Filibuster to Freeze media doesn’t work

Published 6:00 pm Friday, July 14, 2017

HOOVER, Ala. — Ed Orgeron is off the hook.

The LSU coach had been the leader in the clubhouse since Monday for the longest premeditated filibuster of SEC Media Days, a not uncommon tactic among coaches who’d rather hear themselves talk than field questions from the media jackals.

Then, in the event’s final act Thursday, Ole Miss coach Hugh Freeze blew by him with a 16-minute, 2,773-word monologue.

At least Freeze had a logical reason.

There’s a lot Freeze would like to talk about — nobody was interested in hearing about the Rebels’ academic successes — but a lot more that he either can’t talk about, he says, for legal reasons, or he just doesn’t want to.

It was already going to be a trying day for Freeze, with the dominant topic being whether the pending NCAA sanctions that loom over the Rebels’ program will be more than the sanctions the school has already self-imposed.

Then, on the eve of his appearance — yes, the timing is a little too suspect to be coincidental — former Ole Miss coach Houston Nutt dropped a bombshell by filing a civil lawsuit against the university.

Nutt’s attorney, Walter Morrison, wouldn’t comment, saying he didn’t want to “try the case in the media” — yet he conveniently filed it the day before Freeze was to appear at SEC, uh, Media Days.

Nobody ever said SEC football was supposed to be all fun and games.

The suit was far longer even than Freeze’s filibuster, but the gist of it, in which Nutt seeks damages for defamation, is that Freeze and the school undertook a smear campaign — the legalese refers to it as a “false narrative” — against Nutt to lay the NCAA violations at the former coach’s feet.

The NCAA count against Ole Miss is 21 violations, 17 on Freeze’s watch.

A lawsuit is only one side. Ole Miss will have its day in court.

And that court will decide whether Nutt was damaged, but the facts of the suit aren’t good for Ole Miss and Freeze regardless of that verdict.

Like Watergate and the complications of the “cover-up,” the damage-control scenario outlined in the suit may hurt Ole Miss as much as the original charges.

The central allegation is that Ole Miss mounted the “false narrative” to protect Freeze and to salvage the 2016 recruiting class.

The school had resisted Freedom of Information Act requests to make the violations public. Meanwhile, the school allegedly misled reporters in off-the-record sessions to get it circulated that Nutt — and not Freeze — was the culprit in the majority of the violations.

It was just before national signing day and the stories, nationally and locally, got written suggesting that most of the sordid things happened on Nutt’s watch.

The suit suggests that it was to keep potential recruits from getting cold feet.

The NCAA, which has been investigating the program for eight years, sent Ole Miss a Notice of Allegations in 2016 citing 13 infractions, nine occurring under Freeze. That was updated in a second NOA this year, upping the total to 21 violations, only four of which mentioned Nutt.

Nutt coached Ole Miss from 2008 to 2011. Freeze has coached the last five seasons.

The truth was going to come out.

The NCAA might or might not care about lying to the media, but it has clear bylaws prohibiting lying to potential recruits to mislead them.

The stories got written, and several recruits did, in fact, say publicly after signing scholarships that year that they had been assured the same thing by coaches about the pending allegations.

That, more than media misinformation, might interest the NCAA when it starts deciding if Ole Miss’ self-imposed one-year bowl ban, along with double-digit scholarship reductions are enough due penance.

If nothing else, it’s not a good look for Freeze, who isn’t shy about wearing his strong religious beliefs on his sleeve.

“We have taken responsibility for the mistakes we have made,” Freeze said Thursday. “Our administration has taken what we believe to be appropriate action.”

For the time being Freeze will try to motivate a team that has announced it won’t go to a bowl game.

“Might go for it a lot more on fourth down,” he said of really having nothing to lose.

He also plans, he said, to be a “model” for teams caught in similar unpleasantness.

But at least he knows his administration has his back.

“They’ve been unwavering in their support of me,” he said. “I’m greatly indebted to them for that.”

The question is if they went too far with that support — if mounting a campaign of misinformation is a little too unwavering for the NCAA’s taste.