Auburn football head coach Hugh Freeze is ready to return to his coaching style

Auburn football head coach Hugh Freeze discusses coaching styles in the modern era of the transfer portal

It's been a tough season for the Auburn Tigers, to say the least. Ahead of Hugh Freeze's second year as head coach, many were hopeful for the season and expected to see improvement from last year's 6-6 team. Instead, it has been loss after loss.

Heading into Week 8, Auburn football's record is 2-5 with no conference wins and four straight losses. Many of the losses were games that were winnable, and the Tigers found a way to sabotage themselves and give the game away late. Week after week, Freeze addressed the media and repeated lines about needing to coach better, needing more consistency from the team, needing proper execution in the games, and other things.

This week, it seems that Freeze has finally made up his mind about things needing to change. He talked about how the threat of losing players to the transfer portal has impacted the way he coaches, and that fears about keeping the roster intact have bled into the way they run practices. Now, that is over.

“I’ve kinda made up my mind going into that open week and the week leading up to the Missouri game — told our staff this — I’ve made up my mind, I’ve got to be who I am and we’ve got to coach them hard," said Freeze, per Auburn Rivals. "If you can’t coach the mistakes out of them in practice because you’re afraid to coach them, those mistakes will continue to happen in the game. And we’ve seen that on tape. I kinda went back to we don’t demean kids but we’re going to coach them hard. And the good ones should want that. And that’s what I told our team, that’s what I told our coaches. That’s kinda the approach I’ve got to take from this point forward."

The Tigers are continuously plagued by the same old mistakes and the same old excuses, but maybe now, in Week 8, things will be different. Auburn and Kentucky will kick off from Lexington this Saturday at 6:45 p.m.