LIKE IT IS

Freeze proves he’s a good fit with Ole Miss

Ole Miss coach Hugh Freeze watches warmups prior to a 2012 game against Arkansas at War Memorial Stadium in Little Rock.

Before the movie The Blind Side thrust Hugh Freeze onto a national stage as the head football coach at Briarcrest Christian School in Memphis, the Ole Miss head football coach was already a legend.

A legend as a girls high school basketball coach and a high school football coach.

Freeze led Briarcrest to four state titles and three runner-up titles as the girls basketball coach and won two state football championships before being hired as an assistant athletic director for external affairs at Ole Miss in 2005, just 20 days after his star player, Michael Oher, signed to play football for the Rebels.

Oher was a homeless teenager when Leigh Anne and Sean Tuohy brought him into their home and helped him graduate from high school and get eligible for college. Sean was a tough nosed point guard for the Rebels in the early 1980s, and Leigh Anne was an Ole Miss cheerleader.

The NCAA questioned their influence over Oher, as well as Freeze’s, but apparently it found no wrongdoing.

Sean Tuohy does color commentary for the Memphis Grizzlies now, but we first met when he was theradio analyst for Ole Miss basketball, a job now held by Perryville native Keith Carter, who played at Ole Miss. Tuohy seemed like a genuinely good guy.

As does Freeze for the most part, although he did bolt from Arkansas State after one season as its head coach - he was offensive coordinator the season before that - to take the head coaching job in Oxford, where he received a huge raise.

Maybe all of that coaching experience and the fact he is a native of Mississippi has a lot to do with the Rebels’ success in his two seasons as head coach.

Freeze runs a hurry-up, no-huddle offense, which the Razorbacks saw last week against Auburn, but the big adjustment for the Razorbacks will be that the Rebels are much more balanced offensively where the Tigers were, and are, run-oriented.

For the Hogs to have a chance - they are 16 ½ -point underdogs - they will have to get pressure on quarterback Bo Wallace.

It shouldn’t be surprising if there are a few players on the Razorbacks football roster who transfer once the season is over.

Arkansas definitely needs the room to sign a full class of 25.

What the Razorbacks are lacking right now is speed and depth, so the current staff can’t afford to take players just to fill in the numbers. They have to find bonafide SEC players, and it will be hard to get an abundance of them in one recruiting class.

For sure the coaches can tell recruits that they will have a chance to play next year.

This story about Richie Incognito bullying Miami Dolphins teammate Jonathan Martin is disgusting.

Granted, it is hard to grasp how a 6-3, 319-pound guy bullies a 6-5, 312-pound guy, but there appears to be a huge difference in their backgrounds.

Martin comes from a long line of academicians. Incognito comes from a long line of suspensions and being cut. Every team he has ever played on since he stepped foot on the University of Nebraska campus has either suspended him or cut him.

Martin, who Incognito referred to using the n-word, went to Stanford. His mother and father graduated from Harvard, and all total nine family members have graduated from Harvard.

If indeed the Miami coaching staff asked Incognito to help toughen up Martin, who was struggling with pass protection, it is highly doubtful they meant name-calling that is disrespectful in all circles.

Then again, the Miami coaches knew about Incognito’s reputation, one so bad that he was voted the dirtiest player in the NFL in 2009.

Sports, Pages 19 on 11/07/2013