For Jimmy Sexton, there are no road blocks, only temporary detours.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, “There are no second acts in American lives.”

He obviously never met Hugh Freeze, who is suddenly one of the hottest commodities in college football, at least based on what turned up on my Twitter feed yesterday.

Four power five schools have Hugh Freeze atop their list as new offensive coordinator.

Remarkable.

— Cole Cubelic (@colecubelic) December 3, 2018

I can’t say I’m sure about all four, but Auburn, FSU and Tennessee would all appear to be players.  Plus, we all remember that Saban tried to hire Freeze last year, but was blocked by Greg Sankey, who evidently hasn’t changed his stance.

Crimson Tide offensive coordinator Mike Locksley is the favorite for the head coach vacancy at Maryland. If Locksley leaves Alabama, Enos and Freeze would seem like replacement candidates Nick Saban would consider. Saban reportedly tried to hire Freeze last offseason, but SEC commissioner Greg Sankey dissuaded him.

SEC rules include language stating that an SEC school’s president or chancellor must consult with Sankey before considering hiring someone who “participated in activity that resulted, or may result, in a Level I, Level II or major infraction.” The Ole Miss recruiting scandal under Freeze’s watch would seem to qualify.

If Hugh Freeze ends up as the next head coach of Liberty, it’s because Greg Sankey is finally becoming Mike Slive

— Steven Godfrey (@38Godfrey) December 3, 2018

Ah, Liberty.  Now that’s where it gets interesting.

This afternoon, Liberty head coach Turner Gill announced he is retiring.

“It is with a heavy heart that I am announcing my retirement from coaching,” Gill said in a statement. “In the summer of 2016, my wife Gayle was diagnosed with a heart condition. Both Gayle and I wanted to be here to help Liberty through their transition and we are so glad to have done so. We have come to the realization that it is now time for me to step away. I can’t put into words how much this coaching staff, support staff and the players mean to us. We are so thankful for President Falwell, Becki Falwell and Ian McCaw and their support during our time here. They, as well as all of those mentioned, have been and will continue to be blessings in our lives. To God be the glory!”

Immediately speculation began that Hugh Freeze would be the choice to succeed Gill. Freeze has a well established connection with the University and its leadership.

In January Freeze gave his first public talk there.

So we asked the question: is Hugh actually a legitimate candidate? The response we received from a source connected to Liberty is that the school has already advanced the discussions. A source tells FootballScoop Hugh Freeze is indeed a strong candidate at Liberty.

As a private university, Liberty has the ability to move fast here.

How fast?  With Art Briles’ old boss at Baylor as AD and Jerry Falwell, Jr., who’s been quite forgiving of sexual peccadilloes when it suits him as Liberty’s chief, I’d say warp speed fast.

What I don’t know is if Freeze wants to settle for a stretch as a head coach at an independent, or sees the easier path back to the big time as an OC at a P5 program.  Either way, you know Sexton is on the mother.  And that means there’s some hapless AD about to get rolled.

Adventures in hair splitting

RT @CoachHughFreeze: If you have facts about a violation, email compliance@olemiss.edu. If not, please don't slander the young men

— Bruce Feldman (@BruceFeldmanCFB) February 1, 2013

Truly, is there anything that says Tennessee football more convincingly than worrying more about whether Hugh Freeze is a good fit with Jeremy Pruitt’s coaching philosophy than about how a program and its fan base were more squeamish about hiring a guy with a random third-party account about how he may have heard something bad about another coach’s behavior than a guy who chased hookers and whose recruiting practices  put his school on NCAA probation?

Though for most Vol fans I have to admit that last point is way more a feature than a bug.

Today, in double entendres

JUST IN: Jeremy Pruitt has met with Hugh Freeze to talk ‘ball and discuss his offensive coordinator vacancy. ⬇️⬇️⬇️https://t.co/z8K6gj4nrf

— Austin Price (@AustinPriceless) November 29, 2018

Talkin’ ball.  Heh.

The logic is impeccable.

Would this be the most Second Chance U move, or the most Second Chance U move ever?

Hugh Freeze, class act

‘Murica, you’re the reason Hugh Freeze can’t find an employer.

Hugh Freeze partly blames the current climate in America for why he doesn't have a job right now. What a joke this guy ispic.twitter.com/gFuPGzdaf6

— SEC Mike (@MichaelWBratton) September 10, 2018

Obviously, the moment for self-reflection hasn’t arrived yet.

