How Hugh Freeze’s blind spot at QB — and, yes, his love of golf — doomed Auburn football

There will now be plenty of time for Hugh Freeze to golf after Auburn fired him Sunday following an abysmal 15-19 record over three seasons. 

That might feel like a too easy, and frankly unoriginal, punchline about the now-fired Auburn football coach. But in talking to multiple sources within Auburn football and around the Auburn community, it is striking just how much Freeze seemed to prioritize his golf game over doing everything possible to improve the Tigers’ football program. Last season, for instance, he was spotted on the golf course multiple times on Sundays after losses the previous day.  

After multiple stories about his affinity for golf came out this summer, Freeze seemed a bit more sheepish about being seen publicly playing golf during the season. He was sensitive about all the golf jokes — he claimed publicly it didn’t detract from his work — and was particularly upset over comments Ole Miss head coach Lane Kiffin made. But he still couldn’t help himself. 

On the Friday before a home game this season, Freeze again showed up to the golf course. As an Auburn booster told CBS Sports, “Freeze just came out to the golf course without clubs to watch guys play golf.”

As it became more and more clear that Freeze wasn’t the right guy to right the ship at Auburn, there were naturally questions about why it didn’t work. On paper, it seemed to make perfect sense for Freeze to succeed on the Plains. It was weird, though — almost from the start — and there were more and more whispers among staffers and boosters that Freeze had lost the mojo that made him an unequivocal success at Ole Miss and Liberty. He looked deflated and tired, even before a diagnosis of an early form of prostate cancer earlier this year, and didn’t seem to have any real plan to fix things. 

“The only problem we didn’t foresee,” one booster said, “is that he wanted to play golf way more than coach anymore!” 

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Auburn will pay $15.8 million to make Freeze go away, the latest eight-figure payment the university has approved for a failed football coach. In just the last five years, that number totals more than $52 million. No Auburn coach has left on his own terms since 1975, despite at least one of them winning a national championship. 

Freeze had every resource and advantage available to him in ways his recent predecessors hadn’t. 

Bryan Harsin never fit in at Auburn. The Boise native had won plenty at Boise State but had a standoffish personality and quickly looked over-his-head in trying to navigate an insular community like Auburn. Harsin didn’t understand the politics of the place and didn’t seem interested in learning them, upset the wrong powerful boosters who preferred different coaching candidates and had the money spigot turned off in the early days of Name, Image and Likeness. His recruiting efforts weren’t good — he had the No. 54 class committed at the time of his firing — and his on-field record (9-12) was even worse. By the time he figured out how important it was to have certain boosters on his side, it was too late and he was fired midway through his second season.

After going outside the box to hire Harsin, Auburn went as inside the box as possible with Freeze. Never mind the fact Freeze had to resign from Ole Miss because of a “pattern of conduct” unbecoming of a head coach which included a dozen phone calls to escorts. Or that as Liberty’s head coach he sent unsolicited messages to sexual assault survivors, including one embroiled in an active lawsuit against Liberty, defending his boss as the “most Jesus like leader I have ever seen or been around but you take every chance you can to take a shot at him.” 

In a craven desire to be relevant again, Auburn valued Freeze’s two wins over Nick Saban and Alabama over the litany of red flags that followed him everywhere he went. It wasn’t like Auburn leaders were unaware either, even hiring a crisis public relations firm before they hired Freeze to help them navigate the potential fallout. A lesson to ADs everywhere: If you have to hire a crisis PR firm to help sell your toxic hire, just don’t. 

Auburn hiring Freeze was a win-at-all-costs move that ultimately just delivered shame rather than any win of consequence. 

Unlike Harsin, the power brokers all coalesced around Freeze. After a failed coup to insert Kevin Steele as head coach after Gus Malzahn was fired in 2020, Freeze was actually the preferred candidate of many of those top Auburn supporters. He was never able to get any traction that first time around with then-university president Jay Gogue, who made clear he wouldn’t support a Freeze hire. 

