Auburn football HC Hugh Freeze’s brutally honest reaction to historic loss

Things were going well for the Auburn football program heading into this weekend. The Tigers were on a three-game winning streak over SEC teams and were expected to take care of business against New Mexico State before turning the attention to the Iron Bowl and Alabama.

Unfortunately, that is the opposite of what took place on the Plains this weekend. The Auburn football team, which was riding high on momentum from winning games and securing recruits, was dominated by the Aggies from the very beginning of the game, and they never let up.

New Mexico State ran over the Tigers and left with a 31-10 victory, the Aggies’ first win over an SEC program. Before the loss, an eight-win season was not looking impossible, and now it feels like getting to seven wins will be a miracle.

Head coach Hugh Freeze knows it was an awful loss, and it must have felt like deja vu for him in a lot of ways. His reaction to the game was brutally honest, per The Montgomery Advertiser:

"“As good as last week felt and as complete as we played in all three phases, it was the exact opposite today,” coach Hugh Freeze said postgame. “And it’s very disappointing. Our university deserves a better effort than that and that’s my job to make sure they get that and we did not today.”"

This was Freeze’s response when asked if the issue was lack of effort or inability to execute:

"“It’s hard to say. I mean, you’re not going to execute if you’re not giving great effort,” Freeze said. “So it probably goes hand-in-hand. I thought our receivers ran routes in slow-motion tonight, did not get out of their breaks at the top end. We didn’t protect well. There’s nothing positive that I can say about tonight.”"

The bottom line is that there truly was nothing positive about this game, which was supposed to be a warm up for the Iron Bowl next weekend. It would be the most Auburn thing in the world for the Tigers to come out and be competitive against Alabama, but if we see the team that took on the Aggies tonight it’s going to be an ugly Iron Bowl.