Auburn Analysis

After yet another disappointing loss to a ranked team and yet another anemic performance from Hugh Freeze’s offense, Auburn finds itself at 3-3 and staring down the barrel of a third straight losing season under Hugh Freeze. I spoke my piece on Hugh Freeze last year and don’t really intend on rehashing that discussion here since I think all of the criticisms I made in that piece have held up. Auburn football still sucks for the same reasons because Hugh Freeze is a bad coach who is fundamentally incapable of fixing those problems, and it’s time for Auburn to move on from him.

So that brings us to the big question: who can we hire to get Auburn out of this half-decade-long malaise? After two catastrophically bad hires, Auburn has to nail this coaching search. In my last post on this blog, I gave a few criteria that I thought Auburn needed to look for in the next coach:

1. SEC coaching experience, preferably as a head coach,
2. An organic connection to Auburn, and
3. Experience building a program

I think those criteria are still a good starting point, although I want to rephase #2 a bit. I don’t think the new coach has to have a connection to Auburn per se, but he does have to represent the values that Auburn claims to believe in and needs to contribute positively to the image of the program and the university. The next coach will probably need a year or two to turn around the mess that Harsin and Freeze will have left him, and a prerequisite for patience is buy-in from the alumni and the university community, which Freeze never had due to his various scandals and personal character issues.

The new coach doesn’t have to be an Auburn Man™, but he can’t be someone who detracts from the university’s reputation like Freeze. With that in mind, I’m going to start with the candidates who are unacceptable for non-football reasons and who won’t be considered in this post.

The Non-Starters

1. DJ Durkin. I’ve seen a lot of chatter about firing Freeze mid-season and letting Durkin audition for the job. Ignoring the on-field advisability of this decision, this shouldn’t be a consideration because Durkin would be just as detrimental to the program’s reputation as Freeze, if not more so. I live in the DC area and was living right down the road from College Park during Durkin’s tenure there, so I had an up-close view to the scandal that ensued after the death of University of Maryland player Jordan McNair under Durkin’s leadership and his subsequent dismissal from the university. Durkin has never owned up to his failures in this incident and never properly accepted responsibility for his actions, which made him a natural fit for Hugh Freeze’s staff, but should make him unacceptable to the Auburn community as a leader of this program. DJ Durkin needs to be out the door just as much as Hugh Freeze does.
2. Jon Gruden. I can’t believe I even have to seriously address this, but there seem to be people who unironically think Jon Gruden would be a good coach for this program. Look, let me put it this way: I’m 35 years old. Jon Gruden last coached in college football before I was born. He has no experience working in the current landscape of college football, which is a night-and-day difference versus 2019, much less 1989. UNC is giving us extensive proof that even a great NFL coach can’t just come down to the college level and magically make a program relevant, and Jon Gruden was far from a great NFL coach. He was a ~.500 coach for his career and his only real notable achievement was winning a Super Bowl in 2002 in his first year with a Tampa team that Tony Dungy had built. Outside of that, he was a mediocre at best NFL coach. I think the football argument against him is conclusive enough, but he was also fired from his most recent head coaching gig after he was discovered to have engaged in series of disgusting homophobic and racist email exchanges. Hiring someone with that kind of scandal in their recent past would be just as divisive as the Freeze hire and would generate even more negative coverage of the Auburn football program. It’s a terrible idea both on and off the field.

There are other people out there who would be obviously unacceptable for personal character reasons (Art Briles, Urban Meyer, etc.) but I haven’t seen even the dumbest of the dumb internet fans advocate for them, and I think the cases against them are self-evident, so I’m going to move on to some actual good candidates.

The Top-Tier Candidates

I want to be clear that I don’t think the guys I’m going to list in this tier are the only good options available to Auburn, but they are guys who I think would be widely agreed to be excellent hires by those with any modicum of ball knowledge and would be positively received outside of the program as well. Also note that this list is not in any particular order.

