šŸˆ šŸ”„ Hot Seat 2025 / Coaching Carousel: Golesh to AU, Kiffin to LSU.

bama alum said:
Read that article on fb earlier today. He's not wrong. The barn has to be delusional if it thinks it's getting a HR hire.
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IMO their ceiling is Sumrall or Brohm. I think both would be very good hires. Doesnā€™t mean either would excel there, but both are good coaches. My hope is they end up with Dillingham, Franklin, Durkin, etc.
 
www.nytimes.com

Of course Hugh Freeze failed at Auburn, plus CFB rankings preview

Until Saturday is The Athletic's free CFB newsletter.
www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com

A completely predictable downfall

On Sept. 19, 2015, a football bounced off a helmet. Where would it land?

The ball, desperately chucked by Ole Miss QB Chad Kelly, somehow wound up in the hands of WR Quincy Adeboyejo, who took it 66 yards, giving the No. 15 Rebels a 24-10 lead at No. 2 Alabama. They held on to win 43-37, ending Bama's 17-game home winning streak and ā€” far more shockingly ā€” beating Nick Saban for a second year in a row.

The Ole Miss coach who'd done the impossible in those two years, forever ending the Saban dynasty and establishing himself as a table-turning genius: Hugh Freeze.

Hmm.

Except Bama would win the national title three months later, its offense having been modernized by second-year OC Lane Kiffin. And Freeze would follow the 10-3 glory of 2015 by going 5-7 in 2016, then see those five wins (and 22 others from his five years at Ole Miss) vacated by the NCAA after he'd already "resigned" amid a different ongoing scandal. Saban would then win two more titles.

So in hindsight, maybe that football doinking off a Rebel's helmet in 2015, which had made the difference in a win at Bama, didn't actually change all that much about the world. Just one of the million random electron-firings that happen every Saturday.

That's unless you're an Auburn booster in late 2022, sick of Saban's third straight win over your Tigers and tired of him having won five national titles for your archrival since Cam Newton's in 2010.

If you're that Auburn booster, you think back to that time an SEC coach beat your bully twice in a row (nevermind how it happened). You notice the Saban-beater has since won some games in his comeback stint at Liberty (nevermind him having faced some of FBS' easiest schedules there). So you have your Tigers hire Freeze, supposedly Saban's personal kryptonite, or at least the beneficiary of a really cool helmet bounce seven years and numerous scandals prior.

This past Sunday, the shock wasn't that Auburn fired Hugh Freeze after his 10-3 home loss to 3-5 Kentucky and 6-16 SEC record during his three-year blip as head coach. Honestly, great call by his haters. The shock is that there ended up being no shock at all.

No scandal this time. No courting a bigger job. Not even any searching of his own name on Twitter for hours so he could whine in the DMs of strangers, his previously infamous hobby. Just fired for bad football, not even going 15-19 in an exciting way worthy of Auburn's chaotic heritage. Three points!

Being bad at football and getting yelled at for playing golf instead of recruiting, to be fair.

Everything you can say now about what went wrong for Freeze ā€” his offense is no longer state of the art, his final recruiting class ranks 12th in the SEC, his entire deal appears powered by self-absolving excuses, etc. ā€” is something you likely foresaw when Auburn hired him in 2022.

What's the lesson here? Well, Auburn hired a scandals-within-scandals coach, meaning the PR department's takeaways start with, "Try not to hire any scandals-within-scandals coaches." āœļø

But in strictly football terms: When you're evaluating a coach, explore how much differently his career would look if one wayward bounce of the football had changed along the way.

If that 2015 ball had kaboinged in a different direction on that third down, Bama probably would've beaten Ole Miss, making Freeze just one of several upstarts who'd been quickly smacked back into place by Saban. Freeze would've had a solid (on-field) stint in Oxford, but never would've had a top-10 finish or won a New Year's Six bowl.

If Chad Kelly's blindly airmailed 2015 prayer had boi-oi-oi-oinged differently, would Auburn VIPs really have fallen over themselves in 2022 to hire a coach whose Liberty Flames had just lost 49-14 to New Mexico State? Nah. If not for that richochet, Freeze would've been 1-4 against Bama at the time, a Kevin Sumlin with NCAA troubles in place of a Heisman-winner.

While Freeze has argued he shouldn't be judged by his worst moments as a person, I'll argue this: He never should've been judged by his best moment as a coach.
 
Rolltide24 said:
The Hill! My alma mater.
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Mars Hill has turned into an absolute power in football since they started playing about 10-12 years ago. I am not sure of the exact date. I was home last week, Florence, and saw a good article in the Times Daily about Hazelwood and Hatton. Hazelwood, Colbert County High School and Courtland, all located witin 6 miles of each other owned north Alabama football back in the day. I still think Hazelwood has the most state championship trophies. A lot of college talent came out of those schools.
 
alabama mike said:
Mars Hill has turned into an absolute power in football since they started playing about 10-12 years ago. I am not sure of the exact date. I was home last week, Florence, and saw a good article in the Times Daily about Hazelwood and Hatton. Hazelwood, Colbert County High School and Courtland, all located witin 6 miles of each other owned north Alabama football back in the day. I still think Hazelwood has the most state championship trophies. A lot of college talent came out of those schools.
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They have had very strong teams to be such a young program. Courtland and Hazelwood were beasts when I was in school.

I was sunning poolside in a resort a few summers ago. Guy in the pool wades over wearing a Bama hat. I give the Roll Tide which he returns. We chat and he says he went to Courtland. Then find out he was my same grade/age. I mentioned how we followed them so closely because they dominated and we didnā€™t have a football team. He said they followed our basketball team as well. Pretty cool discussion. Then I mentioned if only met one kid from Courtland, at Boys State. Running back/LB named Ivan. Said I remember him being a beast on the field. He said, thatā€™s me, Iā€™m Ivan. Really cool! We talked for a long time about their football program. His senior year, they only had 6 games during the season because all their non-district opponents cancelled their games. Didnā€™t want to play them. They had great teams to be a tiny 1A school.
 
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