The resurrection of Hugh Freeze

Look who’s back, ladies and gentlemen.

ESPN is giving VTech-Florida State the Megcast treatment.
Coaches room will include: Mack Brown, Gene Chizik, Jim Mora, Hugh Freeze and Todd Graham. pic.twitter.com/hS1s49j87y

— Ralph D. Russo (@ralphDrussoAP) August 27, 2018

That may not seem like much to you, but it sure beats coaching football in Italy.

I wonder what Greg Sankey will do if they start to use Hugh on the SEC Network for analysis.

“I can tell you this. It ends terribly for everyone involved.”

If you are an amateurism romantic, I warn you that Steven Godfrey’s inside the sausage factory look at Mississippi recruiting won’t give you the warm and fuzzies.  Sure, Hugh Freeze’s sanctimony and chutzpah make him an easy target, but the real finger-pointing goes towards the NCAA and, indirectly, our love of the game that makes us willing accomplices to the comfortable fiction that the NCAA sells.

You can watch the first installment, which centers around the Laremy Tunsil saga, here:

The first part of @38Godfrey's docu-series on the Ole Miss scandal is up. Part 1 is largely about Laremy Tunsil, but it's going to get to Dan Mullen's Mississippi State soon. https://t.co/FNOrBTKBa7

— David Wunderlich (@Year2) May 30, 2018

There are three more installments that follow, so hang on.

Harbaugh, Patterson, Mars and being sick of ’em all

You guys know my position on player transfers — the current rules are too restrictive and cater to coaches’ sense of control — but I’ve got to tell you after watching the farce of Shea Patterson’s transfer from Ole Miss to Michigan, there’s a part of me ready to declare a pox on all their houses.

Remember, this all started with Patterson and his lawyer, who has an enormous hard-on for Ole Miss, screaming about how the school needed to man up and let Patterson transfer because everyone lied to him.  And when I say screaming, I mean finding receptive idiots in the national media to share their message of perfidy.

Shockingly, Ole Miss had no wish to accommodate the duo’s desire/demand that it admit to a pattern of deception, while not really having a dog in the hunt for where the kid plays this season.  And why should it, anyway?  No matter what, he’s not suiting up in Oxford.

So, there’s one school that wants a quarterback and another which just wants the quarterback and his legal entourage to go away.  The solution seems simple enough that even two athletic directors could figure it out.

The NCAA decided Friday to waive in Patterson’s case its normal rule that requires non-graduated transfers to sit out a year before returning to the playing field. Michigan and Ole Miss said in an announcement Friday that the two athletic departments worked together during the past week to create a waiver request that they both agreed was accurate and one that took advantage of recently adapted NCAA rules to allow Patterson to get on the field this fall…

The new waiver, which used an NCAA amendment passed earlier this month that takes a player’s academic standing into account when applying to play immediately, put to rest Ole Miss’ previous objections to Patterson’s reasons for transferring.

“Both schools are ready to move forward and appreciate the assistance of the NCAA staff in bringing this matter to a resolution,” the two athletic departments said in a joint statement. “While the process has been complex at times, the solution was simple — two flagship universities and the NCAA staff working together with a focus on student-athlete well-being.”

Ole Miss athletic director Ross Bjork said he reached out to Michigan officials last week to try to work out a resolution regarding Patterson’s eligibility.

“Our biggest thing was we wanted to work with Michigan directly,” Bjork said. “We were able to do that and reach a resolution. We’ve admitted all along that our program has gone through some challenges. While Shea was here, we had a coaching change in July. If that impacted his well-being and he didn’t want to be here, we wish him the best and didn’t want to stand in the way of it.”

In other words, quit letting the lawyer try to score points and find a work-around that meets the schools’ goals.  Success!  Meanwhile, with the mission accomplished, Patterson admits the obvious.

In this case, Michigan benefitted from Patterson deciding that he did not want to play at his school (University of Mississippi) anymore because of football program probation violations. Ole Miss, in the wake of an NCAA investigation into booster-involved recruiting, faces a post-season bowl ban for a second straight in 2018, preventing it from being eligible for a spot in the playoff.

And Patterson, along with not wanting to sit out a year, admitted on Saturday that played into his decision to leave Ole Miss.

“If a university’s football program situation changes drastically, kind of like mine did with the bowl ban and two different coaching staffs, that’s obviously not the situation that I wanted to be in originally,” Patterson said.

“Players should get an opportunity leave that situation. That wasn’t what they thought they were getting themselves into.”

