Former Ole Miss Houston head coach Nutt filed a lawsuit against the school Wednesday, claiming it broke the terms of his 2011 severance agreement as football officials tried to pin the majority. Recent Rebels NCAA Violations about the 59-year-old CBS analyst.
In the lawsuit, which can be viewed in its entirety at the bottom of this post, Nutt’s legal team alleges that Ole’s current head coach Miss Hugh Freeze, athletic director Ross Bjork and sporting information director Kyle Campbell deliberately spread misinformation to a wide range of journalists such as undocumented sources from 2014-2017. The campaign was a response to an NCAA investigation that uncovered 15 Level I violations, including a lack of institutional control over Freeze.
Nutt is seeking an unspecified amount for damages for lost wages, emotional distress, embarrassment, attorney fees and punitive damages. Ole Miss’s attorney provided the following statement to Clarion-Ledger:
“We have not received the complaint yet, but we know it has been filed. We were given a short copy not too long ago. We will carefully review Coach Nutt’s requests and respond in due time.”
According to the lawsuit, only two of the 13 allegations in the NCAA’s Initial Notice of Allegations were under Nutt’s tenure; two more, conducted by a pair of former assistant coaches hired under Nutt, in 2013 and 2014, two and three years after Nutt’s departure. Although most of the allegations take place in the post-Nutt era, Freeze, Bjork and Campbell are said to have secretly told reporters over the past three years that Ole Miss isn’t overly concerned about the NCAA’s investigation, as “most” of the allegations happened. under Nutt’s supervision.
As part of Nutt’s severance agreement—the two parted ways after he won six games in his last two seasons—Ole Miss agreed not to “make any statements regarding her tenure.” Coach Nutt at Ole Miss could damage or damage his reputation as a football coach,” according to Nutt’s kit. Upon uncovering reports of Ole Miss using journalists — the lawsuit alleges Freeze was “exploiting their trust and deliberately misleading them into tweeting and writing news stories to promote the program.” Freeze Coach agenda” —Nutt has chosen to take legal action against his former program.
The journalists involved in the alleged spread of disinformation were not named in the lawsuit, but various reports and tweets published as a result of the Ole Miss campaign were cited in this section, thus confirming identified them and their follow-up reports as follows:
The lawsuit goes on to cite four specific cases in which Ole Miss recruits or players were provided with similar information by Freeze. The most notable thing happened when safety team Deontay Anderson spoke to ESPN’s Gerry Hamilton to Internal recruitment sectiontold Hamilton he was not interested in the allegation cloud, as they considered “things that happened in the past before [Freeze] went to Ole Miss.
“It didn’t affect me,” Anderson said. “I spoke to Coach Freeze about it. He said it was about things that happened in the past before he came to Ole Miss. I know he will be honest with me. When I first heard it, it didn’t shake me.”
Freeze is expected to take his turn on the podium for the SEC Media Days on Thursday, where he will have no out-of-record protections, if he actually still shows up.
