I’ve heard some rumblings recently about the possibility of Ole Miss cheating to land a great recruiting class. Seriously, c’mon guys.
If you’ve got a bunch of money, and your alma mater, who you care about deeply is down in the dumps; if they have the worst season in their history and the in-state rival is trouncing them; if you struggle to find a proven coach to turn things around; that wouldn’t give you any reason to resort to whatever it takes to get back to winning. You wouldn’t decide to take all that money and turn things around yourself.
The typical progression of recruiting at schools that are not Texas or Ohio State or Florida or Southern California isn’t that you make the biggest strides on the recruiting trails a year and a half after your first winning season. You don’t need to establish any type of winning tradition or proof you’re a good coach. Programs go from 60th in the country in recruiting one year to top 10 the next all the time.
Cheating certainly isn’t the case with Ole Miss this year. They are recruiting at record levels, and it’s on the up and up. The year they are recruiting from was a 2-10 team, so what? With the boost of their monster 6-6 year and a BBVA Compass Bowl championship – 4 and 5 star recruits just can’t say no to a team in the bottom half of the SEC.
Hugh Freeze: super recruiter. He’s a superstar on the trails, plain and simple. The good classes under Ed Orgeron were all because of Freeze, obviously. I mean, Coach O hasn’t proven he is a great recruiter anywhere else.
When you think of big time Chicago-area recruits you don’t think Notre Dame, Northwestern, Michigan or Illinois. No, you think Ole Miss. You have to figure the best WR in the country would probably want to go 600 miles south to a program that has won 13 games over the last 3 years.
Oh wait, he tweeted this the other day (then deleted it)…
slickdawg made this collage of his visit to Oxford…
But what does all that mean – nothing, of course. They aren’t on the take, they just want to play Rebel football. And win the party too..
Michael Oher’s recruiting violation wasn’t a sign of the culture that’s going on in Oxford, it was just an honest mistake.
Ole Miss is just lucky. We are going to have to face it. They are so lucky to be able to, year after year, flip our commits. Good thing they don’t play actual football games in January, we’d be in big trouble.
The bottom line is, Hugh Freeze is doing this all with his ‘faith-based’ recruiting approach. I mean, for gosh sakes, he took them all to the Library during their visit last weekend to get their studies done…he’s all about education.