Paul Finebaum finds ‘only good thing you can say’ about Hugh Freeze era at Auburn

The Auburn Tigers have once again found themselves looking for a new head coach. On Sunday, following a disastrous loss to Kentucky, the program moved on from Hugh Freeze part of the way through his third season there.

Pundit Paul Finebaum appeared on McElroy and Cubelic in the Morning on Monday. There, he explained that the loss to Kentucky forced Auburn’s hand to make the change now, rather than giving him the time to potentially turn things around later in the season.

“It felt they were in a wait-and-see mode,” Paul Finebaum said. “Hoping and expecting, like all of us, that Auburn would win the game and then roll the dice perhaps on Vanderbilt and later in the season on Alabama. But, as everyone watching and experiencing that game came to the same conclusion, there really wasn’t a choice. I think it was nice of Auburn to let Hugh Freeze walk off the field. I think I might have just thanked him right then and said, ‘We’ll see you another time but this is over.’ That’s how it felt… But, to me, there was no turning back after that.”

In the end, the Freeze tenure didn’t go the way anyone at Auburn wanted it to go. Truly, if there was a positive to be found, Paul Finebaum believes it’s that he simply wasn’t Bryan Harsin. That was good for a while, but not long term.

“The only positive thing I could say was it was better than Bryan Harsin,” Finebaum said. “But it was still a complete and total failure. There’s no getting around that. I think over these two or three years, we’ve all tried to say good things about Hugh Freeze because, personally, I think most of us have liked him and appreciated what he brought to the table, but he never could move the needle. A lot of the same mistakes kept being made.”

Hugh Freeze finished his tenure 15-19 at Auburn and just 6-16 in SEC play. That includes going 4-5 overall and 1-5 in conference play this season. That came as the pressure had been cranked up in the offseason, coming off a year where he missed a bowl and was highly criticized for his golf schedule.

“And, ultimately, and I don’t know if maybe illness has affected him or not,” Finebaum said. “But it does not seem to me to be the same coach I remember at Ole Miss and even at Liberty. Something was missing. He just didn’t seem to have that one molecule necessary that could get him over the top and I think for a lot of reasons he failed. People want to blame the administration and blame other people. I don’t think that’s it. I think the administration gave him the toys to play with and he simply failed in many different respects.”

Auburn is the fourth SEC team to fire its head coach this season. That’s before considering the rest of the FBS ranks. So, competition is going to be steep for a coach, but as it’s now been eight seasons since the Tigers got to double-digit wins and were competitive the way they want to be, Auburn felt it was still time to make a move.