In case you missed the news, Ole Miss head coach Hugh Freeze and his former assistant coach Barney Farrar both released individual responses to the NCAA’s allegations against them following the school’s second Notice of Allegations. Ole Miss released its official response earlier in the week.

Farrar stands accused of four Level I violations, the most severe violations in the NCAA’s new penalty matrix system. In his released response, the former Ole Miss assistant coach claims he did not knowingly break any NCAA rules during his time with the Rebels. Farrar also states that Freeze never asked him to break any rules.

Considering Ole Miss fired Farrar in November and has since forced him to get his own legal counsel, which he is forced to pay out of pocket, that’s a commendable statement from a former employee. Especially considering Ole Miss argues Farrar acted alone if any major violations occurred during his time on staff in its official response to the NCAA.

According to his released response, Farrar is accusing the testimony collected by the NCAA from rival players to be inaccurate and unreliable — calling into question both their motives and their accounts. In fact, Farrar even went so far as to suggest a former Ole Miss recruit, who now plays for a rival school, was ‘likely lured’ into giving statements to the NCAA to avoid his own misdeeds.

Here’s Farrar’s defense, taken from his official response to the NCAA allegations against him (with all names, other than Farrar’s, redacted):

“[Redacted] is the only witness that provided any purported evidence against Coach Farrar. [Redacted] is a young man that now plays football for Ole Miss’s [Redacted] rival, [Redacted]. A young man likely lured into this witch-hunt by his own head coach so he could escape NCAA charges himself, deflect his misdeeds onto Farrar and Ole Miss, and keep his eligibility to play for [Redacted]. A young man who, undeservedly, was given immunity as the NCAA enforcement staff deliberately turned away from his own admitted violations so that it could pursue the school and the recruiter it really wanted — Ole Miss and Barney Farrar.”

Feel free to take a wild guess as to which head coach currently works for Ole Miss’s rival but, as others have pointed out, it’s not hard to figure out exactly who Farrar is blaming for the Rebels’ NCAA woes.

If Ole Miss truly is innocent of all major accused violations by the NCAA, could a rival school really be the cause of the entire case against the Rebels? That seems to be the best explanation Farrar can come up with at this time.