Auburn football: Pros and cons of Deion Sanders, Hugh Freeze as next head coach

The pros of hiring Hugh Freeze as the next Auburn football head coach

Hugh Freeze, unlike Deion Sanders, has gone through the rigors of an SEC season. He’s come away with a 10-win season, another at nine wins, and had three first-round picks in the 2016 NFL Draft from Ole Miss.

After being forced out of the program for issues that we’ll get to later, Freeze took a three-year hiatus before jumping back into the fray with a Liberty program that had been at the FBS level for just one season. In his second year, the Flames were a 10-win program that knocked off the undefeated Coastal Carolina and only lost to a North Carolina State Wolf Pack that finished the 2020 season ranked.

Freeze has proven to do more with less, having won a recruiting battle for Laremy Tunsil, Laquon Treadwell, and Robert Nkemdiche in 2013 over Nick Saban, who was leading a championship run at the time.

The cons of hiring Hugh Freeze as the next Auburn football head coach

So this is what we promised to get to later, and what is easily the biggest con of hiring Hugh Freeze as the next Auburn Tigers head coach: an NCAA-imposed investigation showed evidence that Ole Miss University employees and boosters arranged numerous “impermissible benefits” for players, such as car loans and cash — with at least one recruit even getting help on his college entrance exam. Freeze was even forced to resign after Ole Miss officials found a “pattern of personal misconduct” that was tipped off by a call made to an escort service by the former Rebels head coach.

Freeze has had a less impressive run recruiting at Liberty than Deion Sanders has had at Jackson State, so the possibility of mass disappointment should the current Flames head coach be chosen instead of ‘Prime Time’ is real.