Mailbag 225: How much better does Auburn's offense *need* to be?
This week: Hugh Freeze as a play-caller, Jackson Arnold, Damari Alston, basketball exhibition takeaways and Tahaad Pettiford
AUBURN — Exactly 364 days and 40 mailbags ago, Auburn was coming off a loss to Georgia and going into a game against Missouri.
The title of the mailbag that week was simple: “Can Auburn learn how to win again?”
Ironic, isn’t it?
I don’t like to quote myself too often in here, but I think it’s appropriate in this case. Here’s some of what I wrote on October 18 last year:
Even if Auburn has another losing season in 2024 — and that’s the most likely scenario — it should have a better roster in 2025. Improved quarterback play could be what the Tigers need to take that next step. (We thought that was going to be the case in 2024, though.) More experience for their most talented players should go a long way. Besides, it’s not like Auburn is getting blown out every week.
The 2025 class is too strong, and Freeze has too much support from the people in charge, to think he’s going to be fired at the end of this season. It’s not hard to see where this thing could turn around, either in the second half of this season or next season.
But there are enough examples of teams staying stuck in this spot, even with improved recruiting, to show that there are no guarantees. It’s on Freeze and his staff to figure out how to teach Auburn how to win again.
Almost an entire calendar year later, and Freeze and his staff haven’t done that. He said as much last week. And Freeze can’t even point to an explosive offense or a strong recruiting class this time. Auburn is No. 125 nationally in plays of 10-plus yards, and it’s currently No. 32 in the 247Sports Composite rankings for the 2026 cycle.
Another round of strong recruiting and retaining valuable talent has not translated into on-field improvement. Neither has a change at quarterback. Auburn was playing better offense with Payton Thorne than it is right now with Jackson Arnold. Auburn has to beat Missouri to avoid a third straight 0-4 start in SEC play under Freeze. That has never happened in the modern era of the program.
And perhaps the most confounding part of the situation is that the dam hasn’t broken yet for the Tigers. They’ve lost three straight games to strong teams by 10 points or fewer. They haven’t been blown out. They’ve had opportunities to win them all. Outside of the UGA game, Auburn could have said the exact same thing last season.
But no one wants to hear that Auburn might be close. I mean, Arnold even said this week that he hated saying that. It’s well beyond time for results, and yet the Tigers keep playing the same song for the second straight season — good enough defense to win, bad enough offense to lose to pretty much anybody in the conference.
So, as a result, we’ve got another Friday mailbag in which we’re talking about a lot of the same issues for Auburn football we discussed last week, last month and last year. Spoiler alert: Until the Tigers show something drastically different on the field or make a coaching change, we’ll be in this exact same spot.
At least the basketball questions are pretty new.
Let’s go.
Much has been made of Auburn’s woeful offense, especially juxtaposed with a defense “doing enough.” Hugh’s P4 record when holding an opponent to 28 or fewer is something like 6-13, after a cursory glance back.
To me, asking to be above .500 in those games in modern football is far from a tall order, but that’s just a gut feeling. I know Scoring Offense isn’t opponent adjusted, but how many P4 teams are actually averaging 29ppg against like competition?
Is that actually an elite offense, or just the middling performance I think it is? (Many of these AU games would have been won with fewer than 28 points, but for the sake of argument, I chose 28.)
Patrick
So far this season, 33 FBS football teams are averaging 29 points or more against power-conference competition. If you bump that down to just 28, you get to 38. Go down to 25 — enough to win every game Auburn has lost this season — and it’s 52.
Of the 76 FBS schools below that line, only 22 of them are power-conference teams. The rest are in the Group of Six or whatever we’re calling it now. So that means that roughly the top two-thirds of the power conferences have this type of scoring offense against itself, while the bottom third does not.
Is it too much to ask for Auburn to be in the top 66% of power-conference offenses? Not in any time period, especially one in which it has former blue-chippers all over the offense and is led by a head coach who was hired for his expertise on that side.
Under Hugh Freeze, Auburn has played 23 games against power-conference opponents. His record is 7-16.
In those games, his teams have scored at least 28 points only four times — a bad Arkansas team in 2023, a pre-breakout Vanderbilt team in 2023, a marathon game with Texas A&M in 2024 and a road win over a rough Baylor defense in 2025.
It gets worse: Auburn has been held to less than 20 points 13 different times. That’s more than half of the games that Freeze has coached against quality opponents.
It gets even worse: Auburn has been held to just one touchdown six different times. (It also happened against NMSU.) Again, that’s more than the times it’s broken 28.
This takes some logic-bending, but walk with me here: If Auburn scored just 28 points in each of its losses under Freeze, it would have had enough to turn 11 of those into wins and forced overtime in two others. That’s the difference between a coach who is 14-17 right now and one who could be 25-6 or better.
Granted, situation football matters, and opponents would probably be more aggressive against Auburn if it knew it wouldn’t just win with less than 28. The Tigers’ defense has played against a decent bit of “run out the clock” in the second half.
But this thought experiment just goes to show you that an average scoring offense against power-conference competition could have Auburn in a much different situation than it is right now. And that ultimately goes back to Freeze.
I think most of us can agree that Hugh Freeze and his staff are great recruiters. They have put together a team that has the talent to win in the SEC. But the results just aren’t there.
Is there any chance he would bring in a proven, battle-tested offensive coordinator to take charge of the offense? I don’t mean someone in the Philip Montgomery mold, but one who would actually call the shots.
Would his ego allow this? And could the administration force him to accept such a move if it would allow him to keep his job? I just don’t see a path to success as long as Freeze is the one calling the plays.
Paul