As the crowd of a packed Stanford Stadium zeroed in on his snap, Peayton Thorne fumbled, his throw spiralling into a botched handoff. The loss of crucial yards while the Tigers were trailing behind at 21-10, and the ear-piercing cheers from the Bulldogs fans that followed were enough to signal that Georgia had already won over the Tigers mentally.
The same night, on October 5, 2024, the Auburn Tigers head coach, Hugh Freeze, did something rarely seen in the football world as a response to something that was rather pretty common in it: he threw his QB Thorne under the bus, blaming him for a failed drive instead of shouldering the blame as the head coach.
Naturally, Freeze got a lot of heat from that one decision, the heat that still follows him into this season.
ESPN analyst Sam Acho is convinced that Freeze will subject the shiny new QB Jackson Arnold to a similar public humiliation if he repeats Thorne's pattern.
"Hugh Freeze has not done a great job of encouraging his quarterbacks. Last year you look at some of the quarterback changes, oftentimes he threw his QBs under the bus. Look at Payton Thorne as a prime example," Acho explained.
"This year, he has a transfer in Jackson Arnold. But he needs to instill confidence in his quarterback, not the other way around.”
The timing of Acho's comments is quite ironic since Freeze just had to defend himself from the allegations of "coddling Arnold too much" in his recent fall camp press conference.
"The number one priority for practice is for our quarterback to leave the field confident," Freeze said about Arnold, instantly setting off the alarm bells at Auburn.
If Freeze does what Acho suspects him of after the fall camp motto he revealed for Arnold, he is simply setting himself up to be laughed at.