Auburn hired Hugh Freeze to turn back the clock. It didn't work.
Hugh Freeze, whose last great season came a decade ago, has been fired. Auburn shouldn’t look that far back again to find his replacement.
AUBURN — When Auburn hired Hugh Freeze, he had just one season of finishing in the Top 25 in his previous five. It came during a pandemic-affected 2020.
When Auburn fired Freeze on Sunday, he had not added to that total. In fact, he’s now a full decade removed from his last double-digit win campaign in a non-COVID year.
You don’t need the benefit of hindsight to remember that Auburn’s hire of Freeze at the end of 2022 had a truly backwards focus.
It didn’t seem to matter that Freeze hadn’t topped eight wins in three of his four seasons at Liberty, or that his only win over a team that finished a season ranked was a pandemic bowl game against the Sun Belt’s Coastal Carolina.
It didn’t seem to matter that Freeze’s final season before his dismissal at Ole Miss — the literal last time he was in the SEC — finished with a losing record. It didn’t seem to matter that Freeze had a losing record in the SEC across his entire tenure at Ole Miss.
It also, somehow, didn’t seem to matter that Freeze lost his last three games at Liberty before leaving for Auburn, including a 49-14 blowout to a New Mexico State team that would come to Jordan-Hare Stadium and win decisively a year later.
No, the focus was on what happened before all that. Freeze had once engineered a top-10 scoring offense. That team, all the way back in 2015, had beaten mighty Alabama for what was the second straight season. That mattered a ton to Auburn decision-makers, even though it had been a while.
Freeze had also signed back-to-back top-15 recruiting classes at Ole Miss, including the No. 8-ranked one in 2014. Never mind that, in the three seasons after that legendary signing day, the Rebels went just slightly above .500 (13-11) in SEC play.
Auburn had just seen its program crater under a head coach in Bryan Harsin, who didn’t know the SEC, didn’t seem to care about recruiting and didn’t endear himself to the people on the Plains. Freeze, however, checked all three of those boxes.
And that was enough for Freeze to be the hire for Auburn after Lane Kiffin decided to ultimately stay at Ole Miss. Kiffin, for what it’s worth, has had three double-digit win seasons with the Rebels and is well on his way to a fourth. Freeze only had one.
Auburn was willing to look past how it ended with Freeze on the field at Ole Miss — not to mention everything that happened off the field — and just how much time had passed since he was at his very best as a head coach.
The offensive expertise was a top selling point. A decade-plus earlier, Freeze made a name for himself with a lethally simple offense that would play at warp speed.
But college football had evolved from those days, as Auburn already saw under Gus Malzahn. Rules changed. Defenses adapted. When that pace advantage goes away, you lose the lethality and are just left with simplicity.
The results, like scoring just one touchdown in 21 combined drives against the SEC’s two worst defenses over the last two games, speak for themselves.
The sport was well into that evolution when Auburn hired Freeze, too. As Spencer Hall put it recently, it felt like the Tigers had hired 2012’s hottest candidate a decade late.