Hugh Freeze: When Success Cuts Both Ways

On a coach with which wins and controversy go hand in hand.

Jul 08, 2025

An interview featuring Hugh Freeze - Wikimedia Commons

Auburn head coach Hugh Freeze is college football’s greatest contradiction.

With Freeze, every line is blurred. He’s something of a Baptist Bullshitter, Coaching Charlatan and Offensive Wizard all rolled into one. Because, remember, with Freeze, every blip of success comes with a storm of controversy.

There were the NCAA recruiting violations that led to a bowl ban and scholarship reductions at Ole Miss.

Also in Oxford, there was the time Freeze got caught placing calls to an escort service, which led to him resigning.

Freeze took a two-year coaching hiatus from 2017 to 2018. When he returned as the head coach at Liberty University, scandal followed him there, too.

In the summer of 2022, a former Liberty student sued the university for allegedly mishandling sexual assault cases and accused Freeze of sending her Twitter DMs in reaction to her comments.

Since arriving at Auburn, both the successes and controversies have dried up (at least for now). Freeze is just 11-14 in two years on The Plains and is now facing a make-or-break season.

Can he and Auburn make a surprise push for SEC relevancy in 2025? Or is Freeze finished as an elite-level coach?

A Thorne in Auburn’s Side

College football coaches, specifically offensive minds, are often judged by their decision-making abilities as it pertains to selecting a quarterback.

If you look around the SEC, there are plenty of examples. Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian made a tough call starting Quinn Ewers over Arch Manning. Ole Miss head coach Lane Kiffin was lauded for identifying Jaxson Dart’s abilities and helping him blossom into a top NFL Draft pick. Tennessee’s Josh Heupel will soon be judged on whether it was right or wrong to let former quarterback Nico Iamaleava walk. The list goes on.

Hugh Freeze is no different. In the lead-up to his first season as head coach at Auburn, Freeze poached former Michigan State signal-caller Payton Thorne from the transfer portal. Thorne dazzled during his freshman season in East Lansing, leading the Spartans to a breakout campaign in which he threw for over 3,000 yards and 27 touchdowns. His sophomore year was a step back, and with the added element of the Mel Tucker scandal, it made sense for him to look elsewhere.

Freeze saw something in Thorne and brought him to Auburn, Alabama. Remember, Freeze had just capped a nice run at Liberty and had high hopes of hitting the ground running back in the SEC. A proficient quarterback was a big part of his plans.

Looking at Thorne’s underlying 2023 numbers, it’s sufficient to say things didn’t exactly go as planned.

Source: Hudl IQ

Using the Hudl IQ Player Radar, we can see just how poorly Thorne played during his first season on The Plains. He was a slightly below-average quarterback in most discernible categories, including EPA/Pass, Success %, Yards/Completion and Explosive %. A small saving grace was that he did do some decent things with his legs, as highlighted by above-average Yards/Rush and EPA/Rush numbers.

Source: Hudl IQ

For what it’s worth, I think most of Thorne’s rushing success came more out of necessity than by design during the 2023 season. Auburn had a nice rushing attack, spearheaded by bell cow Jarquez Hunter, but the passing game was so meh that Thorne had to make some things happen on his own.

After a year in the offense, however, Thorne made some positive steps forward during the 2024 season. Once again, using the Hudl IQ Player Radar, we can see that Thorne improved from year to year.

Source: Hudl IQ

Last season, Thorne’s greatest improvement was his ability to generate more explosive plays. This was surely helped by the arrival of freshman standout wide receiver Cam Coleman. Thorne and Colman proved to be a nice combo, and it made the Tigers’ offense a little more cut-throat and explosive in the passing game. Thorne finished the season with 21 touchdowns and nine interceptions, both improvements on the previous season’s totals.

But even with this improvement, the offense didn’t make the kind of big jump you might expect. And it wasn’t exactly like Thorne was a world-beater. He was OK. Cover 3 Podcast listeners might be familiar with the “JAG” (Just a Guy) or “JAG+” (slightly more than Just a Guy) labels. Thorne was probably a JAG.

