The next time Houston Nutt asks you for an apology…

… give it to him, for chrissakes.

In a stunning turn of events, Hugh Freeze has resigned from Ole Miss on Thursday. The move comes after the school found at least one call from the coach to an escort service on his school-issued cell phone.

Yahoo Sports inquired 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 service. 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.

I cannot even begin to wrap my head around the level of irony it takes to fully appreciate that Houston Nutt brought down Hugh Freeze — something the NCAA hadn’t done — with his friggin’ cellphone records.

And you thought the football gods didn’t have a sense of humor.

By the way, I don’t think his dismissal has anything to do with a one-minute wrong number to an escort service.  That’s just the bridge to some deep, deep shit that’s being dredged up.

Bjork told Yahoo on Friday that after receiving the information from Mars, the school had pulled records of Freeze’s cell calls and plowed through 39,000 calls without finding another instance of a call to the 313 number. However, the school kept digging through the records and must have found additional troubling information.

Now there’s an understatement.  Speaking of the NCAA, think anybody there has spoken with Mars yet?

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UPDATE:  Looks like the dismissal isn’t over NCAA compliance stuff.

Ole Miss AD Ross Bjork to #ESPN: “Once we looked at the rest of the phone records we found a pattern. It was troubling.”

— Mark Schlabach (@Mark_Schlabach) July 21, 2017

The blind sided jokes write themselves, don’t they?

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UPDATE #2:  Aaaand, the topper is:

Freeze had and used a second non-university phone, paid for privately, a source told Godfrey.

It also sounds like Ole Miss was bracing for the worst for a while.

As far as Matt Luke is concerned, multiple sources told SB Nation that he entertained an offer from South Carolina to take the vacant OL position in the offseason. Ole Miss officials retained Luke with an aggressive offer specifically as a fallback interim coach if Freeze didn’t survive.