Hugh Freeze: Ole Miss not yet a total SEC team

Hugh Freeze came into the SEC Media Days a pretty happy guy. His Ole Miss team was coming off monster wins (for the program, at least) against Texas and LSU, as well as a bowl victory. He’s recruited strongly – even in the face of Alabama.

He started off his press conference with a somewhat sharp word for another SEC rival: “One good thing about Media Days is Coach Spurrier isn’t talking about Ole Miss as much, wanting to play us every year.  Maybe that’s a good thing“, referencing Spurrier’s comments from 2012 about schedules where he said: “If I made the schedule, Georgia’d be playing LSU and we’d be playing Ole Miss.”

But still, he told the assembled media in Hoover that his team was still “we’re still maybe a year or two away of looking like a total SEC team in the depth chart“, although noted that Ole Miss was “ahead” of when he arrived, especially at 2014 marks the first year where 85 players who Freeze recruited are now going to be on scholarship.

And despite the LSU and Texas wins, there were losses to SEC West foes Auburn, Alabama, Texas A&M and more importantly (for the locals) Mississippi State. But he added confidently: “I said on day one that my expectations were to make Ole Miss very relevant in the SEC West.  And I think this year we should be that.  That’s my expectation, is that we should be competitive in every single game….Obviously I can’t control the health of players, injuries, turnovers, how your quarterback plays.  All of those factors will kind of determining the ending result of win/losses.  There’s no question in my mind we’re a better football team today than we were in year one and year two and we should be very competitive. ”

Only time will tell.