Well, yeah.  Might have been better to have said so from the beginning, son.

Now that the hay is in the barn, Jim Harbaugh has some thoughts about transfers, and they’re about what you’d might expect coming from a football head coach.

Now, in the wake of long, drawn-out process with the NCAA over quarterback Shea Patterson’s eligibility in 2018, the Michigan football coach has some ideas to help fix the college-football transfer debate.

“There’s got to be something,” Harbaugh said Saturday during a football clinic in Paris. “Something. Maybe the school pays back the other school? Ya know?

“Say a school like Michigan gets a player from Eastern Michigan or Central Michigan — maybe you’ve got to pay the scholarship back? Or transfers — maybe you’ve got to pay the scholarship back?”

… To be clear here, Harbaugh isn’t advocating for a change in policy. Just extra burden on the team accepting a transfer from another school.

“Just so there doesn’t become free agency in college football,” Harbaugh said. “That’s the thing I would worry about. But I think scholarships should count as two, or pay back the other school for the money that they have invested, potentially.”

Free agency for players!  Heaven forbid.

In December, though, Harbaugh’s actions somewhat contradicted his words. Despite college football free agency being a concern and players fighting through the adversity being his desire, reports surfaced shortly after Patterson, safety Deontay Anderson and other players were granted permission to transfer that a Michigan plane landed in Oxford, Miss., and that the fourth-year coach of the Wolverines took some players to IHOP.

Hypocrites gonna hypocrite.

Harbaugh’s suggestion, of course, if it came into being, would only serve to benefit the wealthy, which would be more than willing to hand out a little money to smooth the way to boosting their rosters.  Also, of course, none of the funding would wind up in the players’ pockets.  That’s got all the makings of a win-win for big Jim, who, by the way, is making a cool $9 million a year.

Sounds like he and Patterson are made for each other.

Hell hath no fury like a quarterback seeking an immediate transfer.

Man, Shea Patterson and his lawyer are working the media hard.  Dennis Dodd reveals the contents of a nine-page letter Patterson wrote the NCAA in an attempt to justify being allowed to play immediately at his new home that begins, “I’m not going to hold anything back …”

I’m trying to feel the righteous indignation here, but my chuckling over this gem keeps getting in the way:

In his filing, Patterson said he found “a trustworthy, high-caliber coach” with “values, integrity and leadership qualities” in Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh.

**giggles**

Um… sorry.

“It doesn’t seem fair to me that the only thing standing in the way of Coach Freeze making $5 million a year at another school was the discovery that he wasn’t the trustworthy, straight-laced role model that he claimed to be,” Patterson states.

Bless your heart, Shea.  It just now dawned on you that a college football coach isn’t always 100% straight with others?

“I think Hugh Freeze is a really good coach…”

Evidently Nick Saban is far from alone with that sentiment.

According to this Al.com story, at least five SEC schools had contact with Freeze about on-field jobs this offseason.  All five were supposedly shot down by Greg Sankey.  (I say “supposedly” because the SEC office wouldn’t comment on the story.)

Multiple SEC schools looked into hiring Freeze as their offensive coordinator, including LSU and Missouri, but no deal was ever reached because of the league’s opposition, according to sources. Freeze was publicly linked to the Missouri offensive coordinator position before Barry Odom hired former Tennessee head coach Derek Dooley.

While it seems implausible a coach as influential and successful as Saban couldn’t get what he wanted, a nearly year-old SEC bylaw gives the league’s commissioner additional oversight into schools’ hiring practices. According to bylaw 19.8.1.2, a school must consult directly with Sankey before offering a job to a coach “who has engaged in unethical conduct as defined under NCAA Bylaws or who has participated in activity that resulted, or may result, in a Level I, Level II or major infraction.”

That’s relevant because Ole Miss received a two-year bowl ban, scholarship reductions through 2018-19 and had to vacate wins after the program was deemed to have “fostered an unconstrained culture of booster involvement in football recruiting,” according to the NCAA Committee on Infractions.

The committee, though, seemingly viewed it as more an institutional than Freeze issue at Ole Miss. While multiple Ole Miss assistants and staffers received multi-year show-cause penalties, Freeze was hit with only a two-game conference suspension should any school hire him as a head coach before Nov. 30.

All of which seemingly begs the question, if this was more of an institutional problem than a personal one, why is Hugh Freeze currently persona non grata with the SEC, while Ole Miss isn’t?