Meet Auburn football's deep and balanced 2025 transfer class

There's pressure on the Tigers to improve now, and they've landed a top-5 class of instant-impact players they hope will help them get there.

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WR Eric Singleton Jr. (Instagram)

AUBURN — While your views of a “hot seat” may vary, there’s no question that there is pressure on Hugh Freeze and his staff heading into 2025.

Auburn has now had four straight losing seasons, including a step backwards to not even making a bowl game in Freeze’s Year 2. For a program that is one of the 15 or so best in the history of college football, this amount of prolonged futility is uncommon and unacceptable.

Freeze’s Tigers were close to breaking through at times in 2024. Five of their seven losses came by 10 points or less, and they had late leads in two of them. Things could have gone different for Auburn this fall, especially with improvements in the passing game and overall defense. Instead, Auburn regressed where it matters most.

While Auburn’s rebuild toward becoming a championship contender was always going to take multiple years — and the high school recruiting has been what you would want for that — the Tigers can’t sell potential anymore. They have to sell results.

So, it’s good that Freeze and his staff have decided to treat this transfer portal window like that pressure exists.

Auburn currently has the No. 4 transfer class in the entire country, according to the 247Sports Composite. The Tigers have added 14 new players to a roster that has seen 16 players leave via the portal. The 247Sports rankings have Auburn down for only losing one 4-star transfer so far, yet adding a grand total of six.

Nothing is guaranteed in the transfer portal, particularly with the increasing volume of players that go through it each year. Heavily hyped moves don’t always pan out (like Antonio Kite and Caleb Burton III), while more under-the-radar ones can turn into difference-makers (like Eugene Asante and Marcus Harris).

But, well before these transfers even go through spring practices — much less play in their first games — it looks like Auburn has done a lot of what it needed to do in this first portal window. This is a balanced and deep transfer class, with almost every position featuring a newcomer and several clear-cut needs getting addressed.

Auburn can’t just wait around. It needed instant-impact players for 2025.

With the holidays-based dead period for transfer portal recruiting now underway, now is a good time to take a closer look at each of Auburn’s transfer portal pickups so far and where they might fit into the Tigers’ plans next season.

QB Jackson Arnold

We put together some No-Huddle Notes on Arnold when he signed with Auburn more than a week ago. Auburn couldn’t afford to waste time on picking out a potential starting quarterback for 2025, even if the market at the position wasn’t as deep as it has been in years past. The Tigers needed to move quickly and did so with Arnold.