Aspects of a method and system for UMTS HSDPA Shared Control Channel processing may include calculating at a receiver, for each one of a plurality of control channels, a quality metric derived from at least one Viterbi Decoder state metric. A control channel may be selected on the basis of the quality metrics, where the quality metric is selected that provides maximum confidence. The selected control channel may be chosen if its corresponding 3GPP metric is greater than a specified threshold, where the threshold is a design parameter. A validity of a selected control channel may be determined based on consistency and a CRC, where the CRC may be derived from decoding a sub-frame. The calculating and selecting may be done for a first slot of a sub-frame for High-Speed Shared Control Channels.