Auburn Tigers football coach Hugh Freeze paid a starter's price tag to land Jackson Arnold in the Transfer Portal. Class of 2025 QB Deuce Knight didn't come cheap as a freshman either, coming from Lucedale, Mississippi, with the expectation to start sooner rather than later.
Freeze added a third QB this cycle via the portal, former Stanford Cardinal Ashton Daniels. And the 55-year-old didn't bring him to the Plains to stash him on the bench. Freeze admitted that "there's a place for both of those guys that you can play to their strengths" on Monday.
The Montgomery Advertiser's Adam Cole noted that the QB2 battle is "murky," a good sign for Daniels and a bad one for Knight.
"Knight, who was rated as a five-star prospect by both On3 and Rivals, was one of two scholarship quarterbacks practicing with Auburn in the spring, alongside Arnold. But the addition of Daniels, despite his spring absence, has poised him for a back-up role," Cole wrote.
"Auburn's starting quarterback has been effectively set in stone since the program added Jackson Arnold, a former consensus five-star prospect and Oklahoma starting quarterback, in the transfer portal. But the answer surrounding who Arnold's presumptive backup will be has been much more murky."
Any non-Arnold snap going to Daniels is inherently bad for Knight. Fewer reps will make any player feel that way. Given that every year is free agency, with every player on a one-year contract, fewer reps could be the difference between Knight remaining on the team or not in 2026.
Freeze potentially leaning on Daniels is the act of a man who's coaching for his life. Which he absolutely is.
It may cost the team long-term development of who was supposed to be a culture-shifter, though.