Goodbye weeks are a good opportunity to heal beaten bodies. But farewell weeks can also help heal defeated spirits. And right now, there isn’t a more defeated program in the SEC than the 2-4 Auburn Tigers, a team that started the year with promise and hope and now finds itself on the brink of another wasted season in a long, maddening series of them .
Auburn travels to No. 19 Missouri this week in a game crucial to the Tigers’ mentality, success and future. Another SEC loss — Auburn is already 0-3 in conference play — and the Tigers will spiral even faster into total collapse, with reverberations that could last well beyond 2024.
It wasn’t meant to be. This was supposed to be the season where second-year head coach Hugh Freeze would take the Tigers to the next level – maybe not to the SEC championship level, sure, but to the level of a big win every year. Freeze arrived in Auburn last season after the Tigers endured a chaotic run of four head coaches, including interims, in three years. The Plains needed both credibility and stability, and Freeze, despite his disciplinary and behavioral baggage, had to bring both.
For a while, it looked like Freeze had Auburn on the right track. The Tigers were tied with two-time defending champion Georgia in the fourth quarter of last season’s game at Auburn. Only the 4th and 31 “Gravedigger” – – kept Auburn from beating Alabama. Freeze attracted and retained recruits in a way that his recent predecessors had not.
But between the 2023 games at Georgia and Alabama 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 loss to Cal, the game that really sparked the hilariously absurd #Calgorithm movement on Twitter.
Crushing losses to Arkansas, Oklahoma and Georgia followed, as did the finger-pointing. Freeze has thrown his players under several buses, most notably quarterback Payton Thorne, who collided with Freeze two weeks ago, most notably on a fourth-down turnover early in the fourth quarter.
“Yes, he definitely didn’t fit what we called,” Freeze said after the game. “Payton is a thinker. He knows football. He decided to try to read some kind of zone there. I think everyone was a little confused. But we were definitely not on the same page there.”
Now comes Missouri Week and the early returns are not promising. Freeze already scored the first own goal of the week by fumbling a compliment from Missouri head coach Eli Drinkwitz, who provided some of the best material on Missouri’s social media on Monday.
“To me, some of the better coaching jobs are done with some of those lesser rosters in recruiting. And now you also look at people like Eli and (Kentucky’s Mark) Stoops and (Vanderbilt’s) Clark Lea, who I think are doing an incredible job in their respective programs with the kids they’ve had,” Freeze said.
Missouri’s “smaller roster” is 5-1 and a 4.5-point favorite over Auburn, for the record.
Freeze hopes the first bye week of the season will serve as a recalibration. “We had a much-needed week off last week, which was good for our physical body and our mental side,” he said on Monday. “It is obviously disappointing that we are in the record position and we are determined that we need to play more consistent football in all three phases. We need to coach that better.”
But despite all the talk from the coaches, Freeze dropped a direct warning to his players. “When we have a critical situation, it would be very, very, very, very disheartening and infuriating if on fourth and one or third and one some other situation happens that our children don’t have a clear understanding of. what needs to be done,” he said. “That would be quite annoying.”
Would that be the fault of the players for failing to execute, or the fault of the coaching staff for failing to prepare the players? We’ll just have to wait and see, right?
You hesitate to say Freeze isn’t going anywhere, especially with a booster base as active and free-spending as Auburn’s, but an in-season acquisition of Freeze’s six-year, $39 million contract would be around $20 million right now . In an era when college athletic departments have to pay attention to their bottom line, paying someone $20 million to leave doesn’t make much sense, even at Auburn.
Not only that, but dropping Freeze over the Toomer’s Oaks would carry the very real risk of detonating Auburn’s strong 2025 recruiting class. Auburn currently, ahead of anyone outside of Ohio State, Alabama and Texas. If Freeze leaves, so would the many high school students headed to Auburn.
The problem for Freeze, and for Auburn as a whole, is that the Tigers have a murderous plan ahead. After Missouri, Auburn has back-to-back games against the definition of SEC unpredictability – Kentucky and Vanderbilt – before another bye week, a no-nonsense matchup against Louisiana-Monroe, and a vicious back-to-back closer of Texas A&M and Alabama. Even going 3-3 in this series might be too much to ask… and yet Auburn will have to win four of those games to reach .500 on the season.
Many more losses, and the Auburn Family will look to next season…and hope the future stars stick around for as long as they can.
