The Auburn spotlight is now bright on Hugh Freeze. How will he respond?

Bye weeks are a good opportunity for healing beaten bodies. But bye weeks can also help to heal beaten spirits. And right now, there’s no more beaten-down program in the SEC than the 2-4 Auburn Tigers, a team that began the year with promise and hope and now stands on the edge of yet another wasted season in a long, maddening string of them.

Auburn travels to No. 19 Missouri this week in a game that’s crucial for the Tigers’ mindset, success and future. Yet another SEC loss — Auburn is already 0-3 in conference play — and the Tigers will slide even faster toward a total collapse, with reverberations that could last well beyond 2024.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. This was supposed to be the season that second-year head coach Hugh Freeze took the Tigers to the next level — maybe not SEC-championship level, sure, but score-a-big-win-every-year level. Freeze arrived in Auburn last season after the Tigers had endured a chaotic run of four head coaches in three years, counting interims. The Plains needed both credibility and stability, and Freeze, despite his disciplinary and behavioral baggage, was supposed to bring both.

For a moment, it looked like Freeze had Auburn on the right path. The Tigers were tied with two-time defending national champion Georgia in the fourth quarter of last season’s game in Auburn. Only the 4th-and-31 “Gravedigger” — one of the most miraculous plays in Iron Bowl history — kept Auburn from knocking off Alabama. Freeze attracted, and held onto, starred recruits in a way his recent predecessors hadn’t.

But between those 2023 Georgia and Alabama games came a shocking 31-10 humiliation at the hands of Diego Pavia and New Mexico State, an upset that would serve as an early warning. Auburn suffered another unexpected loss earlier this season — a 21-14 defeat to Cal, the…

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Author : Yahoo Sports

Publish date : 2024-10-17 14:55:34

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