Sounds strange, but this is college football after all, where anything can be explained away in pursuit of victory. So Freeze resigned. It was likely embarrassing to Freeze, but he patched things up with his family, got hired by Liberty University and posted a record across four seasons. The best part for Freeze is that almost all anyone remembers about his past are his marital foibles and not what led to the discovery of those phone calls, which seems far more telling β and damning β about how the man conducts himself.
At the time, however, the details were still secret. Freeze was concerned that if the depth of the violations and likely sanctions became public, some of his players might transfer.
After all, Ole Miss was about to take on a two-year postseason ban, not to mention a loss of scholarships. Further, members of the Rebels recruiting class might get nervous and switch their verbal commitments before signing binding letters of intent.
So Ole Miss chose to deceive them. The athletic department orchestrated a massive misinformation campaign by repeatedly supplying the media with off-the-record lies about what was at the heart of the NCAA case. The school kept telling anyone with a keyboard or a microphone that most of the major violations occurred under former coach Houston Nutt, not Freeze.
As such, the story went, the Rebels would be able to avoid significant sanctions. This was not true, though. The vast majority of the violations came under Freeze, not Nutt. Freeze knew the truth. So did Ole Miss. Still, the plan went forward. Part of it was in the media, and part of it was Freeze reportedly lying directly to players and recruits and families who asked him about it.
