re: was Hugh Freeze's recruiting class last year just a flash in the pan?

To answer the question posed by the OP, I think we will have to wait a couple more years before we know how good a recruiter Freeze is.

Had we won the last two games, finished 9-3 and won a New Year's Day bowl, I think this year's class would have been pretty close to last year's in ranking.

Freeze was to blame for those losses, and in January he has paid for it because many top recruits saw those losses as confirmation that the "new" Ole Miss Freeze was supposedly building was really just the same old Ole Miss that chokes whenever it is on the threshold of breaking through to the next level.

You only get so much of a window to demonstrate to top recruits that things have really changed and so Freeze will need to turn in a great season on the field next year to restore momemtum.

That said, with a few late commits like Dupre (not predicting we get him), this class could still end up on the outer fringes of the Top Ten, which, by historical standards, was very good, even for the SEC. It is only because the SEC has become so insanely competitive that it would not look as good.

Time will tell.