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Cam already showing out!

 

 

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al.com

 

How Hugh Freeze believes his first season at Auburn could’ve gone differently

Published: Jan. 02, 2024, 6:30 a.m.

5–6 minutes

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For Auburn head coach Hugh Freeze, it’s painfully easy to isolate a trio of football games and look at them with a “would’ve, could’ve, should’ve” lens.

“If you look at the Georgia game, I wish we would have protected better because we had some shots,” Freeze said Saturday night after Auburn’s Music City Bowl loss to Maryland.

“If you go to the Ole Miss game, I wish we would have gone more tempo,” Freeze added.

“If you go to the Alabama game, I wish we’d have been able to punch better and I wish we’d have taught 4th and 31 defense better,” Auburn’s first-year head coach concluded.

Freeze and the Tigers lost each of those games by one possession – a moral victory for some, considering all three opposing teams finished in the Top 12 of the final College Football Playoff rankings.

During moments of those losses, the often-referenced talent gap that hindered Auburn shone through. In the Tigers’ losses to Texas A&M and LSU, the talent gap argument remained valid.

“We can all say we need to improve our roster, and we’ve said that, and we’re working on that, and we’re going to do that,” Freeze said.

Against New Mexico State and then again against Maryland on Sunday, however, it’s hard to say the talent gap argument still applied.

While New Mexico State wasn’t a bad team by any stretch of the imagination as it finished the 2023 campaign 10-5, the Aggies finished their season 10-5 after a two-possession loss to Liberty in the Conference USA Championship, followed by getting crushed at the hands of Fresno State in the New Mexico State Bowl.

Meanwhile, Maryland, which hung around with top-ranked Michigan in the regular season, had its way against Auburn in the Music City Bowl Saturday afternoon. And the Terrapins did so after being bit harder by the same “opt-out bug” that got ahold of the Tigers’ roster.

And it’s in those two losses that the talent gap argument holds little meaning, leaving the blame searching for somewhere else to reside. As head coach, Freeze knows that blame will eventually find its way back to him – and it should.

“Even with the roster we had, I felt like we could have gotten more out of it if I had done a better job,” Freeze said.

Auburn started out to a crawl against Maryland on Saturday. As a result, the Terrapins climbed to a 21-0 first-quarter lead, which proved too deep of a hole for the Tigers to dig their way out of.

It also proved the Tigers hadn’t learned their lesson in needing to “get up” for every game on its schedule – not just the “big games” or games being played at Jordan-Hare Stadium.

“We felt like we competed really, really well in some games and we had some letdowns in others,” Freeze said. “We didn’t complete some games we could have won, and we weren’t consistent in the level of competitiveness that you have to have to win at this level, particularly in our conference or against Big 10 teams.”

Against SEC and Big 10 teams, Auburn finished the season with a combined 3-6 record. And for the first time in 45 years, the Tigers have finished with a losing record in each of their last three seasons as Auburn continues looking for its first postseason win since the 2018.

And that all keeps Freeze up at night, wondering how he and the Tigers could’ve finished the season with different results.

“Every game is different as to what you would have done differently, but you certainly don’t enjoy having to say that or feel that. Bit that’s the way I feel right now,” Freeze said. “We’re going to improve the roster and all of that, but we still could have gotten more out of this season, I believe, for our young men and our wonderful fans.”

Following Saturday’s season-ending loss, Freeze mentioned his goal in 2024 is to help Auburn “figure out how to be a real team.”

Minutes later, Freeze was asked why he didn’t feel his current roster was a “real team.” He chalked it up to a “disease of me” diagnosis, which he feels isn’t just plaguing the Tigers’ locker room, but society as a whole.

Fortunately, if Freeze learned anything in his first season on The Plains, it’s that it’s easy to buy into the words of the Auburn Creed. He believes in Auburn and he loves it.

“We’re incredibly blessed to be at Auburn. Incredibly blessed by our administration and fans, and it hurt like heck to let them down and not compete on given days,” Freeze said. “But my takeaway is that I’m still confident as ever that this can be an elite football program again.”

However, that doesn’t happen overnight. It’s going to take work – hard work.

And it starts from the top.

“I think our staff and our young men, starting with our staff, starting with me – we have got to create a standard of the way we consistently work, consistently compete and figure out how to be a true team,” Freeze said.

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slim pickings folks. i will check back later and see if anything new has been posted.

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