Did struggling Auburn football transfer Payton Thorne take a shot at Robby Ashford during an October 24 press conference? Thorne, amidst attacking the two-quarterback system Hugh Freeze refuses to give up on, called out the specific act of not handing off the ball on a designed run play.
“You can’t get in there in a situation like that and try to do too much,” Thorne said (h/t Rivals). “I don’t feel like I’ve done that. So just keep going in there and executing the play that’s called. If it’s called to hand it off, hand it off. You can’t try to pull it and make something crazy happen.”
That comes after the first play of the game from Ashford went awry in the same fashion Thorne described, as AL.com’s Ainslie Lee recalled.
“Ashford had Jeremiah Cobb coming in motion and Jarquez Hunter also in the backfield,” Lee prefaced before saying, “While it’s unclear which running back Freeze is saying should’ve toted the football, both were heading to the right, where each Ole Miss defender was accounted for with a block.
“Instead, Ashford faked a handoff to running back Jarquez Hunter and kept the football before trying to hurry around the left edge, only to be stopped three yards behind the line of scrimmage, putting the Tigers into a second-and-long situation early.”
Unlikely Payton Thorne took a shot at fellow Auburn football QB Robby Ashford
This writer isn’t buying Thorne taking a shot at Ashford via passive-aggressive means through a media scrum. If anything, there are only ways to describe an easy mistake a QB could make in the offense since pass plays are up to the discretion of the passer.
Of course, this could be debunked in the future should a tell-all of this season be released and it turned out there was a great deal of friction between the incumbent from Hoover and the incoming transfer from Illinois.
That’s just next-level speculation, though. The locker room seems fine, but the Tigers don’t seem ready for the moment in the SEC West’s final season.