AUBURN, Ala. — Jeremiah Wright has experienced a little bit of everything since arriving at Auburn in 2020, just not a lot of winning.
“Four different coaches, COVID, quarantines, a torn ACL, some ups, but a lot of downs, too many downs,” Wright said with a reflective laugh.
“It’s taken a lot of patience.”
And nobody needs to tell Wright, a sixth-year senior offensive guard for the Tigers, that patience is as abundant in the realm of SEC football as flowing streams are in a desert. That’s especially true at a place like Auburn, which is one of just six programs nationally (Alabama, Clemson, Georgia, LSU and Ohio State are the others) to have won at least one national title and played for another over the past 15 years.
It’s also a program, as Hugh Freeze enters his third season as coach, that has suffered through four straight losing campaigns and won more than nine games only once in the past seven years. Auburn has gone more than three full seasons without being ranked in the AP poll, the program’s longest such drought in 47 years. That level of irrelevance doesn’t sit well with anybody on the Plains.
“There may be one feeling outside our complex, but I can tell you there’s a much different feeling inside our complex, what we’re working toward and what Coach Freeze is building,” Wright said. “We’re a lot closer than people think to getting Auburn back to where it’s supposed to be, and that’s winning championships.”
WHEN FREEZE TOOK the Auburn job in 2023, he said it would take three full recruiting classes to get the team’s talent level to a point where it rivaled the upper-tier programs in the league. The Tigers’ last two recruiting classes were ranked in the top 10 nationally by ESPN, and Auburn also scored big in the transfer portal this offseason with the No. 7 class in the ESPN rankings. In the rankings of this offseason’s newcomer classes, combining transfers and incoming freshmen, Auburn was No. 3.
“I feel a lot better than I have about our talent, our size, athleticism and depth,” Freeze told ESPN. “But look, we still had chances to win some big games against some really good teams the past two years and didn’t get it done. That’s the truth of it, and we can’t run from that as coaches. I own it regardless of what the talent was or wasn’t.
“I still believe we need one more [signing] class to get to where we need to be, but I don’t sense any panic.”
In a program in which dysfunction has run rampant at times and the so-called cooks — influential donors and trustees — have thrown their power around in a crowded kitchen, Freeze said he has received nothing but support. Auburn paid its past two head coaches, Gus Malzahn and Bryan Harsin, a combined $36.8 million in buyouts when they were fired.
“The people here at Auburn have been great,” Freeze said. “I mean, there’s nothing that would ever surprise me in this league, but we’ve got to go compete and be good enough to win some of those games this year that we haven’t in the past two.
“I’m not naïve.”
Freeze’s boss, athletic director John Cohen, says he is more focused on what Freeze is building and how he’s building it than his 11-14 record (6-13 against power-conference teams) over his first two seasons. Freeze’s predecessor, Harsin, was 9-12 (4-11 against power-conference teams) before being fired eight games into his second season in 2022, giving way to interim coach Cadillac Williams for the final four games.
From the time Harsin was hired to the start of Freeze’s first season in 2023, 48 scholarship players left, and 10 of the 18 signees from Harsin’s 2021 recruiting class wound up departing — factors not lost on Cohen when he surveys the first two seasons under Freeze.
“There are two ways I evaluate our football program right now: Do we still have the kids in the locker room? And the answer to that was a resounding yes at the end of last year, especially with the way those kids helped in the recruiting process. And No. 2: Are we indeed evaluating and recruiting top-10 classes? And the answer to that is yes,” said Cohen, a two-time SEC Coach of the Year in baseball at Mississippi State before getting into administration.
“If those two things are happening in this league, you are going to have eventual success. I do think we started from behind the eight ball. I’m not being critical of the kids who were here and stuck it out. I’m really proud of that. But we did not have Auburn-type talent here, and it was obvious that something was happening where kids were running in and out of this program. Our elite kids here at Auburn are not leaving the program anymore.”
Auburn had 23 players depart via the transfer portal this offseason, but only a few were expected to be regular contributors for the Tigers during the 2025 season. Bradyn Joiner was a part-time starter at offensive guard a year ago and earned Freshman All-SEC honors. He transferred to Purdue, while Caleb Wooden, who started six games at safety last season, transferred to Arkansas.