The Tigers finished with just the 71st-ranked offense, good for just under 28 points per game. Compare that with a defense that allowed slightly over 21 points per game (good for 28th in the country) and, well, you have an imbalanced team that could never live up to its potential. And the record showed that.

Looking Forward to 2025

Payton Thorne is no longer the starting quarterback at Auburn, which forced Freeze to once again take a dip in the transfer portal in search of a quarterback. He’s chosen to roll the dice with former OU signal-caller Jackson Arnold. Arnold, a former prized recruit, struggled behind an awfully bad offensive line in Norman last season and lost his job midway through the season. Freeze and the Tigers are banking that last season was more about bad circumstances than it was about Arnold not being a good quarterback.

I’m somewhat bullish on Arnold, but it probably says a lot about this year’s transfer portable quarterback class that Arnold was one of the top options available. Good quarterbacks don’t enter the transfer portal very often, so if your team is in the unfortunate position to need one, well, you sometimes just have to take what you can get.

Speaking of good players, I’m fully expecting stud sophomore wide receiver Cam Coleman to explode this coming season. Last year, he finished with just shy of 600 yards and eight touchdowns in a subpar offense. He can take the top off the defense and showed last season he can be a reliable red zone target. If Arnold is an improvement on Thorne, I expect Coleman to pop off in 2025.

Coleman had a good campaign last year, but he could certainly use some help. In comes former Georgia Tech wide receiver Eric Singleton Jr. to provide just that. ESJ is a beast and I have a sneaky suspicion that he and Coleman will be a handful for SEC secondaries.

On the other side of the ball, I expect Auburn’s defense to be pretty dang good once again. Led by disgraceful coach DJ Durkin, last year’s group held teams under 22 points per game and were a Top 30 defense in the country. The Tigers added a handful of three-star defensive players for the portal, which should add some depth and rotation pieces to an already good group.

The best case scenario for this Auburn team as a whole is to see the offense make a big enough jump that it affords the defense to tread water or even take a slight step back.

Let’s face it, Auburn fans want to see points and wins. That’s the name of the game. If the offense is better and wins follow, they’ll be OK with the defense being a little worse. Time will tell if that’s the case, though.

Playing the Schedule Game

Looking ahead to Auburn’s 2025 schedule, we’ll likely find out a whole lot about this team pretty early when it takes on the Baylor Bears in Week 1. Baylor is a trendy pick to make some serious noise in the Big 12 this year, and with good reason. Returning quarterback Sawyer Robertson is a dynamite player and made that offense a whole lot of fun to watch down the stretch of last season.

I think both the matchup against Baylor and the first two SEC games against Oklahoma and Texas A&M will be season-defining matchups. If Auburn can find a way to beat Baylor and split against OU and A&M, that’ll be a tell-tell sign that this team is ready to take a leap. But if the Tigers struggle against good competition early, well, then I suspect the temperature on Hugh Freeze’s seat will skyrocket.

This is a pressure-cooker season for the Tigers. No doubt about it. The schedule is challenging, but not unmanageable if the offense pops and things break correctly.

I have a feeling the development of Jackson Arnold will be the biggest factor in this team’s success in 2025. If he can tap into some of that potential, I don’t see why Auburn can’t get hot and be a factor down the stretch. But if he falters or plays like Thorne, this will be the same old Auburn Tigers from the past two seasons.

Signing up for Hugh Freeze is a risky proposition. He’s the double-edged sword of coaches.

His career has been one that cuts both ways. For all of the wins and good times, controversy and off-field headaches have followed.

Two years into his tenure at Auburn, the Tigers’ fanbase has gotten a lot of the latter and not much of the former.

There’s an old adage that stems from the Bible (ironic, because it is Hugh Freeze we’re talking about here), that goes something like “For all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.” It loosely translates to, if you live by the sword, you’ll die by the sword.

Every school that has employed Hugh Freeze has ultimately died by the sword. Is Auburn up next?

What I’m Reading

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