When the extent of new NCAA allegations came out last week involving the scope of impropriety within Ole Miss football, the first thing that crossed my mind was the resonating quote to Sports Illustrated from the late Charley Pell once the 1983-84 investigation of his Florida program had concluded: "It was all just so damn unnecessary."

Isn’t that the way it often happens as the reality of being caught cheating comes down? The violators — obsessed with winning to the point of feeling compelled to break or completely ignore the rules — have that come-to-Jesus moment.

Once the punishment is applied, when lives are changed forever and careers/reputations are permanently damaged, a stark realization sets in that the payoff usually isn’t worth the risk.

Sure, Florida ascended to a top-5 ranking for the first time in 1984, finished No. 1 in a frivolous New York Times poll, and enjoyed its first SEC championship for six months until the league presidents voted to strip the Gators of that title.

While Pell united Gator boosters like never before, in the end, the shame of violating 59 NCAA rules to win and losing his career far outweighed Florida’s temporary joy of seeing successor Galen Hall and the players finish the ’84 season with a tainted SEC crown.

That’s the problem when a coach or people on his staff make a conscious decision to not just bend the rules, but break them with such ferocity as to provide a significant competitive advantage. The championship or the wins that may result can never feel real.

Pick any college football scandal or its fallout – the SMU death penalty, the Miami Pell Grant fraud, the Reggie Bush debacle at USC, the NCAA violations/unreported criminal acts that led to the downfall of Oklahoma’s Barry Switzer, Penn State’s Joe Paterno and Baylor’s Art Briles. There’s a heavy price to pay, and quite often, the stain attached to it never quite goes away.

Leadership failure takes place on multiple fronts. Coaches are either complicit in violations or lack the proper monitoring components within their programs. Some claim they didn’t know what was going on when, more likely, they didn’t want to know.

Which brings us to Ole Miss coach Hugh Freeze, who had maintained a pattern of denial when suspicions began surfacing a few years ago about his program. But it now looks rather incriminating in the wake of his program being accused of 15 Level I violations and being charged with lack of institutional control.

When a school agrees before any punishment is handed down to a one-year bowl ban, a loss of 11 scholarships and forfeiting $7.8 million in SEC postseason revenue, that usually means what they expect the NCAA to hand down is a lot worse.

The Committee on Infractions, which likely won’t resolve the Ole Miss case until next year, is going to hit the Rebels hard. It’s just a question of how impactful the hammer will be. Or whether Freeze, who has the school’s backing for the time being, can survive this mess.

It doesn’t look good because of the high volume of Level 1 allegations. And none of the eight new ones are even tied to former Ole Miss lineman and Lake City product Laremy Tunsil admitting on NFL draft night to taking money from Rebels’ assistant coaches. There’s also a charge of Ole Miss attempting to funnel as much as $15,000 to a recruit who ended up at a rival school.

Over three decades ago, Florida’s coaching staff went the rogue route and the Gators were lucky it only took five years for their program to recover. Thanks to the timely hire of Steve Spurrier, a coach as obsessed with playing by the rules as winning, it set UF football on a good, long-term course.

It’s highly doubtful Ole Miss will recover so quickly, especially if the NCAA extends that bowl ban to two years and players are allowed to transfer without penalty. Not in an SEC West division with higher-resourced programs Alabama, LSU and Auburn ready to cherry-pick the Rebels.

A decade after Florida’s football scandal subsided, Pell said this to Dateline in 1995 about his mindset before getting caught: "There wasn’t room for anything but winning. Nothing. Winning was the sole obsession, to a fault."

This is what the trap of big-time college football can sometimes do to coaches, and you get the feeling Ole Miss and Freeze was no different. It’s too bad because, truthfully, big-time cheating is never worth the stress of a cover-up and certainly not the price of getting caught.

Gene.frenette@jacksonville.com: (904) 359-4540