When Freeze was hired in November 2022, Auburn put a robust NIL operation behind him to go get the players he needed to get Auburn back to where it belonged. Freeze recruited the high school ranks well, signing back-to-back top 10 classes in 2024 and 2025, but in terms of overall roster management, he never really got it. 

Freeze admitted to his staff early on that he didn’t have to deal with NIL much at Liberty and didn’t really know how it worked. Despite that, according to sources, he still surrounded himself with Liberty staff who hadn’t managed NIL or the transfer portal. 

“From Day 1 of when they got there, I knew it’d be a shitshow,” said a former Auburn staffer. 

With the portal, Freeze could be slow to act and miss out on players he needed, including offensive linemen, to more aggressive programs. He’d complain about having to get on the phone with high-profile transfer portal players, according to sources, and try to pass it off to other staffers. Freeze struggled with the fast-paced nature of transfer recruiting — how much his program is willing to pay and what the vision for the upcoming season will be — and how different it was from his usual approach with high school recruits. 

Never was that more frustrating than how Freeze approached the quarterback position. 

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For the many reasons Freeze lost his job, his inability to fix an increasingly predictable offense or pick the right quarterback rank at the top. 

No one got more mileage off two wins to earn an offensive guru title than Freeze. He seemed perpetually stuck in his brief glory years back in Oxford when he beat Alabama in 2014 and 2015 before it all came crashing down. He was resistant to outside advice, especially when it came to trying to improve a stale offense that somehow got worse by the day. 

“It’s arrogance. It’s never his fault,” said a former Auburn staffer. “It’s always the guys on the field.”

Freeze never got the quarterback position right in his three years at Auburn. Grabbing Michigan State quarterback Payton Thorne in 2023 made some sense on paper, even if beneath the surface there were concerns. Thorne had a big 2021 season for the Spartans, where he threw for 3,232 yards and 27 touchdowns, but was coming off a much more modest 19 touchdowns and 11 interception season when the Tigers signed him. The underlying issue was Thorne no longer had running back Kenneth Walker or receiver Jalen Nailor to help him. 

Even if there were those in the building who were against taking Thorne in the first place — and there were, according to multiple sources — the bigger issue was that Freeze doubled down on Thorne for a second season. Despite the Tigers going 6-6 in Year 1 behind Thorne, who threw for 1,755 yards, 16 touchdowns and 10 interceptions, Freeze thought the best strategy was to surround him with more talent the way Michigan State had in 2021. Auburn went out and got highly-regarded Penn State transfer receiver Keandre Lambert-Smith and a recruiting class that included five-star Cam Coleman. 

Freeze opted to stick with Thorne despite multiple coaches and personnel staffers in the building pushing him to consider Washington State transfer Cam Ward. There was an internal push to go after Ward from the jump, but Freeze and quarterbacks coach Kent Austin were resistant. They didn’t want to upset what they believed was a young, talented QB room that included four-star freshman Walker White and redshirt freshman Hank Brown. They did check in very late in the process with Ward, who ultimately landed at Miami, to see if he’d still consider Auburn but never went all-in to get him. They preferred to stick with what they had. 

“They legitimately thought Thorne was the answer,” said an Auburn source “and they were wrong.”

Ward was terrific at Miami and finished as a Heisman Trophy finalist. White and Brown both transferred after the 2024 season to Baylor and Iowa, respectively. 

In recent months, Senator Tommy Tuberville, a former Auburn head coach, has told a story to Auburn supporters that he had tried to convince Freeze to go after New Mexico State transfer Diego Pavia instead of keeping Thorne. Freeze was plenty familiar with Pavia, who led NMSU to a shocking upset win over Auburn in that 2023 season and has been a revelation since transferring to Vanderbilt. But Freeze told the senior Alabama senator he preferred to keep Thorne and build around him in the transfer portal. “You’re a dead man if you don’t have a quarterback,” Tuberville said he told Freeze. 

