Auburn Tigers football coach Hugh Freeze is being forgiven for a 3-3 start to the 2025 season and all the failures of the previous two campaigns. As Auburn Undercover's Phillip Marshall notes, the program's power brokers see the team's record as being 5-1 and are blaming officiating for losses against the Georgia Bulldogs and Oklahoma Sooners.
Marshall delivered the kicker to many Tiger fans as play as day: Freeze may survive the entire 2025 season at the helm on the Plains.
As Marshall notes, AU's power brokers believe the SEC is the problem, not Freeze. They believe something is afoot behind the scenes in Birmingham.
"Third-year Auburn football coach Hugh Freeze still has the support of powerful donors, who are convinced he is rightfully 5-1 right now and are about ready to march on the SEC office. As one said to me, 'Something is rotten in Denmark,'" Marshall wrote.
"There is little to no chance that Auburn moves on from Freeze during the season, at least at this point. Every situation is different. If a decision has been made – as seems to be the case with Billy Napier at Florida – that a change has to be made, there is no reason to wait."
When Freeze gets up on the podium and preaches that this team is "close" to executing, the powers that be at Auburn are believing him. They believe the rest of the current campaign will go like the end of the 2024 season, when AU rallied and defeated the TAMU Aggies last November to save Freeze's job, as opposed to the bulk of the last three seasons in conference play.
The fanbase doesn't believe him. Frustration has reached a boiling point with the team's lack of responding to adversity -- most notably in having just two second-half touchdowns in SEC play and scoring none against the 1-6 South Alabama Jaguars at Jordan-Hare Stadium.
In a sport this unpredictable, maybe the football Gods have something special in store over the next six games.
Very little has proven that's possible through the first six games, and yet Freeze is essentially safe if he can find three more wins. One will come against the Mercer Bears, but it's on AU to find another two against the Mizzou Tigers, Arkansas Razorbacks in Fayetteville, Kentucky Wildcats, Vanderbilt Commodores in Nashville, and Alabama Crimson Tide with the Iron Bowl at home.
Either way, AD John Cohen isn't there yet on firing Freeze, and neither are the donors who fund the football program.
So, perhaps fans should gear up for 6-6 or 7-5 to get Freeze through to the 2026 season and a continued lack of accountability to persist at the head coaching position.