The NCAA is hard after the football program at Ole Miss. Last year, it accused the Rebels of 13 football compliance violations, and on Wednesday, Ole Miss said the NCAA had upped its number of allegations to 21. The majority are Level I allegations, the most serious kind, and all the new ones are for wrongdoing the NCAA says happened under the administration of current head coach Hugh Freeze.
Could Hugh Freeze be fired by Ole Miss over NCAA allegations?
Not right now, it seems, but there’s a long way to go.
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Ole Miss self-imposed a 2017 bowl ban, but that’s not going to be nearly the end of this story. A lot of things could happen now, including an NCAA doomsday.
An Ole Miss source told SB Nation’s Steven Godfrey the football program was facing “complete uncertainty at every level.” That includes the top, where Freeze has been the team’s head coach since December 2011.
Right now, Ole Miss is standing by Freeze.
From Godfrey:
Inside Ole Miss, there’s no clarity as to the long-term future of the football coach, but multiple university sources agreed that the decision to put Freeze and [athletic director Ross] Bjork alongside Chancellor [Jeff] Vitter publicly bodes well for their short-term futures.
Unlike other universities, Ole Miss has no board of trustees or regents specific to the school. Dismissing Bjork and/or Freeze would fall to Vitter, who became chancellor in January 2016. Multiple sources indicated to SB Nation that Vitter, still a relative newcomer, might have lacked the support and equity to clean house to this point.
Freeze sat alongside the university’s chancellor and athletic director, his two direct superiors, on Wednesday. They’ve been publicly supportive of their head coach. So have Freeze’s players, to a degree, though they’re not the ones making staffing decisions.
But Ole Miss has a succession plan in place, in case.
From Godfrey:
If Freeze is terminated before the start of the 2017 season, the likeliest candidate for interim head coach is offensive line coach and former Rebel player Matt Luke, who turned down an offer for the same position at South Carolina this offseason and was a candidate for the head coaching job at Troy in 2014.
It’d be malpractice for a program facing down more than a dozen Level I allegations not to have something in mind in case the boss has to go. The new batch moves Freeze closer to the spotlight than he was.
The NCAA says he violated his responsibilities as a head coach, via violations committed by assistants under his watch. The organization is charging Freeze’s program with a lack of institutional control — an allegation that Ole Miss football didn’t care enough about preventing rule-breaking or addressing it after it happened.
Freeze isn’t accused of handing bags of cash to recruits, but the structure of the NCAA’s charges means multiple roads could lead straight to him.
In part for this reason, Fox Sports’ Stewart Mandel doesn’t think Freeze will survive the scandal:
For the NCAA’s purposes, it doesn’t particularly matter whether Freeze knew all or nothing of the events taking place inside his program. It made clear upon revising its penalty structure several years ago that a head coach is responsible for rules violations by his staff members. And in this case, there are just so many of them.
Firing Freeze during the scandal could present a few problems.
For one thing, it might look to the NCAA like an admission of guilt. If Freeze is fired “for cause” — the term for a firing that takes place due to reasons beyond on-field performance and thus frees the school from having to pay contractual buyouts — the NCAA could see that as evidence that his program did wrong. Freeze’s buyout hasn’t been reported publicly but is surely multiple millions of dollars, based on his peers’.
Ole Miss is already not contesting several of the NCAA’s allegations, including a couple of Level I charges, so this wouldn’t be entirely new ground. But any evidence cited by Ole Miss in dismissing Freeze could also be cited by the NCAA as it prosecutes the case against Ole Miss. That’d be true even if Ole Miss used his firing to argue for leniency.
Second, Ole Miss isn’t at its most attractive for coaching candidates while it’s in the middle of an NCAA enforcement process. Elevating a current assistant like Luke would make sense in the interim, but if Ole Miss found itself casting a wide net for a permanent Freeze replacement, it’d be limited until a final resolution and punishment come down. Even then, that punishment could sting for years.
If Ole Miss dismissed Freeze tomorrow, his successor would start behind the 8 ball, and the simple fact of Freeze’s departure would threaten to make the job even harder.
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