About 15 minutes ago, Pat Forde at Y! hinted that Ole Miss head coach Hugh Freeze was in serious trouble. Ole Miss administrators were meeting to determine the fate of his job-kind of trouble.
Just 9 minutes later, this happened:
ANNOUNCEMENT | Hugh Freeze has resigned effective immediately. Matt Luke interim head coach. Press conference live at 7:30 PM CT on ESPNews.
— Ole Miss Football (@OleMissFB) July 20, 2017
Presumably Pat Forde will follow-up with his reporting, and we’ll update this as it goes along. But, Matt Luke is the interim coach, Hugh is off into the sunset, a Committee on Infractions hearing is still pending, and his career is very much in question. For the Rebels, since Freeze was the de facto if not de jure offensive coordinator most years, it throws a lot of uncertainty into a 2017 season where the Rebels were already expected to struggle. There’s obviously a transfer exodus to worry about as well.
This isn’t the end of Ole Miss’ troubles...by any stretch. It’s the end of the beginning of their woes.
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UPDATE 1
You know how the universe detests hubris? When it comes crashing down on holier-than-thous, it comes crashing down hard.
A man who has negatively recruited against Dan Mullen based upon religion, who publicly champions his version of faith, and who has said that his NCAA plight is an assault on his faith -- that he is akin to a christian martyr — has more than a few skeletons in the closet.
I was joking about it’s going to take a dead girl or a live boy.
In this case, a live girl will do it. Especially when the girl in question is a prostitute.
A one-minute call made from the University-issued phone of Ole Miss football coach Hugh Freeze to a number associated with a female escort service was raised as a potential issue in the back-and-forth between the university’s legal counsel and the attorney for former Rebels football coach Houston Nutt, according to records and correspondence obtained by USA TODAY Sports.
Freeze resigned Thursday evening, hours after Ole Miss said it would provide a written statement to USA TODAY Sports regarding the phone call.
School officials did not immediately offer a reason for the resignation.
This is exactly what I meant last week when I said Houston Nutt was playing hardball and Ole Miss should just pay him off. Nutt knows where bodies are buried and that doesn’t even get into the issue of new bodies being found -- as here, in the legal discovery process which unearthed escort services. A man’s sins/kinks/vices/joys are his own, to be sure. But you CANNOT contact prostitutes using freaking state property.
There will be much, much more coming to be sure.
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UPDATE 2
Ole Miss AD Ross Bjork intimated at his press conference that Ole Miss was not intent on firing Hugh Freeze initially. However, upon looking at his phone records they found “a pattern” and “other troubling behavior.”
So, yes, this is about the girls. Worse, using state property to solicit or facilitate prostitution.
It’s like no one has even heard of Mike Price, y’all. SMH.
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That’s probably all of the bombshells tonight. We’ll cover more when we get it.