And all it took was a few games for Freeze to realize he’d made a mistake. On the Friday before a home game against Oklahoma last season, which turned out to be another loss, Freeze admitted to a source he blew it with Thorne and should have taken a transfer quarterback instead. Auburn limped to the end of a 5-7 season knowing it had to get the quarterback position right. 

It’s one reason there was so much industry surprise when Auburn went all-in on Oklahoma transfer Jackson Arnold. The pedigree was there as a former five-star, but it had been an up-and-down first season in Norman for Arnold which included a benching. In fact, the Oklahoma team Freeze lost to was led by Michael Hawkins, who replaced Arnold as the Sooners’ starter for a month. 

Arnold was anything but a surefire pick in a critical year Freeze needed to win big. Perhaps all it took was watching Arnold run all over Alabama in a late season win for Freeze to dream of what he could do for him in the Iron Bowl. 

“He went wrong with the quarterback,” said a Power Four personnel source who has studied Auburn. “He f—– that up. They’ve got a really good defense. You can’t argue with their wide receiver group. Obviously they’re not doing anything, but they’re not doing anything because they had nobody to get them the football.”

It’s not solely Arnold’s fault — a mediocre offensive line and uninspiring play-calling haven’t done him any favors — but when you surveyed the roster it again looked like the quarterback Freeze hand-picked over more reliable options was yet again holding Auburn back. In five SEC losses this season, Auburn lost by an average margin of 7.2 points. In those same five losses, Auburn averaged 11.4 points and 178.4 passing yards per game. The Tigers were a dreadful 20 for 74 on third-down conversions. This despite a talented group of receivers that includes Coleman and Georgia Tech transfer Eric Singleton, who are both believed to be earning seven figures annually. 

Freeze benched Arnold in favor of Ashton Daniels in Auburn’s lone SEC win over Arkansas last week. Both played in a 10-3 loss to Kentucky that was the final straw for Auburn AD John Cohen. In a bizarre season that has included Cohen comparing Freeze to a car that may or may not start, there was no coming back from a loss to the Wildcats that elicited loud chants calling for the head coach’s dismissal. DJ Durkin’s defense did what it needed to keep Auburn in the game, but the offense was again listless and helpless. 

Auburn was too talented — and too much money had been invested in the roster — to accept any more failure. Freeze had been given Michelin star-caliber ingredients, but he was still serving up elementary school cafeteria meals. There was no need to prolong the inevitable any longer. 

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The days of Freeze being relevant within major college football are all but over. He’s all baggage and no upside at this point in his career. If you’re going to sell your soul for football success as Auburn attempted, you want national championships — not a guy who was somehow worse than Bryan Harsin. There won’t be another comeback story after this. 

What’s next for Hugh Freeze after Auburn firing? Don’t expect him to lead a Power Four program anytime soon

Chris Hummer

Freeze leaves Auburn as one of the worst hires in school history. Given all the resources at his disposal, a 15-19 (6-16 in the SEC) record is an abject failure. He was never able to come close to replicating the Ole Miss magic that made schools want to keep giving him more chances. He still believed he was an offensive wizard until the very end even if the results were abysmal. At the time of Freeze’s firing, Auburn ranked 121st in rushing offense, 104th in passing offense and 110th in scoring offense. All three of those rank in the bottom three of the SEC. 

For a man who used to reach out to reporters and fans and offer to pray for them over stories and tweets he didn’t like, he may want to stay off the internet for a few days. The downfall of Freeze, who until the very end insisted Auburn was close to turning it around, has prompted schadenfreude across college football. 

Even in the face of professional disappointment, there are silver linings. It will be in the 70s and sunny this week in Auburn — the perfect weather for a golf round or two. 

The Auburn Tigers are searching for their next head football coach following the dismissal of Hugh Freeze. AuburnUndercover has the most experienced experts and insiders covering the Tigers on the ground in Auburn. Know the news before it happens with this coaching search by signing up for a VIP membership today. In addition, you’ll get team news, recruiting, transfer portal scoop, analysis and more along with interacting with the most dedicated community of Auburn fans.