Hugh Freeze went on for some time about needing to put Payton Thorne in better situations moving forward after a rough outing against Texas A&M last week.

Thorne has had a rough start to the season. The Tigers are dead last in total passing yards through the first 4 weeks of the season and Thorne was benched against the Aggies after a dreadful start.

At the SEC’s weekly teleconference Wednesday, Freeze addressed needing to coach Thorne better, but also noted that the Tigers desperately need to see some progress at the position moving forward. More than anything, he’s concerned with Thorne’s confidence heading into the middle part of the season.

“When we’re asked to be a psychologists along with being a coach — we had a good meeting Sunday night and obviously I feel like there’s things that our staff has let him down on also,” Freeze said. “And some of it is him and he knows that and he owns it. But I promised him we would do a better job coaching him this week and preparing him. And when you say coaching him, it means also the positions that need to be in the right spots at the right time for him. Because he understands the game from the mental perspective and when the ball is snapped, man, he knows, this dig should be the throw and if it’s not the right time from the receivers or whatever, it throws him off and obviously that leads to sacks. At the same time, we’ve got to do a better job of helping him with that.”

“At the same time, you get a wheel route that’s wide open and you do have time, you’ve got to hit it, or a seam route. We had a couple of those the other day. He seemed distracted in the pocket, so we’ve worked on pocket presence a good bit this week thus far. And we’ll do that again. But hopefully this thing’s got to turn to a positive vibe somehow and it takes some mental toughness to do that on his part and our part. In the coming weeks, we need to see some progress.”

The Tigers are back in action this week, facing off against No. 1 Georgia at 3:30 p.m. ET on CBS.