Year's Six bowl games. The status as an SEC West contender.

It was heady stuff for a program that hadn't had much success in the last half-century when it wasn't quarterbacked by a Manning. If you never did make it to the SEC Championship Game for the first time, thanks to that freakish lateral by Arkansas, at least you put yourself on the college football map for something more than drunken frivolity in the Grove.

But now that the NCAA has hit you with an amended Notice of Allegations, piling on more and more serious charges such as lack of institutional control and a violation of head coach responsibility legislation, now that you've self-imposed more serious penalties such as a 2017 postseason ban, you have to ask yourself this question:

Was it worth it?

The party's clearly over in Oxford. You don't get hit with 21 allegations - eight new ones and an expansion of one of the 13 in the original NOA - without the Infractions Committee hitting you much harder than you've slapped yourself.

Ask Alabama.

Unlike Alabama, USC or Penn State, traditional powers who've bounced back from major sanctions in the last 15 years, Ole Miss doesn't have the history, tradition and infrastructure to survive its self-imposed penalties plus the sanctions the Infractions Committee is likely to add without returning to the dark ages for an extended period of time.

While there's no telling how badly the COI will pile on, anyone with any experience in NCAA cases - which is pretty much everyone in this state - can tell you it doesn't look good.

Anyone who watched the grim 20-minute video Ole Miss released Wednesday featuring its chancellor, AD and head football coach outlining the new Notice of Allegations would say the same. They looked and sounded like three men who see the light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train.

That production inspired as much confidence as the Ray Watts-Jerod Haase hostage video when the UAB president announced he was giving his basketball coach a huge raise with all the money the school wouldn't be spending on football.

At least Haase was able to escape Watts by taking a better job at Stanford. Hugh Freeze probably won't be able to escape the NCAA, despite the show of support from his superiors.

The defiant Freeze who tweeted a challenge to anyone who had dirt on his program to turn it in and hinted revenge at negative-recruiting rivals was nowhere to be seen on that video. He was replaced by a man whose rags-to-riches story is in serious jeopardy.

Freeze was the direct target of one of the new allegations, that he violated the head coach responsibility legislation. Ole Miss will fight that charge, but if the COI agrees with the allegation, he'll face a multi-game suspension. At least.

The program was hit with the equally serious charge of a lack of institutional control, which it also will contest. While the Rebs won't have to stare down the barrel of the death penalty, they are looking at hard times ahead.

You don't get accused of having a staff member hook up a recruit with two boosters who allegedly paid the recruit between $13,000 and $15,600 unless the NCAA staff fully believes it has evidence to support that charge.

Ole Miss copped to the impermissible contact between the boosters and the recruit but said "we are still evaluating whether there is sufficient credible and persuasive evidence to support the alleged payments."

In the most Ole Miss thing ever, the recruit in question, who received the largest amount of impermissible benefits in this case, signed with another school. Some of the current Rebels may wish they'd done the same when this case is finished later this year.

You can rail against the absurd length of the Ole Miss investigation, which was extended thanks to the Laremy Tunsil draft night debacle, although it appears none of the new charges arose from that nightmare. You can push the conspiracy theory that Ole Miss is being punished for trying to compete with the big boys using similar tactics that often go unpunished.

You can even argue that recruits and players should be compensated given the enormous salaries paid to coaches such as Freeze and the massive amounts of revenues those players generate.

But the day of fair compensation isn't here yet. Equal treatment under the law remains a pipe dream. On this day, the NCAA has rules, and Ole Miss admitted to breaking some of them as it tried to improve its lot in SEC West life.

The run was fun while it lasted. But was it worth it?