One had to know that there’d be fireworks in a piece titled ‘Hugh Freeze is Auburn’s Donald Trump,’ but AL.com’s Cameron Smith made a valid point about Auburn University’s promise to be accountable for new Auburn football head coach Hugh Freeze.
Smith did compare the new Tigers play-caller to the 45th President of the United States, but there’s little value in analyzing a comparison between a loud-mouthed New York native who rose through the business world to become the most powerful man in the world to a soft-spoken man from Oxford, Mississippi whose career has been spent as a football coach in the south.
Instead, let’s focus on this valid point about how AU’s past actions regarding internal accountability make it hard to believe them when they assured female students that there’d be accountability when it comes to Freeze’s program:
"“Auburn lost a lawsuit this summer to the tune of $645,837 after an Alabama jury found the university illegally punished an Auburn professor raising questions about an unpopular major that had an unusually high concentration of football players. That’s not a result that inspires confidence about Auburn’s promised accountability when it comes to preventing a repeat of Freeze’s Ole “missteps.””"
Hugh Freeze is going to face nine months of media scrutiny from the Auburn football beat
Fly War Eagle has been tracking the local media outlets taking shots at new Auburn football head coach Hugh Freeze, and there’s already been inflammatory cartoons and now hyperbolic comparisons to one of the most polarizing person in the modern age.
For the next nine months, this is going to be the case. Coaching hires will be overshadowed, A-Day will be overshadowed, summer camp will be overshadowed. Get used to these types of criticisms, because they’re not going anywhere.
Freeze himself just needs to block out the noise and build a support staff that can bring Auburn football to new heights — just like what Liberty achieved under Freeze the past four seasons in Lynchburg.