1. Ole Miss head coach Hugh Freeze resigned on Thursday, brought down via public records work by the lawyer of Houston Nutt, Freeze’s predecessor. (Nutt’s suing the school for, he says, blaming its NCAA troubles on him. While searching for other dirt, Nutt’s team discovered Freeze had called an escort service. It told Ole Miss, which then found more concerns.)
Hugh Freeze, Houston Nutt, and Michael Oher just made ‘The Blind Side’ super weird
A bunch of former Ole Miss men are in the news for wildly different reasons.
2. Freeze is not the only Ole Miss man out of a job. Former offensive lineman Michael Oher was released by the Carolina Panthers on Thursday evening, mere hours before the Freeze news went public. (Oher, unlike Freeze, didn’t partake in any scandals here.)
3. Freeze and Oher were already inextricably linked because Freeze coached Oher in high school and took him in:
In 2001, Freeze met Michael Oher, a Memphis teenager who bounced around homes and even had been homeless for stretches in his life. The Freeze family embraced him — Oher spent one to two nights a week at their house — and Jill tutored him. Oher became especially close to the Freeze’s three young daughters: Jordan, Madison and Ragan.
4. Nutt is also out of a job. Since he’s suing Ole Miss and blaming his unemployment on the school, it’s hard to say he’s yet another Ole Miss man, though.
5. Nutt was among the many coaches to play their real selves in the movie version of The Blind Side, about Oher’s younger days.
6. Freeze didn’t portray Freeze in the movie. A character based on Freeze was played by Ray McKinnon.
7. But Freeze did appear in the movie, just not as himself. He had a cameo as an unnamed assistant coach watching film.
8. The actor the future Ole Miss head coach was working with? That’d be Ole Miss’ head coach at the time, Houston Nutt, who was playing Arkansas head coach Houston Nutt.
9. Three men are in this frame. One is a trained actor. The other two are football coaches by trade. One, Nutt, appeared in the movie to pretend to recruit Oher to Arkansas, but he would go on to coach Oher at Ole Miss in real life. The other, Freeze, is portraying Not Hugh Freeze and would go on to have his job sabotaged by a vengeful Nutt in real life.
10. That thing about Freeze losing his job due to some public records weirdness that somebody found while looking for something else entirely? That’s exactly how Nutt lost the Arkansas job in 2007.
11. These numbers aren’t really adding up to anything coherent. Each step just gets more complicated. It’s hard to tell whether all of this makes too much sense or no sense at all, but The Blind Side just gets weirder and weirder all the time.
See More:
