Hugh Freeze’s fatal flaw: Auburn cannot do what it takes to win SEC games
By David Wasson
Published:
We all have flaws.
Full disclosure: mine are pizza and puns. Just can’t get enough of each. The latter do me no harm, but the former doesn’t do my arteries or silhouette any favors.
Auburn coach Hugh Freeze’s flaws? That would be both a penchant for unmonitored cellphone use and the fact that his 2025 Tigers team absolutely craters at the first sign of adversity. The former cost Freeze his job once, while the latter could soon cost Freeze his current gig on the Plains.
Freeze and Auburn had every chance to begin rewriting a 2025 script that was quickly spiraling off the page Saturday night. Visiting Mizzou was in the loveliest village, toting a No. 16 national ranking and plenty of desire to earn retribution after surrendering an undefeated season to Alabama the week prior.
Auburn, on the other hand, was hungry. At least that’s what the Tigers were telling people… hungry to prove that they aren’t the same program that struggled to a 5-7 record in 2024. Or the same program that went 6-7 in Freeze’s first season in 2023. Or the program that went 5-7 and 6-7 in Bryan Harsin’s 2022 and 2021 campaigns.
If you sensed a trend in the previous paragraph, it’s because there definitely is one. Auburn – a program that the son of a preacher man led to the college football mountaintop 15 years prior – was circling the drain marked “SEC Irrelevance” for a 5th-straight season.
Saying you’re hungry and actually playing like your hungry are very different things, a point Auburn proved on the field Saturday night. And the difference between champions and tomato cans is the ability to absorb after getting punched square in the face, after all, with Freeze’s Tigers taking yet another step toward Palookaville against Mizzou.
How else can you explain Saturday night’s proceedings being any different than what Auburn displayed last week at home against Georgia – or at Texas A&M or at Oklahoma, for that matter? All 4 games were against ranked SEC teams, and all 4 games were within Auburn’s grasp for the taking. Yet, following Saturday night’s 23-17, double-OT loss, Auburn is 0-4 in those games.
Auburn had prime opportunities to take down Mizzou and flip the script – taking a 14-10 lead late in the third quarter on a 1-yard Omar Mabson III touchdown run and extending it to 17-10 with 10:31 to play via a 22-yard Alex McPherson field goal. But the visiting Tigers outplayed the home squad down the stretch, as a 3-yard TD run by Ahmad Hardy tied it up with 5:03 remaining and the Mizzou defense held Auburn to precisely zero points in both OT sessions to scratch out the W.
At 1-12, Freeze now has precisely as many victories against Top 25 opponents at Auburn as interim UAB coach Alex Mortensen. The latter picked up the mantle for the fired Trent Dilfer up the road in Birmingham earlier Saturday and promptly dispatched No. 22 Memphis.
If seeing the kid of a former ESPN Insider earning a victory against a ranked opponent isn’t enough for Auburn athletic director John Cohen to postpone his weekly written screed against SEC officiating and heed the call for Freeze’s dismissal… well, we really can’t help you.
Yanking the ejector-seat cords on Freeze won’t cost Auburn an exorbitant sum, as his reported buyout is just $15.4 million. Even though the Tigers paid Harsin a similar sum to go away in 2022, said figure is more or less doable in the wacky economic world of college athletics where we currently reside – especially when one factors in the NIL savings Auburn will have when the current crop of recruiting commitments disappears in the wind created by the door slamming shut behind Freeze.
As speculation has mounted with each of the successive 4 losses in 2025, Freeze’s posterior has gone from preheat to broiling. And after Saturday night’s double-OT, double-hands-around-neck effort against Mizzou, Freeze was asked what his message to the congregation is to convince them he is still the man on which to rely.
“We all know what we signed up for. I certainly know we fit what Auburn is all about,” Freeze said to reporters. “But Auburn is also about winning football. We’re gonna come to work Monday and get our kids ready to play Arkansas. These kids are playing their guts out, and I know that we’ve changed the talent level here.
“But, at the end of the day, at some point, you have to win football games.”
Notice the day-of-week reference in that direct quote. Monday. Not overnight. Not first thing Sunday morning. Freeze is headed to work Monday to get ready for the Razorbacks. Just a Freudian slip or simply referencing Auburn’s next actual practice day? We’ll let the reader be the judge.
We all have flaws, it is simply our nature as humans. Hugh Freeze’s real-time flaw is that his teams do not/cannot muster what it takes to win conference games at Auburn. The question of how long Auburn allows that flaw to manifest might soon be at hand.
An APSE national award-winning writer and editor, David Wasson has almost four decades of experience in the print journalism business in Florida and Alabama. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and several national magazines and websites. His Twitter handle: @JustDWasson.
