Ole Miss Football: The ballad of Hugh Freeze
Ole Miss football coach Hugh Freeze has completed his southern story by getting caught calling an escort service. He resigned on Thursday in Oxford.
Twenty years ago at midnight on a dark crossroads in Itta Bena Mississippi, Hugh Freeze made a deal with the devil to become an SEC football coach…that’s probably not true, but it sure would be a fitting way for this classic tale of a southern fall from grace to have started.
We love a good honest, upstanding guy in the south. Almost as much as we like it when that good upstanding, honest guy crashes and burns. There’s something in the duality of the southern mind that makes us love a bible-thumper and then love the demise of that bible-thumper even more.
A good way to be elected to high office in the south is to talk about how righteous you are. From Mississippi Governor Kirk Fordice to Alabama Governor Robert Bentley, shaking your fist and talking about family values is a sure winner. The problem is that these men of godly principal almost always turn out to be anything but godly.
Hugh Freeze was the darling of many SEC football fans, not because he won championships, but because he was what they considered to be a good man.
Nothing sells it to the unwashed masses of the south like quoting Leviticus on Twitter. Freeze made himself Oxford’s head preacher and head coach, and it worked for a while.
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Freeze was beloved for his part in the Sandra Bullock feel-good SEC football movie The Blind Side. In a tweet, Freeze even once dared the public to call the Ole Miss compliance office if they knew anything the Rebels weren’t doing the right way.
Freeze had it all; fame, a feel good movie and story, and a bible he could thump.
Hugh inspired the Ole Miss Rebel faithful by recruiting some big names, winning some big games and changing a fanbase that was always suffering from Napoleon syndrome. Ole Miss desperately wanted to be one of the big boys in the SEC. Even a popular Ole Miss message board even has the tagline “bringing a national championship to Mississippi.” Hugh Freeze looked like he was the ticket to relevance for the Rebels.
In the past when Ole Miss lost a game they used to say “we may lose the game, but we’ve never lost a party.” That was a great line. In recent years though the feel from Ole Miss changed to some version of “we’d rather lose and do it the right way with a good man like Hugh Freeze.”
Ole Miss became attached to the moral high ground. It became about being the shining university on a hill, rather than being a party school. Even under the cloud of an NCAA investigation the Ole Miss faithful and administration stood by their coach. No one who quotes Leviticus could have cheated, right?
Hugh Freeze’s holier-than-thou attitude of course rubbed the rest of the SEC the wrong way. That’s why the jokes are coming fast and furious now that this man of the lord has been caught calling escorts. There is nothing the south likes more than seeing one of these stalwart pillars of morality crumble and fall.
Freeze is out at Ole Miss now, thanks to a wayward call to an escort service in Tampa. Ole Miss athletic director, Ross Bjork (the man who stood by Hugh Freeze through everything) still has his job for now. Last night in a press conference Bjork did everything he could to avoid saying the word “escort.”
There are, of course, many who want to see Bjork shown the door as well, but if Ole Miss is going to get crushed by the NCAA, keeping Bjork for now is probably the right call. After all, Ole Miss Chancellor Jeffrey Vitter doesn’t want it to be his name in the headlines alone when that NCAA penalty comes down.
Next: 5 Potential Replacements for Hugh Freeze at Ole Miss
Jeffrey Vitter is of course the brother of former Senator David Vitter, who was disgraced when it came out that he was hiring escorts.
Hugh Freeze ran Ole Miss like a southern governor’s office, complete with religious campaigning; it’s fitting that his downfall mirrors a southern politician’s sex scandal.