I pasted the text below. Beware of the link as there are some videos that auto-play.

https://www.clarionledger.com/story/sports/college/ole-miss/2018/01/18/ross-bjork-leading-ole-miss-into-future-can-he-make-his-vision-reality/1039956001/


By Antonio Morales

OXFORD — Something stuck with Ross Bjork when he watched the film “Cool Hand Luke” recently.
“They’re going over the rules over the prison,” Bjork said. “If you do this, you spend time in the box. If you do this, you spend time in the box. Well, you know what? It was our turn in the box. We don’t like it. We don’t like how it happened. We don’t like the parameters around it. But you know what? It’s how you deal with it that I think defines the future and your program.”
With turbulent times, which featured a seemingly neverending NCAA investigation and a sudden coaching transition, now behind Ole Miss, Bjork will steer its athletic department into the future. A future that he has already indicated will center around rejuvenating an athletic department that has taken a series of lumps recently.
So it will be a reset of sorts, and when there’s a reset, it's typically led by someone new like Bjork did when he was hired by the university in 2012. After all, rarely do you get two chances to reset a business or organization.
But Ole Miss has stood by Bjork. So how does he plan to lead its athletic department into the future?
On the field of play, the men’s basketball program reached the NCAA Tournament twice in a three-year span and won an SEC Tournament championship. In 2014, the baseball team reached the College World Series for the first time in 42 years. The football program beat Alabama twice and appeared in back-to-back New Year’s Six bowl games.
The peak of recent Ole Miss football history came in a win in the 2016 Sugar Bowl over Oklahoma State. But the two years since have been filled with frustration.
“I knew standing on that stage at the Sugar Bowl, in the next month or so, we were getting a Notice of Allegations,” Bjork said. “You want to be excited about those moments, but you know what’s coming. Then to have the surprises we had, that’s what you don’t like. You want to be proactive, you don’t want to be reactive. That’s the part that bothers me the most.”
Shortly after the Sugar Bowl, the NCAA’s investigation shifted to the forefront and the university has been caught off guard at times.
There was the Laremy Tunsil NFL Draft night fiasco in 2016, the NCAA enforcement staff’s use of limited immunity, another Notice of Allegations, two years' worth of postseason bans, etc. ...
There's no blueprint for how to handle it when the NCAA comes to investigate your school. The most adversity Bjork faced as an administrator prior to this ordeal? At Western Kentucky, he made a midseason coaching change for men's basketball, and at UCLA a promotional deal with Miller Brewing Company nearly went awry.
As the NCAA process moved forward, Bjork gained more critics, one of which went as far as updating his Wikipedia page recently. At one point last week his bio on the website read: “He (Bjork) is the worst athletic director in the entire nation.”
That’s since been removed from his page, but some criticism still carries on in his email inbox occasionally, on the message boards or social media. The complaints are familiar.
Why doesn’t Ole Miss fight back against the NCAA?
“That’s probably the biggest criticism I hear: I wish we did more publicly, I wish we’d 'fight back' and when you ask what that means, no one really has an answer,” Bjork said. “It’s just I want to see it on Twitter, I want to see it in a quote. I want to see it in a press conference or I want to see an article written.
"So there’s all kind of different ways I think we have fought back, it just might not be behind a podium or in front of a camera pounding our fist on the table and I’m not sure that’s effective every time.”
There are also questions about why didn’t Bjork know about some of the NCAA stuff when it seemed like the man who wrote the book on the Ole Miss investigation, Steve Robertson, had a pretty good idea of what was coming down the pike in real-time. Or if there were rumors about Hugh Freeze’s personal life, why didn’t the university do something before it had to dig through his phone records?
“I think we’re very plugged in, whether it’s me directly, whether it’s staff members, whether it’s people informing us in the community,” Bjork said. “So you filter that. Do you have facts? Do you have evidence? So going back to February of 2016 when we had a Notice of Allegations in hand, meaning investigations are over when you have a notice of allegations. That’s what we knew then.
“There were things we heard about our head coach. We ran a lot of information. Then when things hit our desk that were fact-based and troubling, we dealt with it.”
