All week there has been a clip of Auburn football practice circling on social media that depicts quarterback Jackson Arnold failing to make a throw followed by head coach Hugh Freeze making a throw—throwing his visor to the ground, that is. He then chewed out his quarterback for several minutes.
While all the Auburn football haters out there have made a huge deal out of a single practice clip that shows a mistake, the video simply shows one messed-up play in practice. Point me to the SEC quarterbacks that have yet to make a mistake in fall camp.
The media brought up Freeze's mini meltdown after practice, and here is what the head coach had to say about his actions and the expectations of the quarterback when it comes to executing plays.
"I've gotta calm down sometimes with quarterbacks," Freeze said to reporters after practice, per Auburn Undercover. "When we have the right thing called, the expectation — and I think it's a reasonable one — is we execute it.
"Now, if we haven't coached it well enough when we get in there, maybe that's the case. I'll ask the quarterback staff, 'What did we tell him?' because we've got him wide open and we don't throw the touchdown, and that's frustrating as heck. It's hard enough to score in this league and in any game really, but when you finally have one that's called right, you want to see us execute it. And that's the frustration."
Of course, the overreaction from social media comes on the heels of two years of frustration watching Payton Thorne make these mistakes in live game situations over and over, whether or not it was his fault.
With Arnold on board and the talent level increased, here's hoping no visor-throwing situations occur on the field this fall.