Hugh Freeze Called Houston Massage Company While on December 2016 Recruiting Trip
Former Ole Miss coach Hugh Freeze used his work mobile phone to call a number associated with a Houston massage company in December 2016, according to phone records obtained by SI.com through an open records request. A website found by searching for the phone number features photos of women in lingerie and offers to come to the client between the hours of 6 a.m. and 2 a.m. for $180 an hour. According to the site, the company promises “a high level of satisfactory services.”
Freeze resigned under pressure on July 20 because of what Ole Miss athletic director Ross Bjork termed a “concerning pattern” of behavior that Ole Miss officials found when searching through Freeze’s phone records. The officials conducted their search after a batch of records from January 2016 revealed that Freeze had called a number associated with a Tampa, Fla., escort service.
A screenshot of the website that lists the massage company number dialed from Hugh Freeze's phone on Dec. 4, 2016.
The call to the number associated with the Houston company was made at 7:54 pm Central time last Dec. 4 and lasted one minute. Five minutes later, Freeze was making calls to candidates for the Rebels’ open offensive and defensive coordinator positions. The next morning, Freeze sent a tweet commemorating his five-year anniversary at Ole Miss.
Later on Dec. 5, future Ole Miss signee Ryder Anderson of Katy, Texas—a Houston suburb—tweeted a photo of himself with Freeze and then-Rebels defensive line coach Chris Kiffin.
The number does not appear again in the records provided to SI.com, which cover the entire time Freeze was employed at Ole Miss. Two sources confirmed Saturday that Freeze was allowed to redact "personal" calls before the phone records were released by the school last week. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Ole Miss officials found the pattern of behavior matched Freeze’s time away from Oxford on recruiting trips.
