Fred Segal is an American author and the creator of Freezing Cold Takes, a sports media project that revisits confident statements and predictions after events have proved them wrong. Raised in Miami, he practiced law full-time for more than eight years before pursuing other work. His social media feed developed into a broader publishing project, including books about professional and college football.
His first book, Freezing Cold Takes: NFL, appeared in 2022. Freezing Cold Takes: College Football followed in 2026. Both collect commentary that looks different in hindsight and explain the events that gave it that new meaning. Rather than presenting a prediction as an isolated quotation, the books use its surrounding story to revisit players, coaches, teams, and periods of football history.
Fred Segal Books
| Book | Year | Amazon |
|---|---|---|
| Freezing Cold Takes | 2022 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
Segal began the OldTakesExposed Twitter feed in 2015, and the Freezing Cold Takes website followed in November 2016. The project’s subjects include predictions from sports personalities, journalists, and other public figures. Old statements become material for comparison with later results, allowing an audience to recognize how quickly certainty about sporting outcomes can be undermined by events.
In an interview about the project’s origins, Segal described initially remembering assertions he had seen online and returning to them after games. Searching older material became central to the work. He connected that ability with experience researching case law as an attorney: both activities require finding useful language within a large body of archived material. His explanation makes the process one of research and selection as well as humor.
His publisher biography records appearances on national television, radio, podcasts, and local programs discussing the feeds. The Athletic, Sports Illustrated, and USA Today have profiled the project. The books expand its short-form approach by adding the background necessary to understand why a statement was made and what subsequently happened. The change of format allows a single mistaken forecast to lead into a longer account of an NFL or college football story.
Football Books
Freezing Cold Takes: NFL: Football Media's Most Inaccurate Predictions—and the Fascinating Stories Behind Them: Segal revisits NFL predictions and declarations that proved inaccurate, placing the original statements beside the football stories that followed. The collection draws on the approach of his Freezing Cold Takes feeds while adding background about the people and events involved. Players, coaching decisions, and team expectations become examples of the distance between confident public judgment and unpredictable sporting outcomes. Published in 2022.
Freezing Cold Takes: College Football: An Incomplete History of the Game's Most Inaccurate Statements and Predictions: This collection turns Segal’s attention to college football, assembling assertions and forecasts that aged poorly. The book revisits commentary from different periods and explains the results that undermined it. Newspaper-era opinions sit within a longer history of public certainty about teams and personalities, with hindsight providing a way to reconsider the expectations surrounding the college game. Published in 2026.
The college volume uses the scale and history of the sport to extend the project beyond recent social media posts. Its subtitle describes an incomplete history, acknowledging a selection rather than a comprehensive record of every mistaken prediction. The surrounding accounts provide the context needed for readers who may remember the outcome but have forgotten the assumptions that preceded it. The format also permits individual entries to be read independently.