Hugh Freeze recaps big win over Texas A&M, looks ahead to second Iron Bowl

Auburn coach Hugh Freeze on Monday addressed the media following the Tigers’ big win over No. 15 Texas A&M.

The Tigers’ second-year coach looked back on the 43-41 four-overtime win and also looked ahead to the Iron Bowl on Saturday.

Opening remarks…

“Good morning. Thank you for being here. First and foremost, I want to wish all of you a Happy Thanksgiving week with you and your families. Hope you all have time to really reflect on the blessings we all have in life. We get to do that together with our team and our families. One of my favorite things to do, truthfully, is the Thanksgiving meal with our team and our families here, so I hope you get to enjoy that, also.

“Secondly, our thoughts and prayers are with the (Lloyd) Nix family, losing an incredible Auburn man. Quarterback in ’57, I think he was probably the Pat Sullivan of that day and who every young Auburn man wanted to be. I know that they will celebrate his life tomorrow. Certainly wish I could be there, got Iron Bowl week and it’s kind of difficult. Just know that our thoughts and prayers are with them as they celebrate a magnificent man who impacted many in this Auburn family for sure.

“What a win Saturday night. I think Jarquez (Hunter) and Cam (Coleman) are getting some national awards. Very deserving of that. Glad to see our seniors get to celebrate their last game in Jordan-Hare the way they did. They had to fight for it. My grandfather used to say, ‘There’s no mountains being climbed on the smooth side.’ We’ve had to climb some rocky trail. It’s fun to see them keep fighting, truthfully. I know a lot of people in life give up, and this team hasn’t. They continue to fight, and they had to fight, scratch and claw to find a way to win a football game against a very good football team in Texas A&M. Just couldn’t be prouder for those seniors that they get to go out that way. Happy for our fans that they get to enjoy that type of environment.

“Saturday night in Jordan-Hare is always special, and that will be one that goes down in many, many people’s memory, including mine, as one of the special times in coaching. It was a solid effort. We struggled to get off the field on third down, some of that was us, some of that, give credit to them. The quarterback played outstanding and kept plays alive, made great throws, and we messed up some things, too. But some of it was them. Offensively, when we were able to win first down, we were really good. Sometimes we didn’t, and it was them, and sometimes I could say we didn’t execute well or didn’t have a great call. But I thought the effort from our kids was fantastic. Thought the start was great. We’re going to need another effort like that this week in the Iron Bowl against another really, really good football team who has a remarkable quarterback who makes a difference when you play them. Looking forward to it, though, and excited about another opportunity for these kids to prove they’re getting better.”

Auburn game planning for Alabama QB

On game planning for Alabama QB Jalen Milroe…

“You look at the good. That’s what he’s capable of. I hope we get the lesser-than version. In a game like this, I would think – I don’t know him personally, but everything you see, he’s made of the right stuff and he competes at a high, high level in some of the biggest games. I would think he’d be determined to bounce back. So I think we’ve got to plan to get his best. I feel confident they’ll use him as a runner. That’s when they’ve been the most dangerous, and we’ve got to have a plan for that.”

On considering going for two on the first touchdown in OT vs. Texas A&M…

“Truthfully, on the road, probably would have done that. In all transparency, my mind was so cluttered at that moment, I didn’t want to make a bad decision. I had to put so much into getting to that point, if that makes sense. The no timeouts (in the fourth quarter), the drive, we’ve used quite a few things, and I had no timeouts, and you’re going to have a 25-second play clock coming right at you. Then if you don’t like it, you don’t have a timeout, and it just felt rushed to me. Usually when you make decisions in a manner when you feel rushed, they tend not to work out. So really, it was… I was so consumed by just getting to that point that I wasn’t prepared in my mind, right or wrong. Maybe that makes me less than or something, I don’t know. But I just wasn’t going to feel rushed to make a call at that point.”

On KeAndre Lambert-Smith’s game-winning catch in the fourth OT…

“It was a play we worked every single Thursday against our defense. We always do ‘last play’ scenarios from different yard lines, and that’s a play we worked from inside the five a lot. Believe it or not, he’s probably made a catch like that against them eight to 10 times. So I wasn’t surprised, but it was a really nice throw, too. It had to be high, and it had to be where it was. We had some answers if it was a different coverage, too. That was the first option, and then the backline is last option and that he’s got to win. It was a heck of throw and a heck of a catch for sure. I thought you were going to talk about the mesh route he caught that he got down to the two-yard line where we should have had a chance to score a touchdown.”

Message to DBs: Forget the last one

On preparing the secondary to face Alabama’s receivers…

“We’ve played some really good receivers here as of late. I thought that Texas A&M were very talented also, and certainly Alabama’s are. They’ve got three guys that I think are all really legit SEC receivers. Of course Ryan (Williams) is a kid we recruited really hard. I know how talented he is also. The message is the same – we have to do our assignments on every play. Forget the last one, have a short memory when you are a DB. You just can’t hold onto it, you’ve got to play the next one. You’re on an island a lot of the times back there with an athletic quarterback and athletic receivers that are going to make plays. Just got to hope we can make our share, also.” 

On generating explosive plays on the road…

“Just film study. You’ve got to have good designs, and they have got to be called at the right time against the right defense. That’s not always the easiest thing. You can have some that have a chance to work against multiple things but usually the biggest ones need to be called against the right coverages at the right time, without pressure. All those are, sometimes, a guessing game, but I think we do have a knack for having good designs for some. We will need those to go multiple drives. You are not going to drive the football 75 yards every time without some explosive plays. That will be a big part of winning in Tuscaloosa on Saturday.”

