Hugh Freeze on long trip vs. Cal: Thankful Auburn's 'not in a conference that does that very much'

Auburn head coach Hugh Freeze isn’t looking forward to Auburn’s cross-country trip later this week. The Tigers will travel to Berkeley to take on California at 9:30 p.m. PT on Saturday. On Monday, Freeze broke down the situation on “The Paul Finebaum Show.”

“We’re going to have to go out a day early which I’m not real crazy about, truthfully,” Freeze said. “We didn’t know when the game time would be when we had to schedule all the planes and hotels and now that it’s a night game I kind of wish we were not going until Friday because that’s gonna make for a really long Friday and Saturday there.

“We just got to be very careful not to get our kids lethargic, laying around to much. So, we’ve got a plan the days and our strength staff and nutritionists are doing a good job of giving me input on that, as to what they think it should look like. But, part of the challenge is going out there. I’m thankful we’re not in a conference that does that very much.”

The trip will be the longest Auburn takes this season by a long shot. The 53-year-old head coach pointed out this won’t be the case for other teams, especially in the near future. With recent conference realignment, programs such as Oregon and USC will normally fly 1,000 miles in a weekend.

Luckily for the Tigers, all they have to worry about is the task ahead. And if Auburn’s performance is anything similar to its season opener, the business trip will be more like a vacation. On Sept. 2, Freeze successfully kicked off his time at Auburn with a convincing 59-14 victory over UMass.

As of now, Freeze has devised a game plan in hopes of his success translating to Week 2.

“We’re gonna try to keep them up a little late Thursday night and Friday night and let them try to get their bodies to sleep in longer on both those days,” Freeze said. “I don’t know if that’s the right answer. But we’ve called around and again, this is kind of my first time doing this, but there’s no way around it.

It’s going to affect us. It’s going to affect us for this game, but even more so, Paul, I’m worried about the return trip through the night and it’ll probably be noon on Sunday getting back to Auburn. And that’s our hope and you just don’t know that you regain that night of rest that you lose and it makes that next week even scarier for us to prepare.”