Auburn Tigers football coach Hugh Freeze's program hasn't played any games yet in 2025, but USA Today's Matt Hayes has already seen enough of the 55-year-old and believes his play-calling arrangement -- splitting play-calling duties by down between himself, Derrick Nix, and Kent Austin and owning the power to overrule them at anytime -- would justify a firing.
Hayes believes "it's just not going to work" on the Plains with Freeze in charge.
"It's just not going to work. The college football season hasn't even begun, and the Hugh Freeze experiment at Auburn is all but over," Hayes wrote.
"Just in case you weren’t convinced after two years of bad losses and one bizarre offseason, Auburn offensive coordinator Derrick Nix explained this week how his boss, Freeze, has laid out the play calling plan for the 2025 season.
"Frankly, Freeze should be fired for this specific debacle, and this alone — much less the product on the field."
Hayes isn't alone in being perplexed, though the opinion columnist's take on Freeze needing to be fired right now definitely falls into the "scorching hot" category.
Footballscoop's Zach Barnett was more measured in his approach, but even Barnett had difficulty understanding the three-headed hydra play-calling.
Barnett asked four questions in quick succession to stress how dangerously out-of-the-box Freeze's plan is.
"To me, the biggest issue seems to be an overall lack of trust," Barnett said. "Are Nix and Austin going to call the plays they believe are best suited for a given situation, or are they going to call the ones they think Freeze wants them to call? If Freeze is the best coach on staff to call the plays, why doesn't he just call them? If he's not, why is his hand hovering over the joystick? If Freeze is the primary play-caller, why is Nix saying that Freeze has the authority to overrule anything they say? What is there to say if Freeze is calling plays?"
There's no reasonable or rational answer to why Freeze would arrange this. In terms of the perhaps unreasonable and irrational, Freeze could just be stacking excuses for why he shouldn't be fired, since small adjustments can be made to play-calling.
John Cohen loves Freeze, but he probably loves his job too.
The excuses need to end. The gimmicky play-calling needs to end. And if they can't?
Freeze's tenure as Auburn Tigers head football coach needs to end.