Hugh Freeze explains his decision to give up playcalling duties

New Auburn coach Hugh Freeze is considered one of the best offensive coaches in college football, but he made the decision to give up playcalling duties with the Tigers.

Why, exactly?

“I think there’s a point in time is your whole concern is what is best for whatever program you’re leading,” Freeze said. “There’s so many dynamics to running a program at this level today that are maybe a little bit new and different.”

NIL and the transfer portal, for starters, have increased the time demand on coaches, as they’re routinely putting out fires around the clock.

With that dynamic in mind, Freeze feels like his time is better spent on making sure the program is taken care of from those angles instead of spending time drawing up plays or crafting a gameplan. Thus it was a simple decision to give up playcalling duties.

“I’m very convinced that the culture in the locker room for teams that have talent will, if the culture’s right, it’s going to pay great dividends,” Freeze said. “And I think there’s an enormous amount of time that I can put into that to help us.”

Freeze will still have a large say

Though he’s made the decision to give up playcalling duties, Freeze won’t be entirely without influence in the offensive gameplan.

There will even be times he takes over playcalling temporarily.

“It’s like I’ve told everyone in the room with Philip (Montgomery) and Kent (Austin) and other guys that have helped me in the past, I’m still going to call a share of them, depending on what that looks like, probably in the warp tempo world,” Freeze said. “We really don’t know what it looks like, but I have great confidence in Philip as a play-caller and I have great confidence in he and Kent and Jake (Thornton) and Ben (Aigamaua), Cadillac (Williams) and Marcus (Davis) and those guys that we brought to help formulate a gameplan should I need to be elsewhere making sure that our program is right.”

But Freeze wants to have enough freedom and time to handle anything else that pops up.

“It’s really just the total landscape of college football and running a program is if I really do what I’ve done in the past and spend all of my time game-planning, preparing to call a game only, I’m not sure that’s best for Auburn,” Freeze said.