1. Rhett Lashlee (Head Coach, SMU): Rhett Lashlee has gotten a good deal of buzz among Auburn fans for fairly obvious reasons: he’s done an excellent job with SMU in their first foray into power conference football since the collapse of the Southwest Conference, taking them to an ACC title game appearance and a CFP appearance in their first season in the conference. He’s also got a clear connection to Auburn, having served as the Tigers’ OC during the early, fun years of Gus Malzahn’s tenure. Like his mentor, he espouses an up-tempo, run-and-play-action style of football that would be a welcome change after Hugh Freeze’s disastrous attempts to build his offenses around the “talents” of Payton Thorne and Jackson Arnold The appeal of someone who’s not only a successful P4 head coach but who was also involved in a positive, successful period of Auburn football is pretty obvious, and I think most knowledgeable fans and outside observers would agree that Lashlee would be a home-run hire for Auburn. However, prying him away from SMU might be tough, given that SMU has extremely deep pockets and Auburn probably can’t just outbid them for Lashlee’s services. Auburn does have the advantage of being in the SEC rather than the ACC, and unlike SMU, will undoubtedly remain among the “haves” no matter what kind of upheaval college football experiences in the near future. Would Lashlee jump ship to Auburn? I’m not sure, but it would be a great thing for Auburn football’s future if he did.
2. Jon Sumrall (Head Coach, Tulane): Jon Sumrall has gotten a lot of buzz as one of the up and coming head coaching talents in college football and will likely have his pick of P4 jobs this offseason. His Tulane team is one of the premier G5 programs in the country and still has a shot at the G5 playoff bid for this season. He has SEC coaching experience at Kentucky and Ole Miss and has experience coaching and recruiting in Alabama from his two stints at Troy. The main issue here is that, as I noted above, Sumrall will have his pick of P4 jobs this offseason. Florida will likely be looking for a new head coach this year, and all of a sudden it seems like Penn State will as well. Would Auburn be the most attractive option among those? I’m not sure.
3. Eli Drinkwitz (Head Coach, Missouri): The head coach of Auburn’s next opponent, Eli Drinkwitz is an appealing option for many of the same reasons as Rhett Lashlee: a guy off the Gus Malzahn tree who has experience working on the coaching staff of a championship-winning Auburn team, in this case as a QC assistant on the 2010 national championship team. Philosophically, Drinkwitz has diverged from Gus a lot more than Lashlee has, building his offense as a wide zone-oriented system, an approach that is less common at the college level but would nonetheless be a good fit for Auburn, as he would restore a run-first ethos to the offense. I wrote at length about this style of offense as practiced by Jeff Grimes at Baylor back on the old College and Magnolia blog (RIP, comrade) but it seems like the Fanpost archive there is no longer accessible, so I can’t link it here. Ian Boyd wrote a good two-part series on the wide zone system in college football that you can read here. Like Lashlee, the question with Drinkwitz isn’t whether he’d be a good hire, but whether he’d actually leave his current gig for Auburn. He’s led Mizzou to back-to-back ten-win seasons and is well on his way to a third with the Tigers sitting at 5-1 after a narrow loss to Alabama yesterday. That loss might actually be the key to Auburn’s pitch: Mizzou simply has a lower ceiling as a program than Auburn does, given its lesser resources, facilities, and recruiting base. Would Drinkwitz give up a high-floor job in the interest of a higher ceiling at Auburn? I don’t know, but it can’t hurt to try.
4. Alex Golesh (Head Coach, USF): Alex Golesh, who rose to prominence as Josh Heupel’s OC at Tennessee, has quickly taken USF from the dregs of the AAC to one of the country’s premier G5 programs, largely thanks to his high-scoring veer-and-shoot offense. Hugh Freeze dipped his toes into the veer-and-shoot world with Philip Montgomery as his OC, but Auburn never really implemented the system fully and didn’t reap much benefit of it. Golesh has proven that he can successfully implement the system on his own and build a program around it quickly. Tennessee has demonstrated that a veer-and-shoot offense can be sustainable in the SEC, and after watching Auburn’s offense sputter and fail to get out of first gear for years, a team that could put up points the way Golesh’s offenses at Tennessee and UCF have would be a welcome change of pace. I think this would be by far the riskiest of the four coaches I’ve listed here, however, since Golesh is only halfway through his second season as a head coach and hasn’t necessarily proven that he’s capable of sustained success over a longer period. He would certainly be an exciting hire, and would be the most gettable of the four coaches on this list, but he would probably have the lowest floor as well.

Other Names

I think the four names listed above should be the starting point for Auburn’s coaching search, but I have seen a few other names thrown around that I wanted to at least address here. Again, these are in no particular order.

