"The Freeze 4" on fall camp, expectations... and each other

Cam Coleman, Perry Thompson, Malcolm Simmons and Bryce Cain were front and center Thursday — and they had a lot to say.

(Auburn Football/Twitter)

Sometimes, a college football program will hide its true freshmen from the spotlight.

They might not be trusted to talk until midway through the regular season, if at all. They usually need more time and more media training. And they rarely get presented front and center in preseason practices.

That wasn’t the case at Auburn on Thursday afternoon.

During an interview session that also included veteran linebacker Eugene Asante, potential starting safety Caleb Wooden and returning receiver Camden Brown, the Tigers rolled out all four members of its historic signing class at wideout — Cam Coleman, Perry Thompson, Malcolm Simmons and Bryce Cain — for their first interview sessions of the fall.

“Those boys? They're trained,” Asante said with a smile, pointing to Coleman and Thompson during their interviews. “They know what they're doing.”

(When Coleman yelled at Asante while he was leaving the interview room, Asante looked back at the reporters at his table and said, “Cam Coleman. The guy. The franchise.”)

“The Freeze 4,” as they’ve been dubbed, spent a lot of time after practice Thursday in front of the cameras and recorders. They all talked about how their progress in fall camp, their expectations for the upcoming season and each other.

Auburn hasn’t shied away from the fact that it expects big things in the fall from the highest-rated wide receiver haul in program history.

Here’s the best of what we heard from all four of Coleman, Thompson, Simmons and Cain, starting with their thoughts on the collective unit.

(Austin Perryman/Auburn Tigers)

“The Freeze 4”

Thompson: “Our bond, it’s really nice. We all are from different spots. As soon as we all got up here and linked with each other, it felt like we all had known each other for years. … Everybody's pushing each other to be their greatest.”

Simmons: “It’s a surreal feeling. With all us in-state receivers, before we all committed, we used to talk to each other every day. Just us off the field, just becoming better teammates — knowing what each other do and telling each other what not to do.”

Coleman: “Our relationship has definitely gotten closer since we’ve been around each other more often. We just be hanging out in our rooms sometimes, playing the game.”

Thompson: “We hit the JUGS (machine) a lot, go bowling sometimes and spend good quality time with each other, just building good chemistry.”

Coleman: “They can’t see me in that bowling, though. They can’t see me in that bowling, so they don’t really ask to go bowl often. We all have our strengths, for real. Perry, he’s good at NCAA. I don’t really play Madden for real, so I don’t even play the game, for real. Perry got that.

“Malcolm — he’s good at hooping. He’s good at basketball, he can shoot. We play basketball a lot, too. And Bryce, he just likes to run. He really be running, for real.”

Simmons: “Cam, he’s probably the more laid-back one, but he plays a lot. Then you got Bryce, he’s more like the father of the group. He’s telling us, ‘No don’t do that. No, don’t do this.’ Then we’ve got Perry, the best one at Madden in our group.”

Thompson: “Oh, yeah. They ain't messing with me in that.”

Coleman: “I’m going to be 100 percent honest with y’all, when I was committed to Texas A&M, I wasn’t even responding to Perry. I ain’t even going to lie. I was locked in. He would try and text me weekly, ‘We can turn Auburn around. We can really restore the program.’”