Written by Mark Schlabach at ESPN.com
Ole Miss football coach Hugh Freeze resigned effective immediately on Thursday night, with the Rebels’ athletic director telling ESPN that school officials found a pattern that included phone calls to a number associated with a female escort service.
Assistant head coach Matt Luke, in his sixth season as co-offensive coordinator and offensive line coach, was named interim head coach.
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.”
“While Coach Freeze served our university well in many regards during his tenure, we simply cannot accept the conduct in his personal life that we have discovered,” Vitter said.
Bjork and Vitter met with Freeze on Wednesday night and again on Thursday, when Freeze offered his resignation.
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. Bjork said he would have been fired had he not resigned.
Bjork separately told ESPN that once university officials dove deeper into Freeze’s phone records on a university-provided cellphone, going back as far as shortly after he was hired in 2012, they started finding more of a pattern with phone calls of the nature USA Today earlier reported after an open-records request.
“Once we looked at the rest of the phone records we found a pattern,” Bjork told ESPN. “It was troubling.”
Bjork, speaking alongside Vitter in the news conference, called it a “sad” and “unexpected” day for Ole Miss. He said had Freeze not resigned, the school would have exercised a “moral turpitude” termination clause in Freeze’s contract.
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