Bye weeks are a good opportunity for healing beaten bodies. But bye weeks can also help to heal beaten spirits. And right now, there’s no more beaten-down program in the SEC than the 2-4 Auburn Tigers, a team that began the year with promise and hope and now stands on the edge of yet another wasted season in a long, maddening string of them.
Auburn travels to No. 19 Missouri this week in a game that’s crucial for the Tigers’ mindset, success and future. Yet another SEC loss — Auburn is already 0-3 in conference play — and the Tigers will slide even faster toward a total collapse, with reverberations that could last well beyond 2024.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. This was supposed to be the season that second-year head coach Hugh Freeze took the Tigers to the next level — maybe not SEC-championship level, sure, but score-a-big-win-every-year level. Freeze arrived in Auburn last season after the Tigers had endured a chaotic run of four head coaches in three years, counting interims. The Plains needed both credibility and stability, and Freeze, despite his disciplinary and behavioral baggage, was supposed to bring both.
For a moment, it looked like Freeze had Auburn on the right path. The Tigers were tied with two-time defending national champion Georgia in the fourth quarter of last season’s game in Auburn. Only the 4th-and-31 “Gravedigger” — — kept Auburn from knocking off Alabama. Freeze attracted, and held onto, starred recruits in a way his recent predecessors hadn’t.
But between those 2023 Georgia and Alabama games came a shocking 31-10 humiliation at the hands of Diego Pavia and New Mexico State, an upset that would serve as an early warning. Auburn suffered another unexpected loss earlier this season — a 21-14 defeat to Cal, the game which really kicked off the hilariously absurd #Calgorithm movement on Twitter.
Soul-crushing losses to Arkansas, Oklahoma and Georgia followed, and so did the finger-pointing. Freeze has thrown his players under multiple buses, most notably quarterback Payton Thorne, who clashed with Freeze two weeks ago, especially during a botched fourth down early in the fourth quarter.
“Yeah, he absolutely didn’t go with what we had called,” Freeze said after the game. “Payton’s a thinker. He knows football. He decided to try to run some type of zone read there. I think everybody was a little confused. But we definitely weren’t on the same page there.”
Now comes Missouri Week, and the early returns aren’t promising. Freeze already scored the week’s first own-goal by fumbling a compliment of Missouri head coach Eli Drinkwitz, providing some prime Missouri social-media bulletin board material on Monday.
“To me, some of the better coaching jobs are done with some of those lesser rosters in recruiting. And you look at people like Eli and (Kentucky’s Mark) Stoops and (Vanderbilt’s) Clark Lea now, too, that I think are doing incredible jobs at their respective programs with the kids they’ve had,” Freeze said.
Missouri’s “lesser roster” is 5-1 and a 4.5-point favorite over Auburn, for the record.
Freeze is hoping the season’s first bye week will serve as a recalibration. “We had a much-needed off week last week, which was good for our physical bodies and our mental side,” he said Monday. “Obviously disappointing to be sitting where we are record-wise, and determined that we must play more consistent football in all three phases. We’ve got to coach that better.”
But even amid all the coachspeak, Freeze dropped a direct warning to his players. “If we have a critical down, it would be very, very, very, very disheartening and infuriating if another situation happens on a fourth-and-one or a third-and-one where our kids don’t have a clear understanding of what should happen,” he said. “That would be quite infuriating.”
So would that be the fault of the players for failing to execute, or the coaching staff for failing to prepare the players? We’ll just have to wait and see, won’t we?
You hesitate to say Freeze isn’t going anywhere, particularly with a booster base as active and free-spending as Auburn’s, but an in-season buyout of Freeze’s six-year, $39 million contract would currently , or roughly $20 million. In an era where college athletic departments must on their bottom lines, paying someone $20 million to go away doesn’t make much sense, even at Auburn.
Not only that, but drop-kicking Freeze over the Toomer’s Oaks would carry the very real risk of detonating Auburn’s strong 2025 recruiting class. Auburn currently, ahead of everyone outside of Ohio State, Alabama and Texas. If Freeze goes, so too might the many high school seniors who had been headed to Auburn.
The problem for Freeze, and Auburn as a whole, is that the Tigers have a murderous schedule ahead. After Missouri, Auburn has back-to-back games against the definition of SEC unpredictability — Kentucky and Vanderbilt — before another bye week, a don’t-take-it-lightly game against Louisiana-Monroe, and a vicious back-to-back closer of Texas A&M and Alabama. Going even 3-3 in this run might be too much to ask … and yet Auburn will need to win four of those games just to get to .500 on the season.
Many more losses, and the Auburn Family will start looking to next season … and hoping that its future stars will stick around that long.
