Whipped Cream Difficulties

Hugh Freeze, the football coach at Ole Miss, resigned “effective immediately” last night.

If he resigned, why am I spinning this as a firing? ESPN:

Ole Miss chancellor Jeffrey Vitter, in a Thursday night news conference announcing the move, said Freeze, 47, resigned after confirming to him and athletic director Ross Bjork “a pattern of personal conduct inconsistent with the standard of expectations for the leader of our football team.”

Clarion-Ledger:

If Freeze didn’t resign, athletic director Ross Bjork said the university would have exercised the termination clause in his contract for “moral turpitude.”

“Moral turpitude” is another of those phrases that I love. But I digress: what happened here?

From what I’ve been able to put together reading the press coverage, Houston Nutt, the former Ole Miss coach, is suing the university. As part of the discovery in his lawsuit, his attorney was able to get six days worth of Freeze’s phone records from his university issued cellphone. Freeze was allowed to redact his personal calls from the records, but did not redact what’s being described as a “one minute” call to a 313 area code number “associated with websites that advertise a female escort business based in Tampa, Florida”.

Freeze’s initial explanation was that it was a wrong number call. That’s plausible to me, given how short the call was. But apparently the university dug deeper into Freeze’s phone records:

“In our analysis, we discovered a pattern of conduct that is not consistent with our expectations as the leader of our football program,” Bjork said. “As of yesterday, there appeared to be a concerning pattern.”

…

Freeze, who had about $2 million left on his contract for this year, $5 million next year and $5.15 million for the 2019 season, will not be paid going forward.

So that’s $12.15 million down the drain. Why? Because a highly paid football coach wasn’t smart enough to use a burner phone for his calls to escort services.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 21st, 2017 at 8:13 am and is filed under Firings, Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.