Liberty University seemingly locked up Hugh Freeze for the long term, announcing Friday they’ve extended the Flames’ fourth-year coach through 2030.
Liberty’s a private school, so the exact figures of Freeze’s deal aren’t clear. Per ESPN’s Pete Thamel, it’s a fully guaranteed contract that will pay him just shy of $5 million per year. That would put him near the middle of the pack compared to SEC salaries and make him the highest-paid coach in the Group of Five when Cincinnati joins the Big 12 next season.
It also means we can hopefully put to rest any discussions of Freeze’s return to the SEC for the disgraced former Ole Miss coach, which seem to pop up every time a middle-of-the-road SEC job opens.
If you’re unfamiliar with Freeze — first, I envy you — he led the Rebels to two wins over Alabama and a top-10 finish in 2015 during his tenure. He also oversaw some of the most blatant NCAA recruiting violations we’ve seen in the modern era which overshadowed the program years after he resigned.
Despite the situation he put the university in, those investigations didn’t ultimately spell his downfall. In July 2017, Freeze resigned under duress after a Mississippi State fan discovered he had used a university-issued cell phone to contact an escort service several times.
After a few years of laying low, he reemerged at Liberty, an evangelical university in Lynchburg, Virginia, which holds its students to a strict honor code — despite having no qualms about hiring Freeze. (It shouldn’t be ignored, either, that athletic director Ian McCaw — who hired Freeze at Liberty and extended him Friday — landed in Lynchburg after resigning from the same role at Baylor in 2016 in the wake of the school’s horrific sexual assault scandal.)
Despite leaving an SEC program in ruins five years ago, it hasn’t stopped Freeze’s name from being thrown around regarding openings at programs like Auburn, Tennessee and more. Still, you can’t deny he seems genuinely happy at Liberty, and clearly they’re happy with him. Maybe this ridiculous extension and prohibitive buyout by Group of Five standards will be enough for SEC (and other Power Five programs) to leave him where he belongs.
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