1. Glenn Schumann (DC, Georgia): On the one hand, I get the love for Schumann: he’s another guy off the Saban-Smart tree, who’s been around their successful programs and been on the staff of championship teams. And hiring a Georgia DC has worked out pretty well for Oregon in recent years. On the other hand, I think it’s odd that people have latched onto him given that, from what I can tell, Georgia fans really aren’t impressed with him and want him gone, rather than being afraid someone is going to poach him. It’s also odd to me given that, if Auburn wanted to poach a Georgia coaching staff member, there’s Schumann’s co-DC, former Auburn safety Travaris Robinson, right there. I don’t know if T-Rob is ready to be a head coach or would even want the job, but that’s kind of beside the point. Hiring a coordinator with no HC experience is a major risk in a situation where Auburn really can’t afford a low-floor hire. I think there’s an element of cargo-cult science going on here; hiring Georgia’s DC worked for Oregon, so hiring Georgia’s DC must be a recipe for success, right? Unfortunately, that’s not how it actually works, and I don’t really see the appeal of Schumann when there are significantly more proven options available.
2. James Franklin (HC, Penn State (for now)): 2025 has been…an adventure for Penn State head coach Frames Janklin James Franklin. Penn State started the season in the top 5 of the preseason polls, coming off a playoff appearance and with national championship aspirations. After a close loss to Oregon, however, the wheels have rapidly come off for Penn State, with back-to-back humiliating losses to arguably the two worst teams in the B1G, UCLA and Northwestern, and now there are credible rumors that Franklin’s job is in serious danger. Franklin had success at Vanderbilt back in the day and I still think he’s a good coach who brings a high floor to a program, but his inability to win the big games at Penn State has reached meme-level infamy, and I don’t think he’s going to land on his feet immediately if Penn State cans him this year. (EDIT: LMAO Penn State fired him less than five minutes after I hit “publish” on this post, impeccable timing)
3. Clark Lea (HC, Vanderbilt): I see the appeal here. Clark Lea has turned Vanderbilt from the laughingstock of the SEC to a team that’s hanging around the periphery of the top 25 consistently and has beaten both Alabama and Auburn. Lea is a Vanderbilt alum though, and I can’t imagine he’s looking to jump ship. Also, this might be a hot take, but I think Jerry Kill is doing a lot of the heavy lifting in turning Vanderbilt into a competent program on the offensive side of the ball. I think he’d be a good hire on paper but I don’t think he’s likely to be an option.
4. Curt Cignetti (Head Coach, Indiana): Curt Cignetti has pulled off one of the most stunning turnarounds in the history of college football, taking an Indiana team that has basically never been relevant in football to the playoff in his first season and taking them to a #3 ranking this season after a huge win over Oregon at Autzen. However, I think the problem here is obvious: there’s no way he’d leave Indiana, where he’s already set for life. Also, he’s 64 years old, so I think he’s going to be content to see out his career there. Great coach, almost certainly not an option for Auburn

Random Names

Here’s a couple more guys who are out there but probably won’t get serious consideration and might not even be on the table.

1. Cadillac Williams (RB Coach, Las Vegas Raiders): The only time in the last five years when the otherwise putrid vibes around the Auburn football program were turned around was during Cadillac Williams’ brief tenure as the Tigers’ interim coach after Bryan Harsin was dismissed in the middle of the 2022 season. He remained on Hugh Freeze’s staff early on before being dismissed after the 2023 season under murky circumstances. To be fair, Cadillac was a bad fit for Hugh Freeze’s staff since he was an actual Auburn man who accepted responsibility when the team failed instead of passing the buck onto someone else, so that breakup may have been inevitable. If those murky circumstances were actually the result of some wrongdoing on Cadillac’s part, then I think it’s unlikely he’d be considered for the HC job this time around, and you can legitimately question whether he’s ready to be an SEC head coach with no HC or even OC experience anyway, but he’s a name that could conceivably come up in these discussions.
2. Todd Monken (OC, Baltimore Ravens): I haven’t seen anything to suggest this is even within the realm of possibility, especially given that he just signed an extension with the Ravens, but given the corvids’ struggles on offense after Lamar Jackson went down with an injury, there’s a nonzero chance he’ll be job hunting this offseason. He won two titles as the OC at Georgia and did an excellent job turning around Southern Miss after Ellis Johnson crashed their program in 2012. I don’t think this is a realistic option, but a guy can dream.
3. Gus Malzahn (OC, Florida State and former Auburn Head Coach): lol

Anyway, these were just some disorganized thoughts on the future of Auburn’s program to prove that I’m still alive and the blog isn’t dead. I don’t really plan on writing any more about the program under Hugh Freeze’s leadership because frankly, who cares. Freeze isn’t going to turn this around and I think all but his most delusional defenders have realized that, and blogging about the Xs and Os of a team whose head coach is about to be fired feels like writing about the engineering of the Titanic’s engines after it had already hit the iceberg. Once Freeze is officially gone and we have some actual solid intel on where Auburn football might be going, I’ll be back with some more concrete analysis.