Your inbox approves Men's coaches poll Women's coaches poll Play to win 25K!
DAN WOLKEN
Hugh Freeze

The NCAA is coming hard for Ole Miss coach Hugh Freeze

Dan Wolken
USA TODAY Sports

No matter how bad this gets, when Hugh Freeze looks back on the end of his coaching career — which might be upon us sooner rather than later — the truth is that every bit of the indignity he suffered Wednesday was worth it.

Mississippi Rebels head coach Hugh Freeze.

The NCAA is coming hard for Freeze, charging his Ole Miss football program with serious cheating allegations, the school with lack of institutional control and the head coach personally for unsatisfactory oversight of his assistants, who are charged with carrying out blatantly illicit violations, not “mistakes” as Freeze once attempted to characterize them.

Watching Freeze in a 20 minute, 52 second video posted by the school — eyes puffy, voice wavering, defiance gone — he looked very much like a man who knows what happens next.

Ole Miss takes bowl ban, charged with serious violations

Kellenberger: Ole Miss getting hammered by NCAA

With Ole Miss’ fate soon to be at the mercy of the NCAA Committee on Infractions, it’s reasonable now to wonder whether Freeze’s rocket-ship ride from Memphis high school coach to the NAIA to beating Nick Saban twice in a row and a $5 million annual contract is soon coming to an inglorious and shameful end.

Sure, Ole Miss is going to play defense for now. They’ll pay fancy lawyers to help argue the case that Freeze had no idea what kind of shenanigans his assistants were engaging in to help a head coach with no track record and a school with no recruiting cachet secure a top-10 class out of nowhere in 2013.

They’ll push back as hard as they can for as long as they can, no matter the seemingly overwhelming evidence that exists to paint Ole Miss as a rogue program that was systematically cutting corners with illegal benefits funneled through boosters.

It’s fairly clichéd, standard stuff, especially in light of what has happened recently at Baylor and Louisville and North Carolina. But if the Ole Miss allegations are found to be credible by the Committee on Infractions, history suggests this story will reach a familiar conclusion.

No matter how inconsistent NCAA justice can be, this theory stands the test of time: Even if a school is resolutely against firing its coach, the Committee on Infractions has the power to make it so painful there’s no other choice. If Ole Miss ultimately has to choose between Freeze and the kind of debilitating penalties that might send the program into a decade-long abyss, it’s really no choice at all.

If that’s how it ends for Freeze, it will be hard to feel too bad for him. A decade ago, he was a relative nobody in his late 30s, grinding out a living without an obvious path to big-time coaching. Now he’s banked millions of dollars, fulfilled lifelong dreams and given himself a platform to expand his charity work, which is both real and highly commendable.

No matter what happens, Freeze will be fine, which is why it was odd last summer at SEC Media Days to hear him say over various interviews that he wasn’t “tempted to cheat,” an obviously rehearsed and carefully crafted line that might sound good but has no basis in reality.

PHOTOS: Hugh Freeze through the years

Everything about how to make it big in college football tempts coaches to cheat, and Freeze’s story is a prime example. If you told every $40,000 per year high school coach in the country that breaking the NCAA’s often arbitrary and immoral rules would help them make $10 million and get their shot in the SEC — even if it ended with an avalanche of violations — how many do you really think would turn it down? And once you actually make it to the SEC, if the choice is cheating to jumpstart a downtrodden program or getting fired in four years for playing by the rules, any coach who thinks their odds are better with the latter is out of their mind.

Either way, Ole Miss’ problem wasn’t Freeze’s temptations, it was pure sloppiness.

The minute that 2013 class was signed with star recruits Robert Nkemdiche, Laquon Treadwell and Laremy Tunsil, Ole Miss knew the whispers of impropriety were never going to stop. Skepticism from rival coaching staffs and close scrutiny from the NCAA was a given. Meanwhile, Ole Miss and Freeze very carefully cultivated media allies to help build the narrative there was nothing to hide.

Which is why, when Freeze tried to minimize the first round of allegations last year — characterizing them more as “mistakes” than an attempt to cut corners — it frankly made no sense. How could a school that knew its every move would be watched by the NCAA make so many “mistakes” like not knowing how many family members could have their visits paid for? (These are things, by the way, that every coaching staff knows and clears with compliance unless there’s an intent to get around the rules.)

While the precise scope and some of the specific allegations in the case are unclear — Ole Miss hasn’t yet released this version of the Notice of Allegations, but rather outlined the charges in video form — the first draft last spring already included a damning eight Level 1 (the most serious) charges. More were included this time, including a charge that an Ole Miss assistant facilitated boosters paying $13,000-15,000 in extra benefits to a recruit who didn’t even sign there.

The NCAA presumably procured that information by offering immunity to a current player at another SEC school, a tactic it used heavily in this second round of the investigations following the Tunsil revelations last year on NFL Draft night.

While Ole Miss will contest the accuracy and seriousness of some of these charges, you can bet the NCAA’s case here is structurally sound and airtight from an evidence standpoint. Unlike previous regimes, where the NCAA tried to throw every possible allegation at schools to see what might stick, current vice president of enforcement Jon Duncan has implemented a more conservative philosophy over the last couple years. They’re only going to charge schools with the stuff they can prove, and everything released so far points toward a football program that is about to get absolutely hammered based on process as much as principle.

Some Ole Miss fans and supporters undoubtedly will howl about the unfairness of it all, that others cheat just as much but that they were targeted because their success in recruiting took too much bread off the table of the traditional programs. And they might have a point.

But from the very beginning, what Ole Miss was doing so quickly under Freeze just didn’t look right, and the only question was whether the NCAA eventually would be able to piece together a serious case or merely a wrist-slapper.

We now have the answer, and as bad as it looks for the school, it looks absolutely worse for Freeze. In the video Ole Miss released Wednesday, he sat side by side with athletics director Ross Bjork and school chancellor Jeffrey Vitter. If this is as serious and comprehensive as it appears to be, it’s only a matter of time before he gets pushed out of the frame.

PROJECTING THE PRESEASON TOP 25

Featured Weekly Ad