Mailbag 226: Can Auburn get back to running the ball more?
This week: Comparing this team to the last 20 years, Jackson Arnold, breakout players, coaching chatter, Steven Pearl and pork
AUBURN — Last week, I opened this mailbag by looking back at one I had written one year earlier — after Auburn had played Georgia and before it faced Missouri.
During the process of writing this week’s mailbag, I found a mailbag from four years ago, right before Auburn was set to play Arkansas on the road. That mailbag had a pretty fitting title:
Let’s go back to one of my answers about Auburn’s ground game from that mailbag:
If there isn’t one, Auburn has some real issues. As I wrote earlier this week, Arkansas’ run defense has had a hard time over its last three games. If the Tigers can’t run on the Razorbacks, they’re going to have a rough final stretch of SEC play.
The more things change, the more they stay the same, huh?
Four years later, Auburn is heading back to Arkansas in much different circumstances. Hugh Freeze is the head coach, not Bryan Harsin. Auburn has lost four straight games, not just two to a pair of top-10 games with an SEC win between them. The feels like do-or-die mode for a head coach in Year 3, not one trying to figure things out in Year 1.
But here we are, talking about running the dang football again.
For those of you who don’t know yet, the forecast for Saturday morning in Fayetteville is one of heavy rain and wind. Naturally, that those types of conditions should favor a struggling Auburn offense and not a high-powered Arkansas attack that throws the ball 32 times per game — with explosiveness and efficiency — under Bobby Petrino.
On top of that, Arkansas’ run defense is one of the worst in the entire country. The Razorbacks have allowed 5 yards per carry (No. 122 nationally), and only five other FBS teams have allowed more rushing touchdowns (17) this season. Back in 2021, I wrote about an Arkansas defense that had struggled over the last three games. It’s the same thing for this one in 2025: 6 yards per carry and 10 touchdowns allowed.
According to Game On Paper, Auburn’s offense is No. 21 in the country in EPA per rush attempt this season, while Arkansas’ defense is No. 130. Auburn’s offensive rushing success rate is No. 26, while Arkansas’ defensive rushing success rate is No. 133. Everything in the universe, including the weather, is telling Auburn to run it more.
But will the Tigers do that? A lot’s going to come down to Freeze and how he utilizes his offense Saturday in what feels like a must-win game for his immediate future.
We’ll start with that for this week’s mailbag, followed by questions about how this Auburn team stacks up to the last 20 years, Jackson Arnold, surprise players and some coaching chatter before wrapping up with a little bit of basketball.
Let’s go.
Is there a way to tell if Hugh’s failure to #EstablishIt is due to an over-reliance on RPOs meeting teams stacking the box and daring us to throw it?
Reid
Without access to some truly advanced analytics like the ones ESPN and the teams themselves have, there’s no good way to tell. I’ve seen a stat in the past about “times running into loaded boxes,” but it’s nothing that’s relatively accessible for the public.
What I do know, though, is that Auburn’s offense runs more RPOs than anybody else in the SEC. According to SEC StatCat, the Tigers’ RPO rate leads the league at 39.17%. However, their give rate of 70.77% on those RPOs is third-lowest in the SEC. So, statistically speaking, Auburn is pulling the ball back on RPOs and throwing it at or very close to the highest overall rate in the conference. Auburn is also No. 10 in yards per RPO in these games, making this a high-rate play with bottom-half results.
When Auburn ran the ball all over Baylor back in Week 1, the Bears sat back in a two-high shell on defense and rarely went away from it. The Tigers won the numbers game in the box and hammered a bad defense. Arkansas’ run defense looks even worse than Baylor’s run defense, yet Freeze isn’t expecting the same type of strategy.