Josh Pate breaks down why Hugh Freeze didn't work at Auburn

College football analyst Josh Pate broke down why Hugh Freeze didn’t work at Auburn, and it came down to one position. Freeze was fired Sunday following a 10-3 loss to Kentucky, dropping the Tigers to 4-5 on the year.

Pate said it was the quarterback, not the offense. Now, the blame isn’t entirely on current, much-maligned, starter Jackson Arnold. But the QB position as a whole in nearly three years for Freeze at Auburn.

“Oh, it was ugly. It was bad,” Pate said Sunday of the Auburn game. “Jackson Arnold doesn’t start the game, then he comes off the bench, then he gets re-benched. That was basically a microcosm of the Hugh Freeze era at Auburn … There will be 1000s and 1000s of words written about what went wrong. Why didn’t it pan out? Why did Hugh Freeze fail at Auburn? And you just boil it down to four of them: never figured out quarterback. That’s it. That’s it. There’s not really a whole lot of overthinking that has to go on here now with Brian Kelly at LSU, guys, there were layers to that … I am saying it’s pretty straightforward. It’s pretty fundamental with Hugh Freeze. 

“You know, when he first got there, when they first made the move to hire him, there were a lot of people saying, ‘Oh, does he deserve a second chance?’ Because he had run afoul of all kinds of bylaws, both ethical and SEC when he was at Ole Miss, and then he went to Liberty and he paid his dues and he worked his way back up. ‘Does he deserve the right to come back? Is it a big risk.’ And, you know, all the reasons, all the bullet points for why it was risky. I kind of laughed at those at the time, because I thought, ‘Man, the risk here is, does the offense still work? He’s not going to get in trouble off the field anymore. This dude’s getting a second chance that most people thought he’d never get. That’s not going to be the issue.’” 

Josh Pate breaks down end of Hugh Freeze era

Arnold played in the loss, briefly, to Kentucky going two-of-three passing for 15 yards. Ashton Daniels was 13-of-28 for 108 yards and an interception. Auburn and Freeze managed just a field goa in the second quarter and nothing else.

“The issue is going to be whether you should really be bankrolling your entire future behind the guy whose resume’s biggest bullet points were, ‘I beat Saban a couple of times,’” Pate said. “Now, if you had doubts about that, okay, but the doubts about, you know, all the extracurricular stuff, I never really thought that was much of a risk. The risk, as it turns out, was on-field related. 

“And the risk, as it turns out, was, ‘is he going to figure out quarterback?’ It wasn’t even the offense. I think a lot of people are going to look and say, ‘Oh, Hugh Freeze’s offense didn’t work anymore. Now look, there may be layers of truth to that too. Do we really even know? I mean, really think about the three years here, do we really even know if his offense would have worked? I can tell you one thing we know: It doesn’t work if you don’t have the right quarterback, which, shockingly, we have learned about a lot of offenses around college football.” 

Freeze now looks to what’s next, but it’s safe to say it’s an unknown. A complete unknown for Freeze, or whatever Bob Dylan said.

“It doesn’t tend to work if you don’t have the right quarterback,” Pate said. “You look at the NIL market, you look at the recruiting market, you look at a lot of the big dollar figures that teams are paying quarterbacks. And I know it rubs some of you the wrong way, and to those of you who feel that way, I would just advise you not to pay attention to what the players get paid. Trust me, life’s a lot easier that way. 

“But if you ever wonder why those quarterbacks get paid, what they do, check out what happens when you don’t have one. Ask Huge Freeze, ask Auburn, who’s now going to have to pay 10s of millions of dollars in buy out money and then hire a new staff to make up for not paying two or $3 million for the right quarterback.”