Auburn Tigers football coach Hugh Freeze has done a good job of evading hot seat headlines through the first three weeks of the season. They would've been prevalent had his team not defeated the Baylor Bears in Week 1, but a 38-24 triumph in Waco kept those negative rumors at bay.
He may not be able to avoid them after Week 4, and a trip to Norman, Oklahoma, to take on Brent Venables' Sooners, though.
The Athletic's Seth Emerson predicts two outcomes for Auburn's return trip to Oklahoma to take on an OU squad that stunned AU, 27-21, in an 11-point fourth quarter comeback at Jordan-Hare Stadium last September:
A deep dive into whether four SEC teams can make the 12-team College Football Playoff this December, and a reignition of hot seat rumors for the loser of this matchup.
"Maybe fortunes swing the SEC’s way this year and it gets a fourth team in the field, especially with Notre Dame already losing two games. Five teams, in fact, is a possibility," Emerson wrote.
"But so is everybody beating up on each other, if the conference is as deep as it looked the first three weeks. Mississippi State no longer appears a doormat. Arkansas played Ole Miss close. South Carolina and Florida are down but still capable of beating anybody.
"That all makes Auburn-Oklahoma vitally important for the winner. It’s not an eliminator for the loser, but in the fickle nature of the SEC, whichever coach loses could be the focus of more hot-seat chatter."
The Gamecocks and Gators being "still capable of beating anybody" aside, the sentiment is mostly true.
Auburn's reputation is too down in the dumps for Venables not to pay for a loss at home to the Tigers. On the flip side, Freeze's team laying an egg at Gaylord Memorial will have many questioning if Baylor was that good to begin with, and doubt this team's ability to contend with an on-brand difficult conference schedule.
If Freeze's squad plays the Sooners close, he may be spared any of that talk. A close Auburn loss, depending on how it looks, is the least controversial result here.