The Arizona Hotshots of the Alliance of American Football made headlines Thursday by announcing that head coach Rick Neuheisel has hired Hugh Freeze to be his offensive coordinator for the inaugural season of the new professional spring league.

If you are unfamiliar with the Alliance of American Football League, or AAF, it plans to start up immediately after the upcoming Super Bowl and will be broadcast nationally by CBS and the CBS Sports Network. The league will begin play with eight franchises for the first season with teams in Orlando, Birmingham, Atlanta, Memphis, San Antonio, San Diego, Arizona, and Salt Lake. You may have heard Steve Spurrier is the coach of the Orlando team.

Freeze hasn’t worked in an official coaching role since he resigned from his head coaching position at Ole Miss leading up to the start of the 2017 season after it was revealed his school-issued phone log contained calls of “embarrassing nature” that would be hard to explain, according to attorney Thomas Mars. Ole Miss AD Ross Bjork later said that the school would have fired Freeze had he not resigned from his position.

Following the news of Freeze’s hiring, Neuheisel addressed the decision to hire the former Ole Miss coach on his SiriusXM’s ESPNU Radio show. According to Neuheisel, his relationship with Freeze began when he toured the SEC while covering the league.

“I got a chance to see Hugh with his team, see what he does, this was back when… Chad Kelly was the quarterback,” Neuheisel explained. “Chad hadn’t burst onto the scene, and I remember asking Hugh about him and what he thought. His assessment was right on, and I was impressed with what I saw on that practice field.

“Obviously, Hugh fell from grace, he lost his job, and that has been well documented. I have personal experience knowing that sometimes things, as they are reported, aren’t exactly as they are in the truth. So I called Hugh and wanted to talk to him and had some opportunity to get to know him even better. While we can’t change the past, we can certainly move on in the future.”

You can listen to the full clip of Neuheisel discussing the situation on his SiriusXM’s ESPNU Radio, which was provided to SDS by SiriusXM: