If you’ve been unplugged from media for a few months and returned Tuesday to find former Mississippi State AD John Cohen introducing former Ole Miss coach Hugh Freeze as the new coach at Auburn while Ole Miss announced it was paying more than $9 million to its football coach, well … pass the Tylenol.
Auburn’s interest in the current Ole Miss coach helped shape the big contract that Lane Kiffin signed Tuesday.
Freeze at his introductory presser took a gentle swipe at Ole Miss when he said he feels like he “leapfrogged where I was.” He wasn’t talking about Liberty.
In December of 2011, Freeze was introduced as Ole Miss coach saying, “This is a destination place for me. This is where I want to live and retire.”
Tuesday he went on to explain that he views Auburn as one of the top 10 football programs in the nation.
I don’t think he’d get a consensus on that outside of South Alabama.
Auburn’s history of competing for national championships is really only about 10 years removed.
The Tigers won a title with Cam Newton under coach Gene Chizik in 2010. They played for one in 2013 in Gus Malzahn’s first season.
Most of the rest of Malzahn’s tenure was about finishing third in the SEC West or lower.
As it stands there’s not much difference between the Auburn job and the Ole Miss job.
In perception the gap is probably narrower than Auburn fans would like to admit, wider than Ole Miss fans would admit.
Ole Miss had won just one SEC game in the two seasons prior to Freeze’s arrival but during his five years played in four bowl games — two of them New Year’s Six games — and beat Alabama twice.
Freeze’s time at Ole Miss ended badly, although the school was ready to stand behind him amid the NCAA investigation it faced.
He was fired for what former athletics director Ross Bjork described as a “concerning pattern” of personal behavior.
Now Hugh Freeze has arrived at his second chance, and he deserves it.
“I don’t know anybody in this room who doesn’t deserve a second chance,” he told the Auburn crowd.
That sounds good, but you can’t paint with that broad a brush. These schools have to cross all the t’s and dot all the i’s before they commit millions of dollars and put their reputations on the line.
Freeze’s personal behavior at Ole Miss, while setting a poor example for the young men he was supposed to lead, did not jeopardize their safety.
In that way it’s different than the findings in an independent report about the Baylor football program and sexual misconduct allegations that led to the dismissal of successful coach Art Briles in 2016.
At Baylor there was either cover-up or ignorance. Neither is good, and both were a danger to Baylor students.
There have been no public reports to suggest Freeze’s behavior remains a problem.
It could have been Lane Kiffin standing on the stage and being introduced by John Cohen. That, too, could have required Tylenol.
It wasn’t, and the continuity within the football program is good for Ole Miss.
Freeze deserves a second chance at major college football.
That it comes at Auburn makes Kiffin’s job more difficult.
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