Auburn Tigers head coach Hugh Freeze might be repeating the same old mistake that derailed his success at AU last season.
When the former Tigers QB Payton Thorne botched a handoff versus Georgia last season, Freeze threw him under the bus, humiliating him in front of the media. Thorne left Freeze's squad after the season, leaving the Tigers in search of a new QB. Oklahoma transfer Jackson Arnold stepped in just at the right time, earning Freeze's confidence to make him the starting QB right away.
But that was in the offseason. With their first game of 2025 against Baylor just around the corner, Freeze seems to be second-guessing his confidence in Arnold.
The Tigers' head coach was particularly infuriated by Arnold's failed execution of a goal-line drill since the defense blanketed the receivers.
“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," Freeze stated in his post-practice press conference.
"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."
Freeze calling out his starting QB just two weeks before their season starter sounds like some major, alarming bells for their program. His being so enraged at Arnold that he threw down his visor is an even bigger red flag.
Freeze's evident seething rage in the video is enough to prove that had the failed execution come in a regular-season game, Arnold would have been subjected to the same treatment that Thorne got a year ago.
That said, Arnold is no stranger to his shortcomings either. It is pretty established by now that the Sooners transfer will need to urgently fix his turnover-proneness to win all the close-call games on the Tigers' schedule to have a winning record, at least.
Freeze replacing Arnold with freshman Deuce Knight or Stanford transfer Ashton Daniels is always a possibility. A possibility that will sound more and more believable if Arnold continues to set Freeze off during practice.