Michigan Football: Shea Patterson Case "Ready To Be Decided"
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Shea Patterson should find out soon whether or not he'll be eligible to play immediately, and his lawyer believes it will be good news for Michigan.
Patterson detailed in a letter seen by CBS Sports how he was misled by Ole Miss head coach Hugh Freeze.
Patterson wrote in the nine-page letter he began having conversations with his father about transferring in the middle of October 2017.
"I knew I'd made the right decision to leave Ole Miss," he reportedly wrote when the NCAA dropped the second year of a bowl ban on Dec. 1 that year.
"It doesn't seem fair to me that the only thing standing in the way of Coach Freeze making $5 million a year at another school was the discovery that he wasn't the trustworthy, straight-laced role model that he claimed to be."
According to the Detroit News, Ole Miss received "thorough responses from Patterson to questions from the NCAA case manager. Per NCAA rules, Ole Miss was given 10 days, until April 27, to comment or offer further remarks in opposition of Patterson being immediately eligible to play at Michigan."
“This morning, Ole Miss notified the NCAA — which in turn notified Michigan — that Ole Miss had ‘nothing to add’ and had said that the NCAA should proceed with making a decision by applying its bylaws, guidelines, and applicable precedents for granting waivers of the “year-in-residence” requirement,” Patterson's attorney, Thomas Mars, told the News Wednesday.
“Therefore, the case is ready to be decided. The timing of the NCAA’s decision is a matter of the staff’s discretion, so there is no timetable for when a decision will be made. I’m confident, however, that the staff will not take any more time than is necessary to come to the right decision.”
Mars added he is "supremely confident" this response from Ole Miss bodes well for Patterson.
“I could be wrong, by my interpretation of the message that Ole Miss sent back to the NCAA this morning is, ‘We’re done fighting. Just grant Shea a waiver and get this over with,’” he said.
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