{"id":29201,"date":"2021-03-25T08:50:21","date_gmt":"2021-03-25T12:50:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/?p=29201"},"modified":"2021-03-28T00:17:42","modified_gmt":"2021-03-28T04:17:42","slug":"hugh-freeze-the-blind-side","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/hugh-freeze-the-blind-side\/","title":{"rendered":"Hugh Freeze: The Blind Side Coach, New Opportunities"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Who is Hugh Freeze in <em>The Blind Side<\/em>? How did Hugh Freeze influence Michael&#8217;s football career?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Hugh Freeze in <em>The Blind Side <\/em>was Michael Oher&#8217;s high school football coach at Briarcrest. He was very involved in Michael Oher&#8217;s recruitment. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Read more about Hugh Freeze, <em>The Blind Side<\/em>, and the opportunities for Michael.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<!--more-->\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Hugh Freeze: <em>The Blind Side<\/em> Coach<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>To avoid any suspicion of favoritism for Ole Miss, Sean stayed out of the recruitment process.<\/strong> He routed all communication requests through Hugh Freeze. This move didn\u2019t fool anyone. The Tuohys were already building a house near the Ole Miss campus, assuming Collins would attend and cheer there. Their house was decorated on a normal day with Ole Miss paraphernalia, which grew to intense proportions with their Ole Miss-decorated Christmas tree during the holidays. Each coach walking through the Tuohys\u2019 front door had to pitch their program under the shadow of this tree.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But Hugh Freeze in <em>The Blind Side <\/em>quickly became a liability in Michael\u2019s decision process, as well, when he started interviewing for a job on staff at the University of Tennessee. He wasted no time in trying to impart to Michael all the reasons UT was the right school for him. Leigh Anne also wasn\u2019t shy about her feelings about Michael attending Ole Miss, but she didn\u2019t pressure him. But his tutor, a woman named Sue Mitchell, who\u2019d been working with Michael on his grades five hours a day, six days a week for several months and also an Ole Miss alumna, did. On the day before Michael was leaving to visit the Tennessee campus, Sue told him that she\u2019d heard it on good authority that the FBI conducted decomposition tests on corpses and buried the bodies under the football stadium.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Many people had a vested interest in where Michael decided to attend college, but he took it all in stride. He never committed to one school or another in a serious way and entertained any and all offers to visit campuses in an official or unofficial capacity. The only caveat was that <strong>if he was intending to go to Ole Miss, the Tuohys thought it best to officially adopt him to avoid looking like boosters offering monetary bribes to influence Michael\u2019s decision<\/strong>.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In general, <strong>Michael had taken a lot away from the five-month recruitment process regarding people. He saw who cared about him and who wanted to profit off of him.<\/strong> Hugh Freeze fell into this latter group, as Michael saw that Hugh had used his relationship with him to secure a position on the Tennessee coaching staff. He also saw that Sean respected him enough not to pressure him, and although Leigh Anne and Sue had made their feelings clear, their intentions were more about his support system than school loyalty.&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Who is Hugh Freeze in The Blind Side? How did Hugh Freeze influence Michael&#8217;s football career? Hugh Freeze in The Blind Side was Michael Oher&#8217;s high school football coach at Briarcrest. He was very involved in Michael Oher&#8217;s recruitment. Read more about Hugh Freeze, The Blind Side, and the opportunities for Michael.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":29214,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[40,33,48],"tags":[229],"class_list":["post-29201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","category-people","category-sports","tag-the-blind-side","","tg-column-two"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v24.3 (Yoast SEO v24.3) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Hugh Freeze: The Blind Side Coach, New Opportunities - Shortform Books<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Who was Hugh Freeze in The Blind Side? 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