Forde-Yard Dash: So, Auburn Hired Hugh Freeze … What Could Go Wrong?

At a place where winning unabashedly comes before reason, Hugh Freeze’s biggest challenge may be calming the circus he tends to create around himself.

Forty names, games, teams and minutiae making news in college football, where South Florida, New Mexico and Nevada were the only FBS teams to go winless in conference play:

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Third Quarter

Auburn Gonna Auburn

Operating under the behavioral theory that the absurd attracts the absurd, Auburn (21) centered its coaching search on two unstable geniuses: Lane Kiffin (22) was Plan A, which fell through after a week of Twitter tomfoolery; and Hugh Freeze (23) was Plan B. As my colleague Ross Dellenger reported first Monday, the deal to bring Freeze to the Loveliest Village on The Plain is done.

The search never reached a Plan C, so we don’t know whether that was Bobby Petrino (24). One can only surmise.

Freeze and Auburn are actually an appropriate match. The man can coach ball, and the school only cares about winning at ball. The man can beat Alabama (25), and the school is obsessed with beating Alabama. The man has pushed through significant scandal, and the school is completely unconcerned about significant scandal.

Bruce Pearl (26) is a reclamation hero at Auburn, so why not Hugh Freeze?

In that regard, give them credit. There is no artifice here. No one is pretending. The usual high-minded rhetorical fakery that accompanies college sports hirings does not apply here, and it seems unlikely that anyone at Auburn will expend any breath trying. The only thing that matters is getting the Tigers out of the SEC West basement and back into conference and national championship contention.

Freeze can do that. He’s that good a coach. He showed it at Mississippi and reinforced it at Liberty, a program he elevated into a consistent winner at the FBS level. The greater question is whether he can calm down the circus he tends to create around himself. Because Lord knows Auburn can gin up plenty of circus on its own, with its Greek Chorus of power-tripping boosters ready to insert themselves into the show at any time. Add Freeze as the headliner with that ensemble and this could be wild.

Hugh Freeze is headed back to the SEC after a successful stint at Liberty :: AP Photo/Michael Woods

There is some irony in the fact that some of those boosters tried to drum up an unverified personal scandal to run out Bryan Harsin (27), only to turn around and embrace Freeze. His forced resignation at Mississippi was sparked by “a concerning pattern” of calls to escort services on his school-issued cell phone. Auburn’s tolerance for scandal all depends on what your winning percentage is, and Freeze’s .549 while at Ole Miss certainly beats Harsin’s .429 at Auburn.

Of course, Freeze’s win-loss record is significantly worse if you factor in all the victories that were vacated by NCAA sanctions for violations at Ole Miss. What Freeze did away from the field is between him and his family—it was the NCAA violations, and his response to them, that dragged everything else into public view.

When the school was under investigation, Freeze and others at the school tried to spin the situation to recruits and media as primarily an issue involving other sports or his predecessor, Houston Nutt. When the lengthy NCAA notice of allegations came out, that turned out to be false. So were Freeze’s claims to recruits before National Signing Day in 2016 that the violations were minor and would not result in significant sanctions. That intentional deception was a weasel move.

The violations yielded a two-year postseason ban and major recruiting restrictions, hamstringing Freeze’s successor, Matt Luke (28). It wasn’t until Kiffin’s second season, in 2021, that Ole Miss got back to winning at a level it last enjoyed in 2015.

Freeze paid a price for his transgressions. He spent the 2017 and ’18 seasons without a coaching job; some other SEC schools tried to hire him for assistant positions during that time, but they were discouraged by the league office. (Call it a private show-cause ruling from SEC commissioner Greg Sankey.) That was followed by four years in exile at Liberty—not a bad gig, but one below his coaching talents.

To continue exiling him past 2022 would be excessive, but Freeze still comes with warning labels attached.

The 53-year-old must prove he’s capable of breaking his teenage-level interest in everything that’s said about him and his impulsive replies to public criticism. The man who infamously tweeted how to contact the Ole Miss compliance office in refutation of alleged rule breaking in 2013 is the same one who weirdly sent a direct message to a former Liberty student who was part of a Title IX lawsuit against the school as an alleged victim of sexual assault. Freeze was not involved in the incident, but contacting the student in defense of athletic director Ian McCaw again called Freeze’s judgment into question.

Multiple sources say Freeze has agreed to relinquish control of his social media accounts when he becomes the Auburn coach. The background check on Freeze was extensive, and the school hired a P.R. consultant to handle the expected blowback in bringing him aboard. They are jumping through a lot of hoops for Freeze.

As one source with Auburn ties said Sunday, “If he’s contractually obligated to stay off social media and they had to hire an ‘Oh S---’ firm before he even started, is hiring him really a good idea?”

It’s an Auburn idea. And Auburn ideas all center around winning, especially where Alabama is involved.

Freeze beat Alabama in consecutive seasons in 2014 and ’15, something no one else has done against Nick Saban since LSU in 2010-11. To do it at Mississippi, which never beat the Crimson Tide in consecutive years before or since, was stunning. Freeze owns 20 percent of Ole Miss’s all-time victories against Alabama.

Auburn has had solid success against the in-state Goliath, historically and semi-recently. Of the seven opponents Alabama has played 70 or more times, none has a higher winning percentage against it than Auburn (.431). That includes five wins against Saban by three different coaches—Tommy Tuberville (one), Gene Chizik (one) and Gus Malzahn (three).

When Harsin let a late lead get away against the Tide in the 2021 Iron Bowl, finishing the regular season 6–6, that might have sealed his fate. The offseason became a dirty tricks campaign, and he entered 2022 as essentially a dead coach walking. When the losses came early and often, he was expendable and it was time to move on to a successor.

But first Auburn’s leadership—whoever that is—had to execute an administrative power play (29). It had forced out one athletic director (Allen Greene) and hired another (John Cohen, from Mississippi State). Greene had dared to push back on the booster culture during his tenure, and there was a price to pay for that.

Then it was on to a coaching search that was so Auburn it hurts. Of all the candidates in the world, they settled on two with a lot of scar tissue. The first backed away after a weeklong public melodrama. The second would have walked from Virginia to southeast Alabama. Now the school just has to fight any urge to pretend the hiring of Hugh Freeze is about anything other than winning. And hope that he doesn’t contribute to the eternal institutional dysfunction of the place (30).

Auburn can be a great job. Hugh Freeze can be a great coach. It just might work, if it doesn’t implode spectacularly.

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