Hugh Freeze’s tenure as Ole Miss’ head football coach ended Thursday, just weeks before he was to start his seventh season. The school asked Freeze to resign after it came across phone records that revealed a call to an escort service. Freeze complied.
Hugh Freeze’s exit *technically* wasn’t about Ole Miss’ NCAA scandal
Though it’s easy to imagine him surviving the new investigation, if not for the old one.
Matt Bush-USA TODAY Sports
He’s out of his job because of that burgeoning scandal. He’s not out of it because of anything to do with the NCAA, at least directly.
SB Nation’s Steven Godfrey reports on Friday:
Ole Miss never considered firing Freeze for anything in either list of NCAA allegations against the football program.
I can confirm through six independent sources that nothing new happened on Thursday afternoon in the NCAA’s case against the football program. Nothing happened in the myriad lawsuits layered underneath it, either.
I know this because I’d spent the day working a still-in-progress piece for SB Nation about the case. Before Nutt’s public records search of Freeze’s phone records revealed calls to an escort service, Ole Miss was ready to fight the NCAA at the Committee on Infractions this fall. The school still plans to fight.
Freeze’s predecessor, Houston Nutt, is suing Ole Miss. He says the school tried to pin a series of NCAA violations on him while mounting a misleading PR campaign to protect Freeze. It was Freeze’s lawyer who turned over the relevant phone records to Ole Miss, which, given Nutt’s own problems with public records in the past, is incredibly ironic. Getting Freeze out is Nutt’s biggest coaching win in years.
Ole Miss was prepared to go to bat for Freeze with the NCAA.
In June, the university responded to an updated spate of allegations in a 124-page document that, summed up most plainly, was a defense of the head coach. The school denied Freeze had violated his responsibilities. It denied that his program exhibited a “lack of institutional control,” one of the NCAA’s most serious charges. Ole Miss was digging its heels in for a confrontation with the NCAA.
It would’ve been unlikely that he’d have gotten fired for NCAA problems at this point. Firing the head coach in the middle of an NCAA scandal looks a whole lot like an admission of guilt, for one thing. And for another, this is not the best time for Ole Miss to be looking for a new head coach. Interim boss Matt Luke is stepping into a brutal gig.
That doesn’t mean the two scandals are entirely unrelated.
Nutt’s crusade against Ole Miss sprang directly from the NCAA matter. If he weren’t coming after the school, his lawyer wouldn’t have been in a position to turn over Freeze’s phone records to his employer.
If the NCAA wasn’t already pursuing Freeze, it might’ve been easier for both the coach and the school to shrug off the phone records. But when scandals pile atop one another, dismissing them gets harder and harder.
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