DO NOT HIRE HUGH FREEZE

See reason, John Cohen.

I don’t even know where to start with this, and I’m only writing this piece because other members of College and Magnolia would be unable to turn the caps lock key off and restrain from this being obscenely profane. However, the underlying message is the same.

John Cohen, do not hire Hugh Freeze as head football coach at Auburn University.

There are so many directions with which to take this, but I’ll start here first. You’ve seen the past month for Auburn fans. We finally got rid of a coach who didn’t seem to care, who didn’t want to recruit, who didn’t want to connect with these young men and make their lives a priority of his. With him gone, it was like we got to come out of a trance and embrace someone to carry us into the light. Cadillac Williams got the interim job and we all knew that this was someone we could support.

The evidence since he got the interim gig shows that Auburn was on the right path. Draining the swamp of the cretins that Bryan Harsin had put on staff and instilling the values that the Auburn Creeders love to extoll. While it’s nice to say those things and stand high and mighty above others, Cadillac was fucking doing them. Getting his guys to go to class, making them men.

Auburn interim HC Cadillac Williams on the turnaround in the final month of the season: "Guys are in class, treating people with respect... To hear the academic people come in and say, 'Man, they're like different kids.' That's been the best part of this, to be honest with you."

— Justin Ferguson (@JFergusonAU) November 27, 2022

You watch the video of Pat Dye after the 1989 Iron Bowl, tearing up because he watched his guys become men, that’s Cadillac. He’s doing it. He did it. And we felt great about it for the month he was in charge. He went 2-2, we won the games we were expecting to and lost the ones we expected to. Record didn’t matter, and it seemed like the entire college football world knew about what Auburn was doing because of what they saw when an entire fanbase came out to support a 3-6 team and made Jordan-Hare Stadium as rowdy as it’s ever been.

We were doing the thing, you know, where you take steps to entrench yourself as a top program. Getting the buyback from the fans that Bryan Harsin had lost. Getting the world to notice. Building the newest and most ridiculous football facility in the land. Stuffing money into the NIL fund to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. We’re ready to do this.

And you want to hire Hugh Freeze to manage that.

Now, I know he wasn’t the first choice. I get that, John. But don’t ask us to support this man. You wanted a splash hire, Lane Kiffin would’ve been it. It would’ve signaled that Auburn was going to pony up the dollars to compete with the big boys. We haven’t done it in a serious way since Mal Moore started the exponential rise of coaching salaries in 2007. Sure, there was that idiotic contract that Steven Leath worked out for Gus Malzahn in 2017, and we saw how silly that made us look when we had to pay out just three years later. Either way, Kiffin would’ve been the guy. Recruits knew him, everyone in college football knew him, and there would’ve been a line out the door for guys to come play for him with Auburn’s resources, especially if Cadillac had been kept on staff. Lane would have been the splash hire.

Do you remember the last time Auburn made a splash hire?

This would’ve been it. But Lane turned us down. And that’s fine.

BUT YOUR SECOND CHOICE WAS HUGH FREEZE? Unacceptable. Let’s run it down.

This is a man who, most notably, got fired by Ole Miss because he was using his university cell phone to make calls to prostitutes. He claimed it was a “misdialed number”, yet he had called multiple times. After stepping down, we also got to hear about the rampant cheating that had gone on at Ole Miss under his leadership. From Wikipedia:

The investigation reopened soon after star offensive tackle Laremy Tunsil admitted taking money from one of Freeze’s assistants.^[26] In February 2017—three months after suffering its first losing season since the year Freeze arrived—Ole Miss withdrew from bowl consideration for the upcoming season. The move came on the same day that the NCAA sent an updated notice of allegations charging the Rebels with eight additional violations. Most seriously, it accused Freeze of not monitoring his assistants, and also accused Ole Miss of not properly controlling the program.^[25]

Huh. Failure to monitor. Lack of institutional control. You know, just the most serious NCAA infractions. The kind of thing we laughed at Alabama for years about when they got caught doing this with Albert Means. But wait, we certainly laughed at Alabama much, much more about, I don’t know... USING UNIVERSITY PROPERTY TO GET YOURSELF A HOOKER.

Good lord, Mike Price didn’t even coach a game in Tuscaloosa for this kind of thing and we want to give Hugh Freeze a second chance on it? No, no. Not even a second chance. He had his second chance when Liberty, a bastion of integrity, snatched him up from Arena League offers and gave him the job. I wonder who at Liberty would be sympathetic to a guy just trying to get laid, no matter what’s in the way.

Oh yeah, it’s this waxy corpse of a man.

The complexion you get from one too many deals with the devil.

