Auburn football coaching staff gets serious offensive line recruiting win

The newly implemented Auburn football coaching staff got a major victory for the future of AU’s offensive line, which has been a major sore spot for the past three seasons, on Tuesday, December 13 with the flip of Connor Lew from Miami.

Lew is a 2023 4-star center from the Atlanta metro who let Mario Cristobal and his staff down easy with his joining Hugh Freeze and first-year offensive line coach Kendall Simmons’ first recruiting class.

With the flip, Freeze now has four offensive line commits from the incoming high school class. Expect the staff to continue to add de-commits, with JUCO offensive tackle Isaiah Jatta, a defector from South Carolina, squarely on the Tigers’ radar.

Auburn football head coach Hugh Freeze is following the blueprint for success

There were certainly bold claims around these parts about what Bryan Harsin could achieve on the Plains when he was first hired. The right hires were seemingly being made, but there was just never an on-field product that proved it.

In 2022, Hugh Freeze is walking into a situation that’s already volatile considering the lack of success from the last guy in charge, but he is also making competent coaching hires of guys with head coaching experience as coordinators and keeping key Auburn football legacy guys like Carnell “Cadillac” Williams and Zac Etheridge. Not to mention, outlets have already taken aim at some of the skeletons in his closet from his last SEC stint at Ole Miss — making the need to perform well at the job to shift the attention away.

So far, so good for Freeze, at least from this optimistic viewpoint. Paul Finebaum approves of the offensive coordinator hiring of Philip Montgomery, and Ron Roberts’ recent success with Baylor’s defensive dominance in 2021 during a Big 12 conference championship season does the talking — even if others may see the pair as ‘meh.’