Hugh Freeze shares his vision for future of Auburn football

Hugh Freeze thinks Auburn can be among the best programs in college football. He also knows the Tigers need to do two key things to get there.

First, Freeze and his staff can do better in developing and coaching the team week to week, he said. They also need to recruit better.

“We’re going to be one of the elite programs in the country and I really didn’t have a vision for this year other than to try to get us to a bowl game and to improve us from week to week. Can’t say that every week I felt like that and that’s why you’re hard on yourself, as a coach. And we’ve gotta look at ourselves as coaches, every single week, every single day, and are we demanding a standard that’s going to get us to that elite status? That, combined, obviously, with recruiting classes that are comparable to the upper echelon,” Freeze said.

In a world where Alabama is the measuring stick for Auburn each year and the SEC provides countless challenges beyond, Freeze isn’t mistaking what needs to improve: Recruiting.

He said Auburn can’t continue to recruit classes that aren’t among the Top 25 nationally and, realistically, that are much better than that.

“We can’t recruit in the 30s and 40s and 50s and expect to all of a sudden walk out there and just be great coaches and you’ve gotta — it’s a combination. You’ve got to coach to a certain standard and you’ve got to recruit somewhere close to level, par to the way those guys and some others in this league are,” Freeze said.

The early returns for 2024 are promising, though, as Auburn has the No. 11 ranked signing class for the cycle according to the On3 Industry Rankings.

And Freeze is after these two things in the pursuit of something greater: The belief that Auburn can be elite.

Auburn hasn’t been elite in recent history, with their last double-digit win season coming in 2017. But Freeze is confident that given the state and stature of the program, the Tigers can re-establish themselves as a national power.

“Now being an elite program in this conference, there’s some others too in it. Does that mean you’re gonna win every single game? Probably not, I don’t know if many teams are going to do that anymore truthfully,” Freeze explained. “But we should be in every game and this place and the support it has, the energy, the fan base, the culture, the family feel, the administration alignment, the facilities.”

“Everything is here for us to build and I say build, these things don’t happen over night, to build a championship team and it’s here and we can do it.”