Attorneys representing the University of Mississippi and the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning filed a motion in federal court Thursday asking that former Ole Miss football coach Houston Nutt’s breach of contract lawsuit be dismissed.
Earlier in July, Nutt filed the federal lawsuit against IHL, the university and the Ole Miss Athletics Foundation, alleging that representatives of the athletic department breached his contract by orchestrating a misinformation campaign to mislead “the media, Ole Miss boosters and potential recruiting prospects about the true nature of matters that were being investigated by the NCAA.”
The lawsuit, filed during the week of SEC Media Days, garnered immediate national media attention as Ole Miss athletics director Ross Bjork, former head football coach Hugh Freeze and sports information director Kyle Campbell were specifically targeted in the suit.
Oxford attorney Cal Mayo, who is representing the university and IHL but not the athletics foundation, filed the motion for dismissal on Thursday, saying his two clients cannot be considered citizens of the state, as the original lawsuit stated, and cannot be sued in federal court.
The motion seeks to have the entire case dismissed by the federal court. If that happened, Nutt could refile the lawsuit in federal court without naming the university and IHL as defendants, or he could file the original lawsuit in state court.
“The first step before you file a lawsuit is to determine if the court has jurisdiction,” Mayo said. “Here, the federal district court clearly does not.”
In the original lawsuit, Nutt’s attorney argued that Freeze initiated off-the-record conversations with several sports journalists “for the specific purpose of creating multiple false and misleading news stories, tweets, and other social media comments supporting the above-referenced false narrative,” and “that the NCAA’s focus was on the former football coaching staff and Houston Nutt in particular.”
The lawsuit also alleges that Freeze, backed by the Ole Miss athletic department, purposefully misled recruits and boosters about the severity of NCAA charges that fell during his own tenure as head coach.
Later in July, Freeze’s phone records showed a call to a number associated with a Tampa-based escort service. Freeze resigned on July 20 as head football coach shortly before that news was made public. Bjork and Ole Miss Chancellor Jeff Vitter, in a news conference the same day, cited a discovered “pattern of personal misconduct.”
“Once we looked at the rest of the phone records we found a pattern,” Bjork said. “It was troubling.”
Nutt, who now lives in Texas but coached at Ole Miss from 2008-2011, won back-to-back Cotton Bowls in his first two years before posting a 4-8 record in 2010 and a 2-10 record in 2011. His contract with the university continued despite being fired.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
- Look for the "Republish This Story" button underneath each story. To republish online, simply click the button, copy the html code and paste into your Content Management System (CMS).
- Editorial cartoons and photo essays are not included under the Creative Commons license and therefore do not have the "Republish This Story" button option. To learn more about our cartoon syndication services, click here.
- You can’t edit our stories, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style.
- You can’t sell or syndicate our stories.
- Any web site our stories appear on must include a contact for your organization.
- If you share our stories on social media, please tag us in your posts using @MSTODAYnews on Facebook and @MSTODAYnews on Twitter.
- You have to credit Mississippi Today. We prefer “Author Name, Mississippi Today” in the byline. If you’re not able to add the byline, please include a line at the top of the story that reads: “This story was originally published by Mississippi Today” and include our website, mississippitoday.org.
- You can’t edit our stories, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style.
- You cannot republish our editorial cartoons, photographs, illustrations or graphics without specific permission (contact our managing editor Kayleigh Skinner for more information). To learn more about our cartoon syndication services, click here.
- Our stories may appear on pages with ads, but not ads specifically sold against our stories.
- You can’t sell or syndicate our stories.
- You can only publish select stories individually — not as a collection.
- Any web site our stories appear on must include a contact for your organization.
- If you share our stories on social media, please tag us in your posts using @MSTODAYnews on Facebook and @MSTODAYnews on Twitter.