The No. 1 Crimson Tide take on Ole Miss in Tuscaloosa this Saturday night, and this series will be missing one thing that helped make it great the last few seasons: former Rebels head coach Huge Freeze.
A postmortem appreciation of the all-too-brief Hugh Freeze vs. Nick Saban rivalry
Alabama’s been so dominant, simply beating the Tide twice in a row is an incredible achievement.
Photo by Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images
He resigned in July admist calls placed to an escort service on his university phone and left behind a program facing NCAA issues, but he’s a big reason why this otherwise lopsided rivalry was huge for, well, three years. (This time, Bama’s favored by four touchdowns, so that whole thing might just be done.)
Freeze is one of only three head coaches to have defeated Saban more than once.
And Freeze did so in back-to-back seasons. The two others to have done it at all? Ohio State’s Urban Meyer and Miami head coach Mark Richt.
It’s hard enough to beat Saban once. Since he’s revved it up in Tuscaloosa in 2008, he’s lost only 13 times. He’s lost 19 times in total, but six of those came in his first season.
Saban’s last two regular season losses were at the hands of Hugh Freeze’s Ole Miss. (Freeze resigned Thursday night after Ole Miss learned from Freeze’s predecessor, Houston Nutt, that Freeze had called an escort service, with AD Ross Bjork indicating Ole Miss had found other concerns as well.)
Saban is particularly adept at the revenge games, so after Ole Miss beat Bama at home in 2014 during the Rebels miracle run to No. 3 in the country, as we tracked the goal posts throughout the streets of Oxford, no one thought they could do it again.
Then a year later, the Rebels pulled stuff like this in an upset win on the road:
Freeze almost did it a third time in 2016, taking a 24-3 lead in the second quarter before the Tide stormed back and took a 34-27 lead in the third. The Rebels hung on until the end, scoring back-to-back touchdowns in the fourth quarter, but fell short, 48-43. That made it three straight classics against Saban, during an era in which plenty of coaches are lucky to take the Bama legend to the wire even once.
“It was a really difficult game for a coach to have to suffer through but we made it,” Saban said after the win via AL.com.
Saban out-recruited everyone, but the Rebels had competitive classes.
For the last seven years, Alabama has finished with the No. 1 recruiting class in the country. The closest Ole Miss came to No. 1 was with Freeze’s 2016 class, which finished No. 5 in the country, per the 247Sports Composite. But his more historic (and frankly unexpected) class — the 2013 group that featured Robert Nkemdiche, Laremy Tunsil, and Laquon Treadwell — finished eighth.
In an interview with CBS Sports from March 2016, Freeze addressed the challenges of recruiting against a coach like Saban:
“I feel like I have to personally recruit 12-15 guys in order to beat a Nick Saban, who may call the parent one time. They may still beat us. We’re winning our share now, but it’s taking an enormous amount of work to do. Will that ever change? It has … some.”
The two were more than just rival head coaches — they had an off-the-field friendship, too.
They both had lake houses in Lake Burton in Georgia, where the two played golf in the summer:
Alabama’s Nick Saban hides at Lake Burton in the northeast corner of Georgia, tooling around on his pontoon boat with wife Terry. Hugh Freeze of Ole Miss, who also has a place there, says Saban “just shows up at my place on his Jet Ski.” The six-time national champion explains: “I have two normals. I have football normal, and I have lake normal.”
They were paired together for the 2014 Chick-fil-A Bowl Golf Challenge, too.
“I think this guy’s one of the best coaches in our league and does a great job with the players that he has,” Saban said of Freeze last September via Al.com. “The fastball pace that they use offensively is always challenging, and it’s certainly something that our players are going to have to do a good job with.”
It’s hard to say when Freeze will work in athletics again, but those three games against Alabama will be the best-remembered part of his Ole Miss legacy.
A Sugar Bowl win and a couple top recruiting classes (later tainted by NCAA allegations) are very nice, but nearly beating Saban three times in a row is unthinkable, especially in a series as tilted as this one. Before Freeze’s two wins, the record in the series was 48-9-2, Bama.
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