Former Oregon quarterback Jeremiah Masoli is apparently headed to Ole Miss, which is an intriguing prospect for a player who, despite all his issues, remains very much the same.

Before things get out of control, he’s not and never was coming to WVU.

Now there was, on some level, interest by the troubled quarterback in WVU … which could mean something as insignificant as Masoli telling one of his people, “I like WVU” which is then relayed to someone with a notebook or something as slightly less insignificant as one of his people picking up the phone to call WVU.

Not sure where it registered on that scale, quite sure WVU was never, ever interested — or even aware — but all it means for WVU is it was an attractive place for a spread-option quarterback who was one of the nation’s best players last year, not that a spread-option offense was interested in a player who was one of the nation’s best players last year. There’s a very big difference.

Still, Division I football people were talking about this and other people were hearing it. These rumblings had reached the Mountaineers. Two people within the program said they’d been asked by others about Masoli-WVU, though they knew nothing of it beyond being a rumor. Apparently this got trumped up a little bit by something some day on a radio show, for which WVU wasn’t entirely happy. A third person sternly contested even the possibility Masoli would be considered at WVU, let alone taken in, and suggested there’d never been anything done by either side to make this more than completely bogus.

And now, on with your Thursday.