Armed with just Google and three days of phone records, in which he was seeking an unrelated contact, a Mississippi State fan helped bring down Ole Miss’ head football coach.
Steve Robertson, who has been writing about Mississippi State sports since 2001, was researching a book he is authoring when he didn’t recognize one of the numbers on Freeze’s call log on Jan. 19-21, 2016. Robertson was trying to pin down a call the coach had made on Jan. 20 with a sportswriter, but requested the days before and after so Ole Miss wouldn’t pick up his scent.
Then, according to ESPN, he came across a 313 area code and did a search for it. It was one call in a three-day span of 94 calls — not including three the school had redacted — and it would be the end of Freeze.
When Robertson discovered the call to an escort service, which led to Freeze’s ouster Thursday, he called Thomas Mars, an attorney he had been working with and who’s representing former Ole Miss coach Houston Nutt in his defamation case against the school. Mars then passed along the information to Ole Miss general counsel Lee Tyner, alerting him that the school had unknowingly given this damning call record to a writer.
Freeze’s attorney, a university attorney and an athletic department staff member conducted an investigation, ESPN reported, into his phone records dating back to his December 2011 hiring. Ole Miss athletic director Ross Bjork called the pattern of calls “troubling.” On Thursday, Freeze resigned, with the school saying it would fire him otherwise.
A Mississippi State fan working on a book about the NCAA’s Ole Miss investigation had toppled the rival’s career 69-32 coach.
“If it weren’t for Steve Robertson, I don’t believe this case would have transpired the way it did over the past week,” Mars told ESPN.