1 week Ago By JUSTIN LEE [email protected]
It’s been true for the last 120 years of Auburn football, and it doesn’t change overnight. Auburn wins, we’ve all always said, with defense and with running the ball. In his short time at Auburn, Hugh Freeze has sold many fans on a lovely dream: The RPO opens up, it’s been said, with talented wide receivers.
With the most-hyped-up group of wide receivers ever on campus, it was time to let it fly, to overturn all the old notions, to change the perception of Auburn football and turn Auburn into a wide-open, high-flying, lethal, explosive offensive ariel attack. But it isn’t. Auburn lost to Cal.
And did so because it’s still playing terrible offense under Freeze in his second year. As it turns out, the problem wasn’t the lack of receiver talent. The problem was the offensive line, which is the same thing everyone around here’s been saying since 2018.
A not-so-stunning realization, worth repeating: Auburn football wins playing defense and running the ball. The next “Freeze Four” worth getting excited about should play left tackle, left guard, right guard and right tackle. To be frank, it should’ve been the first.
Freeze is still recruiting extremely well. He’s reeled in several highly touted targets, even if Auburn’s gameday preparation has left much to be desired the last two years. He can still turn his tenure around — Auburn can still win big games this season, even.
No one should leap to any extreme conclusions after one game, but there are few conclusions that can be made: Auburn’s receivers won’t flip the offense around overnight. Cal’s defense caught more Auburn passes than Cam Coleman did on Saturday, anyway. Auburn’s offense was so bad a quarterback change wouldn’t help it too much either.
Making excuses for the coach and saying he can’t possibly win without a five-star top talent at quarterback isn’t a valid way to build a program, either. What Freeze will have to do is what Auburn’s defense did at halftime on Saturday: adjust. He’ll have to look at the holes in his own plan to build around receivers and the RPO, and change.
He’ll have to do things he doesn’t want to do — maybe pull one of those touted receivers off the field and replace them with a blocking back — because that’s just the way the game of football goes sometimes. It’s been true for 120 years. It isn’t changing for anybody, any time soon.
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