Hugh Freeze became the toast of Oxford last year, surprising many by taking a 2-10 Ole Miss team and leading it to a 7-6 bounce-back season. One guy who wasn't surprised by the quick turnaround, however, was the coach he replaced.

"I think the biggest thing he did was he got Bo Wallace," former Ole Miss coach Houston Nutt said of Freeze. "Jevan Snead left early for us (after the 2009 seaon) and it kind of threw us out of whack a little at quarterback. We feel like at every other position, we were on our way. So it didn't surprise me."

Nutt, who was one of several former coaches in Gulf Shores this weekend for SEC BeachFest, led Ole Miss to back-to-back 9-4 seasons and consecutive trips to the Cotton Bowl before being dismissed after 4-8 and 2-10 seasons in 2010 and '11. He said Saturday that his successes and failures -- and Freeze's success in 2012 -- can be traced back to recruiting.

"Ed Orgeron left me two very good classes, but there were two not so good and my first year wasn't very good," he said. "But if you look now at the freshmen, the redshirt freshmen and sophomores now that are going to be juniors ... we recruited some really good kids -- very fast, athletic kids. Hugh came in and did a good job of taking some good players that were left him."

Freeze, of course, also did a very good job of recruiting his first year, landing a class ranked in the top five in the nation by 247Sports and ESPN. The class was headlined by the top prospect in the country, five-star defensive end Robert Nkemdiche, whose older brother Denzel had been signed two years earlier by Nutt.

"One thing his mother and father said is: 'If you get Denzel, his little brother is coming to play with big brother because we're not going to two separate Saturdays,'" Nutt said of Nkemdiche. "So we knew we had a leg up with a No. 1 recruit. That helped Hugh. And then Hugh did a really good job with about three or four other really highly recruited players. You get a player like Nkemdiche and they become your No. 1 recruiter. Good players want to play with good players.

"Now he has to go back-to-back. He has to go get another class like that. I think that'll be important."

While Nutt said Ole Miss is "not an easy, easy place to recruit to," he praised new Rebels athletic director Ross Bjork and said the football program is now being given more tools with which to work.

"Some of the things we asked for four or five years ago, now they're building - new team meeting room, new weight room, going to feed your kids with the right nutrition," he said. "I just think there's a lot of good things - just keep winning."