Hugh Freeze didn't so much return to college football's biggest stage Monday as big-time college football came around to Hugh Freeze.

Most of what led to NCAA rules violations during Freeze's time at Ole Miss are now easily worked around either through regulations the NCAA has implemented or practices it is unwilling to prosecute.

At the time, the NCAA said Ole Miss "fostered an unconstrained culture of booster involvement.".

While that's not to diminish the fact that NCAA rules existed and Freeze blatantly broke them -- creating a major scandal in the process -- it does show how far college football has shifted in the time since he's been away from the SEC.

It's one of the reasons Freeze makes perfect sense as the Tigers' Plan B after Plan A (Lane Kiffin) didn't work out.

Freeze was willing to crawl to Auburn over broken shards of glass.

This was a comeback that might never have been if college athletics didn't move right into Freeze's wheelhouse.

About 3 ½ months before the NCAA hammer came down on the Ole Miss program for violations under Freeze's watch, the coach resigned from his position after it was discovered he had made inappropriate calls on a school-issued mobile device to a phone number "associated with a female escort service.".

While that was "totally unrelated to the NCAA matter," as an Ole Miss lawyer said at the time, it moved standing by Freeze from difficult to impossible when those missteps were combined with the skirting of NCAA rules.

For a while, college administrators drew that line at Hugh Freeze.

When the time was right, Freeze was always going to find another Power Five job.

Perhaps Freeze as Plan B isn't as desirable as the clear Plan A, but Kiffin flatly turned down Auburn.

The only other active coach walking the planet to have beaten Nick Saban at least twice (Gus Malzahn) also did it at Auburn.