On how recruits reacted to Saturday’s win…

“That’s the one thing I miss about not being on the Twitter world, I don’t get to see all that. I really don’t know what’s going on. The ones I had conversations with after the game were all incredible, and then continuing into yesterday with the official visits. I think certainly it helped our cause of showing this is what Auburn can be again, and you can beat top-15 teams. That’s a team that’s playing to go to the SEC Championship game. And I think they noticed all the close losses, but now they get to see, not only what the Auburn fan base is like and the support we have and the energy that we bring. I think they see too, probably the best testimony, the locker room. Look at our kids and how they continue to fight and stay together and continue to care. That’s a culture that I think some of these ‘25 class guys are drawn to. I’m not saying we are the only ones that have that, but that’s another thing for sure that they are noticing.”

On what the Alabama game means to an Auburn head coach…

“There is no bigger game on the schedule. To sit in this seat and to lose one like we did last year still doesn’t sit right. I know that the Auburn faithful had to endure that, and we want to change that feeling in this building and for our great fan base in this state. It’s a tall task. Their roster is deeper, and it was deeper last year too. We had a shot to win it, so we have to find a way to keep ourselves in it and give us a chance to win and try to change that and start making it a regular expectation.”

On how Auburn’s freshmen have grown throughout the season…

“An enormous amount, I’ve seen it every week. I mean the improvement that Malik Blockton, Amaris Williams, (Demarcus) Riddick, Jay Crawford, Kensley Louidor-Faustin, they’re getting better and better each week. Offensively, I think our receivers were talented and good, but they’re starting to learn how to play the game better and understand some coverages and depths of routes. I’ve seen the growth, and they are getting better, and hopefully, we will continue to improve this week.”

On how things have changed with signing day being earlier this year…

“It’s interesting. I’m for this being able to stay with your team as the season is over in December and, honestly, to take a breather a bit at night and be with your family and not be on the road every single day doing business is something I want. Obviously with new things there’s always some things you don’t like. You find out real quick that it’s kind of advantageous to have a home game the last weekend. Every other year we’re going to be on the short end of that, where kids are going to be at other people’s campuses that last weekend before Signing Day and not on ours, that’s a little negative. You just have to hope you can hold on through the last storm that comes. I’m excited about it, truthfully, to be able to be around our team. You have to continue to recruit them and kind of not be all over the place in the month of December.”

Believe

On the team believing they can win in Tuscaloosa…

“You have zero chance of winning if you don’t have a belief that you can do it. I think somewhere along the line in these difficult losses we started believing more, and hope has become a real thing that you can go on the field and be a good football team. You’ve played close games with them, but you can win them. It’s going to take an amount of that belief going into Tuscaloosa to win. It’s not an easy place to play. No road game is. Just look at the SEC every week. It’s hard enough to win at home but you go on the road, it’s really difficult. That’s a tall task that we have, but it better start with us believing that we can go in there and win.”

On the difference in Alabama not having Nick Saban on the sideline this season…

“I have on my list to call him and make sure that he is out of town and not in town this week. First, I have great respect for Kalen DeBoer. We go way back to NAIA days. He has had success everywhere he’s been, and Kane Wommack, obviously, my ties with his family. His father was my DC for years, and I gave Kane his first job at Ole Miss. He has a wonderful family. I have great respect for those guys also, and they got one of my former guys as the defensive analyst there so he knows all our stuff. We have to combat that again this week. So, I have great respect for Kalen and Kane and that staff there. Obviously, Nick (Saban) is a friend of mine, but also I loved competing against him because he is arguably the best that’s done it. I know a lot of people say, ‘Well, he always had good rosters.’ Well, that’s part of being a good coach, you go get good rosters. He was always very good at that. It’s different for sure. The scheme is a little different, it’s not the same as what you would see under a Nick defense. I mean, there are some similarities, there are always going to be some, but it’s not the same, to answer your question.” 

On conversations with Payton Thorne as this season comes to an end…

“It’s funny you ask that. Most of our conversations now…  you know, there will be some ball talk obviously in the meetings and stuff, but most of it has just been about the mental toughness that he and I have kind of endured together to get through a lot of things. He could have gone a lot of different directions, and credit to him and his makeup and his determination and mental toughness to not let other people define him. To continue to go to work and get better and improve and help others around him improve, so most of our talks have just been about that. It was a relief for he and I both. He has really played well in a lot of games since the Cal game, and he just had not got the result for one reason or the other. His play has been pretty consistent. I don’t keep up with the stats, I don’t know where he is at in the SEC passing or efficiency, but it has to be up there, I would think. So I am happy for him because he has endured. I know you all get tired of hearing me talk about life, but that’s really what I believe in. I know I will get judged by wins and losses and what the scoreboard says and I get that, I signed up for it. At the end of the day, man, 15 years from now these young men will remember probably more about what I said about what we are learning and what we are going through – good, bad or indifferent – and how I modeled that in relationships with them maybe more than the wins and losses. Proud to see Payton endure well and finish well.”

On his relationship with Kane Wommack and Texas A&M’s defensive front being good preparation for Alabama…

“Kane goes way back. His dad (Dave Wommack) was my first defensive coordinator when I got my first head job. Dave is an incredible friend. We’ve got Dave’s daughter here with us. She’s married to my strength coach so it’s a whole family affair for them. They’ll have an interesting Thanksgiving, I’m sure. Kane does a great job. Their front looks a lot like Texas A&M’s for sure. Big, athletic, strong. They may be a little longer at linebacker actually than A&M. It was a good prep for us to face what we faced last week for sure.”

On struggles in the punting game vs. Texas A&M…

“That’s the first time (Oscar Chapman) has done a couple things like that. I wasn’t happy with him. I love Oscar. He’s been very consistent and I expect him to bounce back well. And Ian (Vachon) bounced back from what I thought was an awful attempt at a field goal. He had ice in his veins when it counted. So I think Oscar will do the same.”