Auburn redshirt freshman quarterback Hank Brown threw three interceptions Saturday in the Tigers’ 24-14 loss to Arkansas at Jordan-Hare Stadium. (Photo by Zach Bland/Auburn Tigers)
Auburn coach Hugh Freeze grapples with Saturday’s loss in a postgame meeting with reporters. (Jimmy Wigfield/Call News)
From
Auburn, Ala.
You know when your mama called you by your full name that you were in trouble.
“DANNY HUGH FREEZE!”
OK, so Auburn coach Hugh Freeze didn’t get whipped with a hickory switch following the Tigers’ 24-14 loss to Arkansas Saturday in front of 88,000 fans at Jordan-Hare Stadium, many of whom spent the afternoon counting their team’s five turnovers on one hand and whacking their foreheads with the other.
Freeze still knew he was in trouble when he strode off the field ensconced by his Alabama State Trooper escorts and chewing on his lip. There were no boos but most of the fans had deserted the place by then.
But following Saturday’s fiasco — which serves as a representative slice of the program as it now stands — he didn’t try to place blame on anyone else except for one D. Hugh Freeze, who spoke to the press in an almost confessional tone afterward. Such things usually make mama soften and throw away the switch and that should happen here.
“We’re not doing a very good job coaching the quarterbacks right now,” Freeze said, an admission that can be admired for its candor and the way it will earn the patience he said he needs from Auburn fans. But at some point, those fans will want to know what he’s going to do about it.
Frighteningly for Freeze, unless he wins a bidding war for a blue-chip quarterback in the transfer portal, the solution will not come this year and maybe not for several years if he stays with his otherwise admirable philosophy of building with high school talent.
Freeze warning has thawed
Quarterback play has long been an issue on the Plains. While the Tigers have had many good quarterbacks through the years — Reggie Slack, Stan White, Jason Campbell, Jeff Burger, Pat and Bo Nix and Nick Marshall come to mind — rarely have they had a great quarterback, one who can put a team on his back. Auburn has had two of those, ever: Pat Sullivan and Cam Newton, each of whom won a Heisman.
Freeze has to figure out how to sign one of those kind. Until then, quarterbacks Payton Thorne and Hank Brown might just keep throwing the football up as if it’s a moon pie at a Mardi Gras parade.
Even before Saturday’s disaster, Newton launched into a profane tirade last week featuring the F-bomb (the F doesn’t stand for football) and charged that Freeze is good only at making excuses.
“It’s either the coach’s fault or the player’s,” Newton said. “I’ve been hearing the same excuse for too many years. ‘Oh, we’ve gotta get our recruits in.’ You had a whole ******* recruiting cycle that you should have recruited another ******* quarterback.”
An even more bizarre critique came from Bo Wallace, a former third-team All-SEC quarterback who played for Freeze at Ole Miss.
As the wreckage from the defeat was being picked over, Wallace awoke from a 10-year slumber to label Freeze as a “great play caller” but a cowardly and abominable human being.
Wallace took umbrage with Freeze for saying that he had to find a quarterback “who doesn’t throw it to the other team.” This was after Freeze admitted to doing a poor job of coaching.
“We’re approaching the point that he’s thrown so many quarterbacks under the bus that maybe no one wants to play for him??” Wallace wrote on X. “Don’t be a coward and blame it on kids.”
Wallace then launched into a diatribe whereupon he insinuated Freeze hasn’t helped him — with what, paying his bills or wiping his nose? — whereupon Freeze blocked Wallace on his social media account.
If Wallace was trying to stir up a popular uprising to get Freeze fired, it didn’t appear to succeed. Just having the job makes Freeze exist in a peculiarly uncomfortable realm — a good coach given a second chance by a program that had no choice but to hire him because, frankly, nobody else of any consequence wanted the job.
Keep the pitchforks stored
Freeze has yet to claim a victory of any significance — the so-called “signature win” — although he did come close to at least penciling in a few letters with the close calls against Georgia and Alabama last year. But in the SEC, close doesn’t count unless you start counting buyout money and the bodies of dearly departed coaches.
While most any warm body was an upgrade over Bryan Harsin, Freeze has yet to give one the feeling he has truly put Auburn on a trajectory that will match that of Georgia or Alabama. Nor has he given one the feeling he is in over his head, the way Billy Napier is at Florida.