Ole Miss experienced newfound success in softball in 2017 and Braden Thornberry won an individual national championship in golf. So there were some bright spots, but the performance of the big three sports at Ole Miss — football, men’s basketball and baseball — dipped a bit in the 2016-17 academic year, which didn’t help matters.
Football followed up its Sugar Bowl with a 5-7 season, while men’s basketball and baseball both missed the NCAA Tournament. Even now, football is dealing with a two-year bowl ban and the men's basketball team is far from the postseason conversation. Baseball is ranked in the top 10 in at least one preseason poll and offers promise.
When Ole Miss received its ruling from the NCAA’s Committee on Infractions on Dec. 1, it held a press conference that afternoon.
Chancellor Jeff Vitter voiced his confidence in Bjork despite the result of the case. And he did so again last week.
“We have the opportunity with Ross’ leadership to really turn the corner and go forward. He’s the right person and we really rely on him to do that,” Vitter said. “If we did a search he would be the ideal person, so I have full confidence in him.”
While Vitter has confidence in Bjork, the key moving forward is reinstilling confidence in supporters who may have lost faith.
Adversity puts a strain on any relationship. The university's with the fans is no different, and the NCAA's decision caused some frustration and anger.
Vitter and Bjork both consider restoring that faith to be one of the department's biggest challenges in 2018.
The dynamic between Vitter and Bjork gained some attention in the last year as well. There’s a belief out there that Vitter played a large role in basketball coach Andy Kennedy's contract not getting extended after last season.
That came at a time when the men’s basketball program had some momentum. It made a run to the NIT quarterfinals. It was doing well on the recruiting trail, and landed a grad transfer in Memphis' Markel Crawford.
“We work hand in hand together. We consult together on major decisions,” Bjork said. “So I want his support and his support has been valuable in all of these decisions but I know what happened. I know all the details. People have a different perspective. Then again, control what you can control.”
Vitter claims that the school offered Kennedy a four-year contract that would have raised his salary but lowered the amount it would take to buy him out of it.
"We were focused on paying for success, not for not doing well," Vitter said, "and Andy chose not to do that."
So it's established that Vitter stands by Bjork. With that being said, how will Bjork go about rejuvenating the department?
“We have to set the tone as an athletic department that says, ‘Look, we know what happened. We’re going to learn from our mistakes. We’re going to own those situations, we’re going to deal with it,'" Bjork said. "But we’re also here to compete at the highest level. We’re in the SEC so it’s not for the faint of heart, so if you’re not ready to embrace that and continue that, then we won’t compete. But we’re ready to compete.”
Actions will define Bjork and his tenure at Ole Miss. And it's a bit different than six years ago. He won't have the benefit of coming in with an outside perspective to help shake things up.
His mentor and former boss, Dan Guerrero, UCLA's athletic director, said that shouldn't be an issue though.
“Ross has been intimately involved in creating and executing new initiatives his entire career,” Guerrero said. “That being said, he must take advantage of the expertise that he finds in his staff at Ole Miss, as well as other entities that can add value to the enterprise.”
Michael Thompson, Ole Miss senior associate athletic director for communications and marketing, was around when Bjork took over in Oxford and doesn't feel like the situation is similar.
"It feels way more stable and it’s because of the foundation Ross has built," Thompson said. "We’re going to reset and rejuvenate, but it’s still going to be based in the same leadership that Ross has exhibited."
Guerrero knows a thing or two about longevity. He lasted 10 years as UC-Irvine's athletic director and has been UCLA's athletic director since 2002.
"I attribute the longevity I have been fortunate to have in this industry to the fact that I have always led by principles, not by circumstances," he said. "That is why I view every challenge as an opportunity. I don’t relish those, but they are inevitable. Challenges help us grow."
Bjork has guided the university through its challenges the past two years. Save for an NCAA appeal, Ole Miss has cleared nearly all its hurdles and finally has some long-awaited clarity.
The future will be defined by what Ole Miss and Bjork learned from it.
"As long as they have faith in me to do it," Bjork said, "we’re ready to go full speed ahead.”


Contact Antonio Morales at 601-961-7117 or amorales2@gannett.com.