Ian McCaw hired Hugh Freeze to be head coach at Liberty, and this comes after McCaw found himself at Liberty after his time at Baylor, where he was forced to resign after uh, turning a blind eye to gang rape.

Baylor University itself admitted that McCaw knew about the rape allegations and just didn’t do shit. But it’s alright, because according to Hugh Freeze —

— Jesus would’ve been flipping tables to help protect the people that were hurt under Ian McCaw’s watch. Going to church doesn’t make you a good person, and leading the athletic department at a religious institution doesn’t give you the inside track to heaven, no matter what Hugh thinks.

What’s the deal with that screenshot of a DM? Oh yeah, that’s just what Hugh sent to a sexual assault victim when she named Ian McCaw and other leaders at Liberty in her lawsuit that the university shockingly covered up allegations of sexual assault. Pretty apparent pattern there, isn’t it, Ian?

Let’s not also forget that Hugh Freeze has sent DMs to members of this website on Twitter after they tweeted something he did not like. He has never been affiliated with Auburn in any way, yet couldn’t help himself. Ian McCaw would approve of that. All of Will Herring’s “Hugh Freeze is a good man who would love on his players” talk, and he couldn’t think to phrase it any differently than that? Hugh would definitely like to love on something, but it’s not his players if we go by his past.

Damn, we’re over 1,100 words and we haven’t even mentioned why he doesn’t deserve to be the head coach at Auburn based on football sense. The last thing we’ll tell you about his transgressions above is to remind you who’s the super sleuth that figured out he had prostitutes on speed dial.

Hugh Freeze got taken out back by Houston Nutt. All joking aside, he’s too stupid to manage Auburn’s football program.

Now, in terms of football, why does anyone want him to be our coach? There are two obvious reasons, and they both came more than 7 years ago. He beat Alabama twice in a row. In 2014 and 2015 he beat Alabama. Yes, it’s true. Let’s look at those wins.

In 2014, they caught Bama early in the year when the Tide were trying to figure out what they had. Lane Kiffin was their new offensive coordinator, and they went into Oxford and lost 23-17. Bama had 2 turnovers, Blake Sims was the quarterback, it happens.

Then in 2015, Ole Miss went into Tuscaloosa and won 43-37 in the dumbest football game of all time. You think Gus ran the “gotchya and grabass” to perfection? Shoutout to our buddies across the state for that phrase.

Interesting only if you’re a mouthbreathing nitwit. Equitable if you’re the ones on the field trying to play actual football instead of gotchya and grabass. https://t.co/sum1sEFeXM

— Roll ‘Bama Roll (@rollbamaroll) April 22, 2020

In 2015, Alabama committed 5 turnovers, didn’t start the guy that would eventually win them a national title (Jacob Coker), and instead started a guy who had a more Bama name (Cooper Bateman). Ole Miss got two incredibly lucky plays, one the ole blind heave, double-doink into the hands of the streaking receiver touchdown, and the other, well, let’s just say they wrote not one, but two articles about it over at Roll Bama Roll. It was the infamous Pop Pass, the game-tying touchdown that Gus Malzahn drew up in the 2013 Iron Bowl. Linemen downfield? It was borderline for us, but nobody was looking for it back then. Two years later? It’s a wonder Nick Saban’s forehead vein didn’t Pop Pass him into early retirement.

You know it was bad when this play wasn’t even the biggest thorn for them:

Either way, Ole Miss won despite Alabama storming back from a 20-point deficit and having the ball with a chance to win on the final possession. Then they turned around and got blown out by Florida, only to slip back into irrelevance. He took a team the next season that had A.J. Brown, D.K. Metcalf, Van Jefferson, and Evan Engram, and went 5-7. His former star players? Uh...

Look, maybe we all got a little tired of Gus Malzahn, and maybe it was time for us to part. But we can’t pick up with Gus Lite just two years later and pretend like we don’t realize what we’re doing. Hugh runs the exact same offense, he just did it worse. Gus beat Alabama more times, and we fired him. Hugh never won any titles, unless you count “Biggest Blowout Loss in Peach Bowl History” as a championship.

When this news broke on Saturday morning that he was the top target, he promptly showed us what he could do and lost 49-14 to New Mexico State. I’m sold. I’m sure that this is just Jimmy Sexton doing his job and appealing to the lowest common denominator in an effort to make money, and that’s fine, but we don’t have to entertain it. Word is that Auburn has hired a “crisis communications firm” to handle the PR and optics on this particular decision. You don’t think that’s a red flag in itself? You can avoid having to pay some group that does this sort of thing by not hiring this guy.

As for what we should do next? There are a million different paths that this can go, but there are only a few that can truly unite the Auburn fanbase, and continue what we had over the past few weeks. Hugh Freeze ain’t it, because Hugh Freeze ain’t shit.

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