Hugh Freeze Resigns As Ole Miss Head Coach, Reports Tie Him To Escort Service
If you can imagine, things just got even worse for Ole Miss and Hugh Freeze.
Things haven’t been good for Ole Miss over the last 12–15 months, in fact, they’ve been absolutely horrendous. With the NCAA spotlight glaring at Freeze and the Rebels every second of every day, things just got even worse according to reports.
Ole Miss announced just before 7:00 p.m. on Thursday that Freeze has stepped down as head coach.
Then, just seconds after the announcement, Yahoo! came out with reports about Freeze that the school found at least one call from the coach to an escort service on his school-issued cell phone.
Yahoo Sports first inquired last week with Freeze and athletic director Ross Bjork about a call at 8:34 p.m. on Jan. 21, 2016, to a Detroit number that is linked via various websites to a Florida-based escort. Freeze told Yahoo last Friday that the call had been brought to Ole Miss administrators’ attention by former coach Houston Nutt’s attorney, Thomas Mars, and that they had questioned him about it. Freeze told Yahoo he had no idea why the call was on his phone records.
“I’ve got no idea, to be honest,” Freeze said. “I was in an 813 area code and that was a 313 number, I think that might have been a misdial. I don’t think there was even a conversation. There’s nothing to it.”
Yahoo Sports obtained Freeze’s phone records from Mars, whose client is suing Ole Miss for breach of contract. The call only lasted one minute, raising the possibility that it was a wrong number.
Freeze said he had the opportunity to redact numbers from his phone logs after a freedom of information request was made by Mars for his cell record. He said if there were anything nefarious about the call, he would have redacted it.
“If I was trying to hide something, I would have,” Freeze said. “That call shows up nowhere else on my records. There is no story to that one.”
More to come as this story continues to unfold. Freeze and Ole Miss’ Athletic Director are set for a press conference at 8:30 p.m. EST on SEC Network.
Per the team’s presser, Hugh Freeze will not receive a settlement. He was to make just short of $5 million this season.
