Hypocrite Hugh no longer measured by wins over the Tide
Perhaps it’s a bit unfair to former Ole Miss football coach Hugh Freeze to label him Hypocrite Hugh. We all fall short of perfection in the eyes of our maker, regardless of who we consider that maker to be.
But we also don’t all wear our faith on our sleeve. We don’t turn to it to shape our public image. We don’t arrogantly and callously throw it out there as some force field against criticism for the rather unscrupulous way we’ve appeared to do our very public job the past four or five years.
So when Freeze resigned from Ole Miss on Thursday rather than have the school fire him for, in the words of chancellor Jeffrey Vitter, “a pattern of personal conduct inconsistent with the standard of expectations for the leader of our football team,” ears perked up and cynics smiled.
That was especially true after it was revealed Freeze’s university-issued cellphone had been used to dial a Florida-based female escort service in January 2016.
Talk about being blindsided. While Freeze played a prominent role in the real-life story that inspired “The Blind Side,” the movie about former Briarcrest Christian and Ole Miss football player Michael Oher (having coached Oher at Briarcrest), the coach’s ouster was the ultimate “blind-side” termination, if only because it is not related to serious NCAA charges regarding the Rebels’ football program, university officials said.
Freeze isn’t saying much about that call other than telling USA Today that he believed it to have been “a misdial.” (And you thought all of Freeze’s more recent misdials were to his overmatched defensive coaches.) But whomever he said he was or wasn’t calling — and given that he’s both a husband and father, it seems more than a little important whether he was possibly hiring these escorts for himself or recruits — misdials don’t cost coaches contracts valued at $4 million a year without so much as a single dollar’s worth of settlement.
After all, this was a coach Rebels brass curiously had stood behind despite allegations by the NCAA that Ole Miss was paying players during Freeze’s reign and that he should have known more about those actions by assistant coaches.
Of course, the Rebs also twice beat Alabama under Freeze, and no other current Southeastern Conference head coach has been able to make that claim since Nick Saban took over the Crimson Tide in 2007. In fact, current Ohio State coach and former Florida boss Urban Meyer and former Georgia coach Mark Richt, now at Miami, are the only other active coaches with at least two wins over Saban.
But Ole Miss isn’t expected to beat Bama or much of anyone this year as the full impact of that NCAA investigation — and probable crippling sanctions — may well crush the progam.
No one could have expected this during Freeze’s first years in Oxford. He not only went 34-18 in his first four seasons but was 27-12 in the second, third and fourth years. He won bowl games. Again, he beat Bama. Twice.
But Ole Miss went 5-7 in 2016 and figured to be worse this season. Despite the Bible verses Freeze would tweet, and the charming story of going from a high school volleyball coach to SEC football head coach in less than 20 years, his act was beginning to wear thin upon closer examination.
Not that Hypocrite Hugh ever ratcheted back his parochial persona. As recently as SEC media days, he told more than 1,000 reporters: “Our core values that we talk about all of the time are faith, attitude, mental toughness, integrity and love. Faith doesn’t mean they have to believe as I believe in a higher being or God above, but they’ve got to have faith in something bigger than yourself to be a great team.”
And there’s nothing wrong with faith. Nothing wrong with forgiveness, either. We could all exercise a little more forgiveness in our lives.
But while Freeze publicly touted his faith, he privately was phoning sports writers the same week he called the escort service to trash former Ole Miss coach Houston Nutt, much as the school often had seemed to want to blame the NCAA issues on Nutt, though the most serious ones assuredly occurred under Freeze’s watch.
When Nutt decided to sue Ole Miss and Freeze 10 days ago for defamation of character, his attorney asked for Freeze’s phone records from that January 2016 week. There, in what was surely a surprise to most, was the escort-service call that Freeze somehow had failed to redact. From there, the school rather quickly determined its coach had engaged in a pattern of behavior unbecoming for someone in that role.
Would Freeze have been fired for such behavior had the team appeared headed to the Sugar Bowl? Who knows? Winning appeared to protect Baylor coach Art Briles for far longer than it should have. Louisville still clings to men’s basketball coach Rick Pitino despite the numerous times he has embarrassed the school. Winning too often blindsides folks to the ugly truth.
Which brings us back to Hypocrite Hugh and just what was discovered beyond that one phone call.
According to the Commercial Appeal in Memphis, when Ole Miss athletic director Ross Bjork was asked Thursday whether he now considered Freeze a fraud, the AD replied: “I can only go on the facts. What did the record show?”
It shows a rather unholy mess. It also shows that in the SEC, our fan bases are likely to forgive or ignore all sins as long as long as their football coach can beat Bama.
Unfortunately for Freeze, he lost to the Tide last season and was expected to continue down that path for the foreseeable future.
Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress. com.