Freeze has been more active in the transfer portal after admittedly being slow to adapt to it when he first got to Auburn. That hesitancy was one of the reasons he hired Will Redmond away from LSU to be the program’s general manager of player personnel following his first season with the Tigers. Auburn signed 19 players out of the portal in the 2024-25 cycle, and four are expected to play pivotal roles on offense this season: quarterback Jackson Arnold (Oklahoma), offensive tackle Xavier Chaplin (Virginia Tech) and receivers Eric Singleton Jr. (Georgia Tech) and Horatio Fields (Wake Forest).
“The thing you see is the competition, the way guys go after each other on the practice field and hold each other accountable,” said Singleton, one of the top-rated portal receivers after catching 56 passes a year ago for the Yellow Jackets. “We know what we’re capable of and that we have the talent to beat anybody.”
Singleton grew up watching Auburn football. His cousin, Darvin Adams, was Cam Newton’s top receiving target on the 2010 national championship team.
“I know what this program is about, and that’s putting in the work and then taking it to the field and winning,” Singleton said. “That’s the Auburn I grew up watching, the Auburn I want us to get back to, so being a part of this program means a lot to me. I’m here to help that turnaround.”
A MORE TALENTED roster should help, but Freeze said playing with more efficiency, consistency and discipline will be critical if the Tigers are going to win some of the games they couldn’t finish the past two seasons.
Not that anybody on the Plains needs a reminder, but it took a miracle touchdown pass in the final seconds by Jalen Milroe on fourth-and-31 for Alabama to beat Auburn in the 2023 Iron Bowl, which came just a week after the Tigers suffered an embarrassing 31-10 home loss to New Mexico State. In that same season, Auburn was tied with Georgia late in the fourth quarter, rushing for 219 yards against a stacked Bulldogs defense. But the Tigers couldn’t stop Brock Bowers on Georgia’s 75-yard touchdown drive in the final minutes and lost a 27-20 heartbreaker at home.
Last season, Auburn lost three games by a touchdown or less and was victimized by turnovers. No loss better illustrated the Tigers’ 2024 season than the 27-21 home setback to Oklahoma. Auburn squandered an 11-point lead early in the fourth quarter, and the decisive blow was a 63-yard interception return for a Sooners touchdown on a Payton Thorne pass.
The Tigers finished 120th nationally in turnover margin and lost an SEC-high 22 turnovers. And with regular place-kicker Alex McPherson missing all but one game with ulcerative colitis (he’s healthy and back this season), Auburn was also last against SEC competition in field goal accuracy (8-of-17) and last in red zone offense (16-of-24). The Tigers scored just eight red zone touchdowns in eight SEC games.
Based on ESPN colleague Bill Connelly’s postgame win expectancy, a formula that determines how likely a team was to win based on a game’s key statistics, Auburn should have won about eight games (7.8) instead of five, making it the most underperforming team in the country by that metric.
“We did a lot of the things that get you beat, and yet we still averaged 6.7 yards per play on offense,” Freeze said. “Only four other power-conference teams averaged more.”
Those four teams — Ole Miss, Ohio State, Miami and Louisville — were a combined 43-12.
“And then there was us,” Freeze said.
Despite all that yardage, the Tigers scored 17 or fewer points in six of their 12 games. One of the priorities in the offseason was to strengthen a passing game that put up decent numbers (sixth in the SEC with 251.5 passing yards per game), but failed to produce in key moments and had 13 interceptions in 12 games. Early in the season, the Tigers shuffled back and forth between Thorne and Hank Brown at quarterback, and nine of their 13 interceptions came in the first five games.
Auburn will look to Arnold, ESPN’s No. 3 overall prospect in the 2023 class, for an upgrade at QB. Things didn’t really click for Arnold at Oklahoma. He was benched in the SEC opener against Tennessee last season, and although he returned to the starting lineup nearly a month later, it was a struggle.
The Sooners were decimated by injuries at receiver and allowed 46 sacks, which ranked 132nd nationally. Arnold also had three different offensive coordinators at Oklahoma, and he said coming to Auburn is a much-needed reset. How well he bounces back will go a long way toward determining whether the Tigers are ready to make a move in the SEC.
“I know it didn’t go the way he wanted at Oklahoma, but you watch him spin it and the way he can extend plays, and he’s exactly what we were looking for,” Freeze said.
Freeze plans to spend more time with the quarterbacks on the practice field this fall and said he will call most of the plays (offensive coordinator Derrick Nix will call some). Freeze delegated a lot of those responsibilities when he took over the program as he tried to install his infrastructure.
