Redshirt Auburn football freshman Holden Geriner is set to get reps at the start of fall camp according to AL.com’s Ainslie Lee — who revealed that the starting quarterback role will ultimately come down to either Robby Ashford or Michigan State transfer Payton Thorne.
“Redshirt freshman Holden Geriner and true freshman Hank Brown have both received high praise from Freeze, and Geriner could get reps at the start of camp,” Lee prefaced before saying, “But all the buzz points to last year’s starter, sophomore Robby Ashford, and junior Michigan State transfer Payton Thorne being the two names to keep track of during fall camp.”
Ashford was the sportsbooks’ favorite to win the QB1 role as of the start of the last week of July, but a slew of public wagers on Thorne has dramatically shifted the odds back in favor of the former Spartan signal-caller.
Hugh Freeze worried about integrating so many new Auburn football pieces
At SEC Media Days, Hugh Freeze shared a great deal of worry regarding his first Auburn football roster on the Plains; one that’s had 20 transfers make their way to East Central Alabama since the end of the 2022 season.
“We’ve got a lot of questions about exactly how we’re going to be, and truthfully I don’t know all the answers to that yet,” Freeze said in his opening statement at media days. “This is a strange feeling and in some ways for me I’ve never experienced going into fall camp and having so many unknowns in my mind. That’s a challenge for us, to try to formulate a team from so many different and new faces in a very short amount of time?”
Not having a starting quarterback named is certainly something worth worrying about, but the presence of Thorne is calming in two ways: one, at worst, a former starter on a Big Ten contender in 2021 is your guy, and two, Ashford has clearly been pushed to improve since the MSU transfer arrived in May.