Freeze relying on compass, whistle

Ole Miss coach Hugh Freeze's winning percentage figures to take a hit this season. Freeze is replacing Houston Nutt, whose Rebels finished last in the SEC in 2011.
Ole Miss coach Hugh Freeze's winning percentage figures to take a hit this season. Freeze is replacing Houston Nutt, whose Rebels finished last in the SEC in 2011.

In Hugh Freeze’s first three seasons as a college head football coach, his teams went 18-1 in conference play.

Freeze’s .947 conference winning percentage figures to absorb a big hit this season as he takes over an Ole Miss program that is 1-15 in SEC games the previous two years, including a 14-game losing streak dating to a 42-35 victory over Kentucky on Oct. 2, 2010.

Since becoming a charter member of the SEC in 1933, the only other back-to-back seasons in which Ole Miss combined to win just one conference game was in 1981-1982, when the Rebels were 1-10-1 to mark the end of Steve Sloan’s five-year coaching tenure.

Falling to the bottom of the SEC cost Houston Nutt his job as Ole Miss’ coach — after his first two Rebels team were each 9-4 — and allowed Freeze to be hired after he led Arkansas State to a 10-2 record in 2011, including 8-0 in the Sun Belt Conference, in his only season as the Red Wolves’ coach. Freeze also was the coach at Lambuth College, an NAIA school in Jackson, Tenn., in 2008-2009 when the Eagles were 20-5, including 10-1 in the Mid-South Conference.

Freeze is accustomed to quick turnarounds, but he understands that isn’t going to be the case in the SEC, which has produced the past six national champions and has six teams in The Associated Press preseason Top 25 poll.

One voter at SEC media days picked the Rebels to win the conference title, but overall Ole Miss received the fewest number of poll points and was the media’s choice to finish seventh in the West. That’s even worse than last season’s 0-8 team, which finished sixth. Now there are seven teams in each of the SEC’s divisions with the addition of Missouri and Texas A&M.

“It won’t be an overnight fix,” said Freeze, a former Ole Miss assistant. “It probably won’t be a one-year fix. It’s a process. I call it ‘the journey.’ ”

Freeze, whose Rebels open against Central Arkansas on Sept. 1, has talked about Ole Miss needing to find its way out of “the wilderness” to be an SEC contender. He said he doesn’t believe that statement negatively impacts his players.

“I think they hear the consistent message that we give them every day, that winning the day is the process of getting out of the wilderness,” Freeze said. “That’s what they’re focused on.

“I know our staff is focused on how do we win today. Not talking about the negatives of where we are, but being real. This is where we are, everybody knows it, it’s documented all over ESPN and everywhere. ... So our kids hear that, they know that.

“What they hear from us is, here’s how we’re going to change it. I’m thrilled to have a core group of guys that have bought in. I think we’re sitting around 60 percent of our team that has bought in. I think you need to get it to about 80 percent to have a fighting chance.

“Hopefully, we can get that done before the fall.”

Senior Randall Mackey, who was Ole Miss’ starting quarterback the second half of last season, has moved to running back. Quarterback is a battle between sophomore Bo Wallace, a junior college transfer, and junior Barry Brunetti, who played in five games last season, with two starts, after transferring from West Virginia.

This is the second time Wallace has been with Freeze. Wallace, from Giles County (Tenn.) High School, signed with Arkansas State when Freeze was the Red Wolves’ offensive coordinator, but he stayed in Jonesoboro only one season. Wallace transferred to East Mississippi Community College after redshirting in 2010 as a true freshman when Ryan Aplin won the starting quarterback job.

Wallace passed for 4,604 yards and 53 touchdowns while leading East Mississippi to a 12-0 record and a national junior college championship last season, then signed with Ole Miss in January to be reunited with Freeze.

Freeze said he and Wallace had some “rocky” times at Arkansas State.

“But I don’t think it ever got to the point where we didn’t care for one another or share the same aspirations,” Freeze said. “His leaving Arkansas State was his choice, and I understood it.

“We didn’t want him to go, but he had Ryan Aplin in front of him for a couple more years. It was pretty clear. We’re very honest and straightforward with our kids, tell them where they are.

“He chose to leave. It obviously benefited him greatly.”

Freeze said Wallace has matured as a person as well as a player since he was at Arkansas State.

“When we sit down and talk and have discussions about life, football or whatever, he’s definitely a different kid,” Freeze said. “Not that he still doesn’t make poor decisions, like all of the kids that we coach in this league sometimes do, but he certainly has matured.”

Freeze was asked at SEC media days to compare the talent at Arkansas State he coached last season to the talent he’ll be coaching at Ole Miss this season.

“I don’t know if that’s fair to judge necessarily, because last year at Arkansas State was a remarkable ride,” Freeze said. “The chemistry we had, the discipline that was already there that I have to give [predecessor] Steve Roberts a lot of credit for. He had a lot of great things in place, and I learned a lot of things from him.”

Freeze also talked about how talented Arkansas State was on defense last season, and how well Aplin played at quarterback.

“I do think we were more talented at some spots [last season],” he said of Arkansas State in reference to Ole Miss. “Or maybe deeper is the appropriate term I should use.”

A Sun Belt team — even the champion — being deeper than an SEC team? That doesn’t bode well for Freeze and the Rebels.

“I’ve said this from Day 1 that I think a reasonable expectation from our fans and our administration that they should have for us — our staff and our kids — is that we compete passionately for our university for 60 minutes,” Freeze said. “Whatever the scoreboard says at the end, we’ll have to live that.”

Upcoming Events