The fan base isn’t at the stage of madness to chase Freeze out of town at the point of a pitchfork, as Harsin and to some extent Gus Malzahn were. He’s not going to get Bobby Petrinoed, as Tommy Tuberville almost was. Petrino, the vagabond coach whose job history resembles that of a bad fry cook who has started one serious grease fire after another, must have relished calling the plays as the Razorbacks’ offensive coordinator Saturday opposite of the sideline where he once stood and called plays for the Tigers.
Freeze has infused Auburn with high-grade high-school talent but he doesn’t have a quarterback who can play winning football in the SEC. Given a brush and a blank canvas each week, Brown and Thorne have so far instead spilled paint all over the floor and made quite a mess of things. Between them, they have eight interceptions, four coming Saturday, three by Brown, with two of those destroying promising drives at Arkansas’ 29 and 27. The Razorbacks had pulled in only two interceptions before Saturday.
I’m not sure what was said on the in-helmet radios between offensive coordinator Derrick Nix, Brown and Thorne on Saturday but it might have gone something like this: “Hey, we’re wearing the blue jerseys. Throw it to one of them.”
Freeze signaled as much.
“I know we have people open and we were running the ball,” he said. “I’ve got to find the guy who doesn’t throw it to the other team and running backs who can hold onto it.”
The Tigers also have six fumbles this season, giving them 14 turnovers in four games. They had only one fumble Saturday but it was one that Damari Alston lost at the goal line after a 36-yard run near the end of the first half. Instead of a touchdown and a 7-7 tie, it was a touchback.
“It’s sickening, sickening that we can’t take care of the football on offense,” Freeze said. “I have got to get that fixed. We turn it over at the 29, zero and 27. It was miserable to watch that.”
Brown, the redshirt freshman who was hailed as the possible solution after a promising debut against New Mexico the week before, was yanked at halftime Saturday and replaced by Thorne, who had been put in purgatory after throwing four interceptions to California the week before that.
“It’s not easy,” said Thorne, who added he would warn Brown not to read criticisms on social media. “I’m going to talk to Hank about staying off his phone.”
Brown and Thorne had too many misreads, a number Thorne said afterward he couldn’t quantify without looking at the film. They never took a deep shot, even with Cam Coleman back on the field.
“We’ve got to look at ourselves as coaches first,” said Freeze, who again didn’t say the quarterbacks call all the plays while the coaches stand around with their hands in their pockets. “I don’t think it’s the scheme.”
Wake up the sleepwalkers
In the immediate aftermath of Saturday’s defeat, Freeze wasn’t looking forward to breaking down film and trying to decide who to start at quarterback against Oklahoma this week.
“I have no idea sitting here right now but I’m going to look at it tomorrow and get locked in on it,” he said.
Freeze said Brown deserved to start Saturday but it quickly became apparent he isn’t ready for SEC defenses — and Arkansas is nothing special.
“I was anxious to see how Hank performed in SEC play,” Freeze said. “I don’t define our players by performance as an individual. I’m judged on that. But Hank was missing open guys and throwing into coverage. We’re not doing a very good job coaching the quarterbacks right now.”
There were a precious few times Thorne looked like a proficient SEC quarterback, particularly on his 67-yard touchdown pass to KeAndre Lambert-Smith to cut the lead to 17-14 in the fourth quarter. And it was on fourth-and-2. The Tigers went five wide, Thorne stared down a blitzing defender and found Lambert-Smith on a slant.
There were a few bad calls, especially when the Razorbacks’ Ja’Quinden Jackson was given a touchdown when he clearly didn’t break the plane of the goal line late in the game. The bad calls didn’t decide the outcome, although they made Freeze tear off his visor and headsets and nearly hurl them. He thought better of it, probably fearing they would also be intercepted.
Freeze is hopeful the advances he has made in turning Auburn into a top-10 recruiting destination won’t suffer if the program doesn’t show progress in the short term.
“We’re having growing pains,” he said. “I hope they’ll see it and want to come help us. It’s going to take some patience. I think (prioritizing high school recruits) is the best thing for Auburn but we should also expect to play better.”
Freeze — who is 3-6 in the SEC — knows he must do something to jolt his somnambulistic program since the only consistency we’ve seen in his 1½ seasons on the Plains is the weekly uncertainty of what to expect from his team, a perennial trait of a young roster. The situation, Freeze said, “is getting frustrating and old.”
Many Tigers fans keep hoping Freeze will make good on some things he said at his introductory press conference in November 2022.
“I do think I have a gift to help develop quarterbacks,” he said. “I think we can turn it fairly fast with the new world we’re in.”
Recruiting has improved. But quarterback development and Auburn under Freeze remain a mystery.
