At the beginning of the season, everyone had hopes for the 2025 Auburn Tigers football team. It was year three under head coach Hugh Freeze the staff spent the last two off-seasons loading up the roster, and there was a room full of new quarterbacks.
Even after the first game against Baylor, people were impressed with the Tigers, and people thought that maybe former Oklahoma quarterback Jackson Arnold would be able to lead the offense better than Payton Thorne.
Fast-forward to the end of the season, and the complete opposite happened. The Tigers suffered their fifth consecutive losing season, and the defense outshone the offense in almost every single game. For what felt like the thousandth year in a row, sub-par quarterback play plagued the Tigers, although obviously the entire blame does not sit on Arnold.
A little over a month removed from his firing, Hugh Freeze sat down for an interview with Auburn Sports' Justin Hokanson, and he was asked if he thought there was anything he could have done to better prepare the team ahead of the 2025 season.
"Going from the 24 to the 25 season, 100 percent a lot of the credit goes to Dom [Studzinski] and DJ Durkin and [Derrick] Nix, but I mean, we grinded from February as soon as we got off the road all the way up to the season," Freeze said. "And if you talk to DJ or Nix, because I have, we're just all stunned. Felt like everything was done more... every I dotted, every T crossed."
As Freeze said repeatedly throughout the disappointing season, the team was so close, but they could never quite make it over the hump. It seems as though the staff could never really figure out why, either.