In the end, regardless of how he chose to play it out, Hugh Freeze‘s time in Oxford would’ve come to an end.
Thursday night brought the stunning news that Freeze’s tenure as the head coach at Ole Miss had come to an end because of at least one call from his university-issued cell phone to a known escort service. Freeze, to Yahoo! Sports, blamed the call on a misdial; Freeze’s now-former boss, athletic director Ross Bjork, led the same website to write that “further vetting of Freeze’s phone records disclosed a ‘pattern of conduct’ that led the school administration to confront Freeze this week.”
After meeting with Freeze Wednesday night and then again Thursday morning, the die had been cast for the coach.Bjork said that if Freeze had not offered his resignation he would have been fired for cause, citing the “moral turpitude” clause in Freeze’s contract. Bjork said there was no buyout of the contract and no settlement.
“He admitted that conduct to us,” Bjork said. “None of us are perfect. Nobody in this room is perfect. I think we need to respect how he resigned and respect his privacy.
The infamous call in question -- it lasted one minute, which gives at least some credence to Freeze’s claim that this one was a misdial -- came to light as a result of Houston Nutt’s recently-filed lawsuit against Freeze, the university and other high-ranking school officials. No other calls to that specific phone number were found in a review of an estimated 39,000 calls made from Freeze’s school-issued phone; "[h]owever, the school kept digging through the records and must have found additional troubling information,” the website wrote
Freeze’s admission to “that conduct” according to Bjork says as much.