Ole Miss CB Tee Shepard will miss 2014 season

It's official: Ole Miss cornerback Tee Shepard will go under the knife and miss the entire 2014 season, according to Ben Garrett of Scout.com.

If you've been following this story over the last week, this comes as no surprise. Shepard, a former five-star prospect who was expected to contribute to the Rebels' secondary immediately this fall, went down in practice last Friday with a partially torn tendon in his big toe. The news filtering out of camp all week was decreasingly disheartening as the team sought alternate opinions on whether he could return.

Because the tendon was not completely severed, Shepard could have attempted to play through it and postpone surgery until after the season.

"He could try to push through and get it fixed after the season," Hugh Freeze told the Clarion-Ledger on Wednesday, "but there's the chance that scar tissue could form around it and it not be able to heal properly long-term."

In the end, team doctors and three outside consultants determined that move was too risky. Shepard will undergo a procedure in North Carolina, Scout.com reports.

"We obviously think he has a career in football and we want to do everything we can to make sure that career is preserved," Freeze said Wednesday.

It's a bad day for injury news: reserve cornerback and kick returner Carlos Davis tweeted earlier in the morning that he has torn his ACL.