“I think it’s vital that Jackson and all of the quarterbacks are hearing my thoughts,” said Freeze, noting that true freshman Deuce Knight was extremely impressive this spring. “I like what I’ve seen from Jackson, and we need him to have success early on. I think he could really catapult from that.”
One of the most improved groups on the team should be the receiving corps, and Freeze said Thorne unfairly took the “brunt of the deal” last season over the Tigers’ struggles on offense. To be fair, scoring points has been a problem in both of Freeze’s seasons at Auburn. The Tigers have scored 21 or fewer points in 10 of his 16 SEC games. By comparison, when Freeze had things rolling at Ole Miss in 2014 and 2015, the Rebels scored more than 30 points in nine of their 16 SEC games.
“There were times last year where Payton was ready to pull the trigger on something that should have been there, and we may have been a little young at receiver and didn’t quite run the right depth of a route or the right route,” Freeze said. “The difference I see right now in Malcolm [Simmons], Perry [Thompson] and even Cam [Coleman] is monumental. They’re starting to understand the game and the system. I think Jackson is going to be the beneficiary of that.”
Auburn has spent handsomely on its 2025 roster, in the $20 million range, and Freeze admits to having a better understanding of how it all fits together. Following the 2023 season, the Tigers were in the running for quarterback Cam Ward, who wound up transferring from Washington State to Miami and was one of four finalists for the Heisman Trophy last year.
“I just didn’t know if that was the right thing to do [paying millions to Ward] because it was so new to me,” Freeze said. “So you’re sitting here, and at the time you think you’re working off a certain number, and I wasn’t the type and neither was our collective, to throw things out there that we weren’t certain we could do. I was big on building the class from the high school ranks and chose to really focus on the high school kids and thought we could win with Payton … and we had our chances. But we were a lot more aggressive in Year 2.”
Freeze also is optimistic that some new and younger faces will contribute on defense in 2025. Cornerback Raion Strader (Miami, Ohio) and linebacker Caleb Wheatland (Maryland) are transfers who bring a lot of experience. Three true sophomores — linebacker Demarcus Riddick, cornerback Jay Crawford and safety Kaleb Harris — have All-SEC potential, and Freeze loves what he has seen from his freshman class. Linebacker Bryce Deas, cornerback Blake Woodby, safety Anquon Fegans and defensive tackles Malik Autry and Jourdin Crawford could all make immediate impacts. One of the more improved players on defense, according to Freeze, is senior Keyron Crawford, who will play the hybrid “Buck” outside linebacker position. This was the first spring practice with Auburn for Crawford, who transferred from Arkansas State after the spring last year.
“I like our personnel. We’ve been able to get most of the guys we wanted and keep the guys we wanted,” Freeze said. “The retention part is as important as anything.”
Freeze said the addition of Redmond — who helped build LSU’s roster and was named FootballScoop’s Player Personnel Director of the Year in 2022 — soon after the 2024 winter portal closed has freed him up to coach, not be bogged down in discussions about NIL deals, and be more involved in the day-to-day operation of the program.
“I quit talking to players about money. I was walking out there to practice and looking at them different, coaching them different,” Freeze said. “Now, I’m still in the loop obviously, but I tell the players up front, ‘I don’t care what you make.’
“It’s like the old saying, ‘I don’t care what they paid for the horse, but I’ll decide when the horse runs.'”
Freeze, 55, was diagnosed with prostate cancer in February and said in a lot of ways he sees the bigger picture with more clarity than he once did. His doctors told him that his cancer is a low aggressive type, so Freeze will wait until after the season to decide whether he’s going to have surgery. At that point, doctors will reexamine his condition and plot a course of treatment.
“I’m in a good place, and I feel the same way about our football team,” Freeze said. “It’s the most settled since we’ve been here.”
One of his best players, junior defensive end Keldric Faulk, agrees this is the most stable the program has been since he arrived as a four-star recruit from Highland Home, Alabama. But Faulk, who headed up a defense that finished 27th nationally in scoring a year ago, said there’s a big difference in “being settled” and “settling.”
“We expect a lot out of each other, more than anybody else,” Faulk said. “We want everybody to expect a lot out of us because we’re not scared to get onto each other. But the difference is we all know it’s out of love and pushing each other to get to where we want to get, and not out of hate.
“There’s been too much hate — maybe not hate, but disappointment — in the Auburn family lately, and it’s on us to change that.”
