Critical Mistakes Continue to Haunt Hugh Freeze, Auburn Tigers

On Halloween weekend, Hugh Freeze and the Auburn Tigers are haunted by mistakes, poor clock management, and coaching decisions.

Hugh Freeze has steered his Auburn Tigers to 1-5 conference record after a 17-7 loss to Vanderbilt. / Jake Crandall/ Advertiser / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

Auburn, Ala. – Critical mistakes, poor situational football, and questionable play-calling continued to doom Auburn on Saturday in the Tigers 17-7 home loss to Vanderbilt.

Aside from the offense scoring just one touchdown, special teams were key in the loss. Kicker Towns McGough was 0-2 on field goals – from 44 and 51 yards – and the most crucial error of the day was perhaps a penalty on field goal defense that set up the Vanderbilt offense with an opportunity to extend its lead to two scores late in the fourth quarter.

Toward the end of the a long drive with the Commodores leading 10-7, the Auburn defense forced a field goal attempt, which was good, and that would have extended the lead to 13-7. Auburn’s offense would have had a chance to take the lead or win with a touchdown. However, Keldric Faulk jumped in the air to try to block the kick and landed on a Commodore blocker.

“Ummm… I better be careful here,” Freeze said when asked about the play postgame. “It certainly was a critical call in the game, and one that I would strongly disagree with. If you’re lined up on the line of scrimmage you can put your hands on the back of the offensive linemen. You can’t land on them. I didn’t think he landed on them. I’ll have to watch the film and see. Y’all probably had a better view than I did. It was certainly a critical call.”

Two plays later Vanderbilt scored a touchdown and claimed a 17-7 lead and victory.

Auburn had its chances, but special teams proved to be detrimental in the loss. Tied 7-7 coming out of the half, Auburn drove to the Commodores’ 26-yard line and stalled on third down – a theme throughout the game for the Auburn offense.

McGough missed his first of two field goal tries.

Later in the third quarter after Vanderbilt punter Jesse Mirco pinned the Auburn offense at its own two-yard line, the Tigers offense stalled. Auburn punter Oscar Chapman out-punted his coverage team with a 59-yarder in the air, only for it to be returned by Martel Hight to the Auburn 21-yard line. That set up the field goal to give the Commodores’ their 10-7 advantage.

Following Vanderbilt’s fourth quarter touchdown, Auburn mounted a drive to the Commodores 34-yard line. Needing two scores to potentially force overtime, Freeze inexplicably called on McGough again from 51 yards. It was a surprise to no one when the freshman kicker whose confidence is all but gone, missed to fall to 5-12 on the season.

Auburn outgained Vanderbilt by a hundred yards – 327 to 227 – and the defense played stellar all day. At the end of the third quarter Vanderbilt had a 10-7 lead, but had only 55 rushing yards on 23 carries and hadn’t completed a pass since the first quarter.

Auburn averaged 7.9 yards per play on first down, but didn’t pick up a third-down conversion until the fourth quarter. The Tigers offense was 2-13 for the game on third down with an average of just 3.5 yards per play on the money down.

A week after Jarquez Hunter reeled off 275 yards in the second half at Kentucky on 21 carries, the Auburn offense went away from Hunter versus Vanderbilt. Hunter had carries of eight yards and five yards on the opening possession of the second half, and didn't get another carry.

“I don’t think he’s banged up,” Freeze said of Hunter, “but he did look gassed to me. In the second half, we just kind of, I don’t know how many possessions we had, but we didn’t have many. The last two for sure we gotta go, and so we’re not handing the ball in those circumstances. Other than that I don’t know if we had but two other possessions.”

Auburn had three possessions in the second half before getting into hurry-up mode.

As bad as Auburn’s play has been in critical situations, time management has been horrendous in multiple games. After Saturday, Freeze surely belongs in the same territory as Les Miles – perhaps ever worse.

Auburn was using timeouts on defense as the two-minute warning approached, hoping to get the ball back and get a couple of late scores. After a third-down stop Freeze opted to call a timeout after a third-down stop with 2:01 on the clock. Vanderbilt’s punt would have lead to a clock stoppage. Freeze traded a timeout to save one second.

“That was a bad decision there,” Freeze noted. “We should have let that one go on down to the two-minute warning there.”

Freeze butchered the final 30 seconds of the first half versus Oklahoma earlier this year. It’s only been seven days since the Tigers tried to kick a field goal with 14 players on the field goal at the end of the first half versus Kentucky.

Given how Auburn has continuously out-gained opponents but committed bone-headed mistakes at critical moments, it’s clear that neither the players nor the head coach are learning from their mistakes as the Tigers dropped to 3-6 with the program’s first ever loss to Vanderbilt in Jordan-Hare Stadium.