Freeze psychologically changed after he had a good year and recruited the class with Nkimdiche, Tunsil, and Treadwell.  He allowed the success to go to his head and inflate his ego.  Stubbornly, he refused to change tactics about RBs in the SEC, and continued to recruit receivers and scat backs.  With the success came the fact that he thought he was infallible and could do not wrong.  His altercation with the NCAA prompted the investigator show Freeze who was the most powerful.  Freeze was too busy being a celebrity and worrying about his reputation instead of taking care of business as a head football coach.

SCrebel wrote:

He won many of the games by having a good defense. He stopped recruiting defensive players for the most part and that was our down fall. Longo hire was icing on the cake.

he did not "stop recruiting D players".  He simply lost a lot of battles for defensive players.  particularly LBs.  we did ok signing DL and DBs.  No LBs wanted to play in our system.  We have had very few True LBs here at OM for like 8 years.  

Even when we would sign big time LBs, they ended up at DL.  Mainly because we could not recruit elite LBs with size.  We always signed the 200lb kids that we needed for speed in this system but when it came time to handle a 230 lb back, we would get whipped

Had we looked for a new DC 3 years ago, we could have found a big name coach and we would have still had big league talent on D which would have helped us recruit better. 

With all that said, Freeze is still a good coach IMO.  His problem was he got caught up in the web of lies he created by trying to hide his booty calls.  unless he stopped and allowed for those decisions to die out which does not look to be the case because he became so cavalier in his actions, he would have crashed and burned out at some point. 

it is all for the best at this point, the NCAA wanted freeze gone and judging by his back door activities, it needed to happen.  

Sooper_Rebel wrote:

Alabama and MSU targeted any player that we went after on the D side, especially at LB. Freeze had great commits up to signing day that would then sign elsewhere. He was very frustrated by this. If the NCAA crap wasn't on our heads, I feel confident that he would have kept succeeding in recruiting.

Yep.....once the NCAA places what amounts to an indictment on a program through suspicion of cheating that's the kiss of death.

I just can't see how 5 years worth of investigations can be justified when most of the BS they pulled up in findings were in affect, self reportable bs 

If we had known this was what they were going to pull, could we have not started self imposing penalties 3 years ago?  

there has to be a statutory limit on how long these D heads can set up shop.  It cost us millions in defense, millions more in lost revenues and an invaluable amount of talent that either we missed on or never even got consideration from over the last few years because of this NCAA bs.   

The issue is also with state.  we lost a lot of battles with state because they were the source of the BS.  Simmons, Gay, Lewis, and others would have been difference makers on our defense.  All were locks with OM at some point until their thin character broke and they sided with the humpback.

Life sure is unfair, but it all comes around at some point