Auburn has a new offense and a new QB. Now... who will step up at WR?

The Tigers need to develop the big-play receivers that they've rarely had before. And the 2023 crew isn't interested in waiting for the future.

WR Jay Fair (Austin Perryman/Auburn Athletics)

Hugh Freeze called it “shocking.”

Auburn football has only had two 1,000-yard receivers in program history. One of them was Terry Beasley, who was Heisman Trophy winner Pat Sullivan’s favorite target from 1969 to 1971. The other is Ronney Daniels, who played three seasons of minor league baseball before playing football for the Tigers as a 23-year-old in 1999.

Freeze has had more 1,000-yard receivers during his time as a head coach, which started in 2011 at Arkansas State. He coached Dwayne Frampton at ASU in 2011, Laquon Treadwell at Ole Miss in 2015 and Antonio Gandy-Golden at Liberty in 2019.

“I've had very few years where I didn't have one who was at least close to 1,000, if not over 1,000,” Freeze said earlier this month.

Then there’s the man Freeze hired to be his offensive coordinator, Philip Montgomery. He had a 1,000-yard receiver in each of his last three seasons as the head coach at Tulsa. He had a pair of 1,000-yard receivers in both the 2015 and 2016 seasons. Montgomery also had a pair as the offensive coordinator at Baylor in 2014, and he was involved with receivers who hit that mark in 2011, 2012 and 2013.

Add it all up, and since 2010, Freeze and Montgomery have coached 15 different 1,000-yard receivers. They’ve had 22 receivers with at least 900 yards, 27 with at least 800 and 34 with at least 700.

Auburn, meanwhile, has had zero 1,000-yard receivers, two 900-yard receivers, four 800-yard receivers and eight 700-yard receivers since the start of the 2010 season.

The Tigers have traditionally been a run-the-ball-and-play-defense program. Even Cam Newton, arguably the greatest college football player of all-time, didn’t crack 3,000 passing yards in his historic 2010 season. (He, instead, ran for nearly 1,500 yards and scored an absurd 20 times on the ground.)

But Auburn’s lack of a deep receiver tradition is still surprising when compared to its peers in college football.

Of the 20 winningest programs in college football history that currently are in the FBS, Auburn ranks 13th.

Of the 19 other teams in the top 20, 12 of them have had 10 or more 1,000-yard receivers in their histories. In the SEC, that includes Alabama, Tennessee, LSU and Florida — with future conference partners Texas and Oklahoma having both hit that mark as well.

Among the eight remaining teams, Ohio State and West Virginia both have nine 1,000-yard seasons in their record books. Penn State and Texas A&M have six, with all six of the Aggies coming in the 2010s.

That leaves just four top-20 teams: Nebraska, Georgia, Auburn and Virginia Tech. Nebraska has two, and both of them came rather recently, in 2018 and 2022. Virginia Tech also has two, with the seasons coming back-to-back in 2015 and 2016.

Georgia is the lone top-20 team that doesn’t have multiple 1,000-yard receivers. However, the Bulldogs’ sole representative is Terrance Edwards, who played in 2002 — a few years after Auburn’s last 1,000-yard season.

Of course, a 1,000-yard receiver isn’t indicative of a great offense or even a great passing attack. (Georgia just won back-to-back national titles without one, and Auburn has had several championship-winning campaigns without one.)

But it’s the lack of overall production at the wide receiver spot for Auburn, which, again, has only had eight 700-yard receivers over the last 13 seasons, that needs to change. As detailed earlier this offseason, one of the biggest differences between Auburn and the other recent contenders in college football is a big-play passing game.

Freeze and Montgomery, along with wide receivers coach Marcus Davis and others on the new staff, have a lot of work to do in order to get the Tigers where they need to be through the air. And go-to receivers are a huge part of that equation.

“We desperately have got to get to that point,” Freeze said.

Freeze has honestly and bluntly pointed toward recruiting as the key to ultimately turning things around in this department. Auburn currently has its first composite 5-star wide receiver committed in more than two decades in Perry Thompson, and it has another in-state star in Bryce Cain — who has a pair of 4-star ratings.

But the Tigers won’t want to wait around to truly launch their new era on offense, which starts Saturday afternoon when Auburn hosts UMass. They’ve got a new scheme in place, and they’ve got a new starting quarterback in Payton Thorne.

Now, the question is: Who will step up at wide receiver and help build that bridge?