Hugh Freeze: ‘We find ways to not win football games.’ That’s a hallmark of coaches on the hot seat.
Controversial call on Jackson Arnold fumble sparks Georgia rally.
Auburn makes losing close games an art form.
As soon as Auburn quarterback Jackson Arnold fumbled at the one-millimeter line in the Deep South’s Oldest Rivalry, you just sort of knew the game was over.
The Tigers led Georgia by 10 points, but that barely mattered.
Sure enough, Georgia rallied to a 20-10 victory.
Auburn managed just 50 yards in the two quarters following the fumble.
Georgia’s team is incomparable to what it was when the Bulldogs won back-to-back national championships, but Kirby Smart’s program still houses a winning culture. More times than not, Georgia finds a way to win its clunkers.
Auburn remains stubbornly steadfast in how it finds ways to lose games. Depending on your perspective, maybe you saw Arnold break the plane of the end zone before he fumbled. The officials didn’t see it that way and upheld the controversial call of a fumble, marking the latest chapter in the shoulda, woulda, coulda story of Hugh Freeze’s tenure.
Each of Auburn’s three consecutive losses came by no more than 10 points, and dating back to last season, the Tigers’ past six losses were decided by no more than two scores.
“It’s clear that we find ways to not win football games,” said Freeze, whose Auburn record dropped to 14-17.
That’ll be the summary of Freeze’s Auburn coaching tenure when it ends: He came close to winning more.
Freeze moved another step closer to a firing, and never mind his team doesn’t look that far off from having a few more victories, because the landfill of battered and broken coaching careers is full of guys who came close to winning more games. Repeatedly coming close (and repeatedly coming up short) is a loser’s hallmark.
Undisciplined play is another hallmark of losing teams and fired coaches. After Auburn’s 11 penalties in this ninth consecutive loss to Georgia, the Tigers rank as the SEC’s second-most penalized team.
“It’s what I mean when we’re finding ways not to win the games,” Freeze said of the penalties.
He sees the problems, but that’s not the same as fixing them.
Auburn’s next game against Missouri feels pretty darn pivotal to Freeze’s longevity.
Freeze’s buyout will be a tick more than $15 million after this season, and the payments could be spread out over the next few years. That amounts to a line item for a program that shelled out more than $21 million to get rid of a coach who never had a losing season.
Freeze earned an offensive guru membership more than a decade ago at Mississippi, when he helped bring tempo offense and run-pass option plays to the SEC. Back then, that was cutting edge stuff, at least within the conference Nick Saban ruled. Freeze even inspired Saban to evolve his offense by beating him back-to-back seasons while at Ole Miss.
Now, Freeze is like the guy walking around with a flip phone, wondering how he went from pioneer to past his prime. His guru membership got revoked years ago. He’s failed to develop a good quarterback in three seasons at Auburn.
At least when Auburn kept finding ways to lose last season, Freeze could point to his recruiting class as a reason to stay the course. No more. The Tigers’ class ranks 50th nationally in the 247Sports Composite. That’s one spot better than Boise State and one spot worse than Iowa.
That landfill of broken-down coaching careers is also full of guys who stopped recruiting well.
The upside for Auburn is they don’t look too terribly far away. The downside is, the Tigers seem stuck 10 steps short of getting over the hump, stuck one millimeter short of the goal line, stuck explaining how they let another winnable game slip away.
“That locker room is a good enough football team to play with anyone,” Freeze said.
Good enough to lose repeatedly by close margins.
Blake Toppmeyer is the USA TODAY Network’s senior national college football columnist. Email him at BToppmeyer@gannett.com and follow him on X @btoppmeyer.