Hugh Freeze, Bobby Petrino get second chances as college football evolves -

I’ve become something of an expert at knowing when Hugh Freeze is lying, which is often. He wasn’t this week.

Auburn’s coach was genuinely flummoxed about college football’s crowded and nearly unworkable calendar, specifically when it comes to recruiting and the transfer portal.

“That’s been one of my issues,” Freeze told reporters. “… When I say that I don’t think I’ve been very good at some of this portal deal, [it] is because I’m really committed to trying to sign the best high school class we can.”

As of this writing, Freeze is closing in on a top-10 high school recruiting class after one full calendar year at Auburn, but the Tigers are basically absent in the transfer portal. Because of the indecipherable, ungoverned structure of college football, high school players are committing to programs during the early signing window this week, at the same time transfer portal players are committing to new schools, at the same time as bowl game practices and preparation for the College Football Playoff, all on the heels of the head coaching hiring-and-firing cycle just a few weeks back.

If that seems like poor planning on the part of college football’s leadership, it’s because there is no leadership. For years we’ve seen slow-creeping change become a bull rush, from name, image and likeness (NIL) expansion to roster-flipping via the transfer portal to television-induced conference cannibalization to playoff expansion pains and even, finally, an NCAA reckoning.

So you want to be an NIL agent? There’s very little stopping you.

The ensuing confusion and a future without a firm blueprint for on-field success could have created a sea change for coaching hires in recent years. With the old rules and best practices fading fast, innovative thinking could have brought new, dynamic hires with ideas about how to succeed in post-portal roster management and realignment.

But we aren’t there yet — not by a long shot. Instead, retreads such as Freeze are left trying to conceive best practices in a world where their calling card for success — and the reason their checkered pasts are ignored — might not hold nearly as much weight in the future.

Freeze “resigned” from Mississippi in 2017, technically for using a school-issued phone for “inappropriate contact” with recruits, which is the college scandal version of Al Capone going to prison for tax fraud. I covered the real scandal surrounding Freeze extensively and dealt with him and his hapless superiors directly during the reporting.

Weirdly enough, Auburn Athletic Director John Cohen — the man who hired Freeze last year — was serving the same role at Mississippi State when the school turned in complaints to the NCAA about alleged rule-breaking and deception within Freeze’s program. Of course, that didn’t matter five years later at Auburn, because the Tigers’ previous coach, Bryan Harsin, failed to recruit high school players at an elite level.

High school recruiting used to be the sole off-the-field gold standard for a quality coaching hire. It’s why Auburn hired Freeze in 2022. (He also had beaten Alabama Coach Nick Saban twice, so that’s gospel on The Plains.)

Freeze was, by my estimation, a pathological liar willing to stack shoddily crafted deceptions to maintain his run in the SEC, all at the expense of others. To date, I’ve seen zero evidence he has changed as a human being. But, man, he can sign a great high school recruiting class and command a strong offense. By the standards of 2014, Freeze checks all the boxes. But across the industry, coaches and their employers are privately admitting they don’t even know what the right boxes are for 2024 and beyond.

Maybe that’s why Freeze felt like a good hire last year. Maybe that’s why Arkansas rehired as its offensive coordinator former head coach Bobby Petrino, the man it fired over a decade ago for orchestrating an affair with a subordinate, a former-volleyball-player-turned-university-employee he lied to his bosses about after a motorcycle wreck. (If you’re new to this sport or only casually invested, please understand that sentence is factually accurate and even weirder than you think.)

Since then, he was fired from Louisville and turned in a lackluster 2023 season as Texas A&M’s play caller. Petrino is a far cry from the offensive genius status he enjoyed in his original Arkansas heyday, but the Hogs still hired him. Why? Because he was good once? I don’t know. I do know college football will only innovate, create or progress when forced to.

Ranking every college football bowl game, from Myrtle Beach to Sugar

The massive difference between those two situations isn’t in the particulars of the scandals preceding these desperate second-chance hires; it’s the positions. Petrino will call plays. Freeze is expected to steward a program trying to keep some kind of pace with Alabama and Georgia, its two hated, dynastic rivals.

High school signing classes are still paramount to success — every recent national champion built its run on a blueprint of elite high school talent developed in a traditional arc of a four-year collegiate system, give or take redshirts or a few transfers. But this ungovernable game ruled territorially by television networks and conference commissioners is changing quickly. It’s impossible to say whether you can win at the level Auburn boosters are expecting without accounting for players leaving at the end of every season.

Texas A&M is a great case study. In February 2022, the Aggies landed seven five-star recruits and completed the highest-rated signing class in history, according to the 247Sports composite score. Less than two years later, a third of that class is gone, with the best players (wide receiver Evan Stewart and defensive lineman Walter Nolen) among them.

So is Florida State. The Seminoles’ almost-playoff-caliber season started with high-profile transfers helping them beat LSU. The idea of Florida State leaning on the portal in a state historically overripe with high school talent seemed anathema just a year or two ago, but Coach Mike Norvell found a way to create complementary systems and resurrect the Seminoles to national prominence, playoff committee be damned.

Freeze could, can and will recruit strong classes of high school players. His classification as an “offensive guru,” is, like Petrino’s, subject to interpretation and holds a short shelf life in the ever-evolving world of schematics. But his unfamiliarity with and lack of credentials in the portal game are growing into legitimate concerns, and he’s not alone. No one, not even overactive portal coaches such as Mississippi’s Lane Kiffin and Colorado’s Deion Sanders, can claim they have mastered the new apparatus, though many are willing to learn on the job.

But for someone such as Freeze, a reality is dawning. He needs to keep his status as an expert in personnel, because he has never achieved anything close to the on-field consistency of a title-caliber coach. His Mississippi teams would routinely lose to lesser opponents the same year they would slay a giant such as Alabama. Auburn has already felt this, having dropped a home game to New Mexico State a week before almost upsetting Saban’s playoff-bound Crimson Tide.

One of the unspoken understandings of big-time college football, especially in the SEC, is that we’re expected to look away from coaches’ obvious moral and ethical failings in favor of their supposed rarefied skill set, something that makes ignoring their past (or current) sins a palatable trade.

It’s why Kiffin, with a chance to deliver Freeze’s old school its first 11-win season in history, seems Teflon-inured to media criticism at the moment: He’s not a fundamentally better person; he’s just winning. Auburn, like every other school in its neighborhood, is more than willing to turn blind eyes — as long as they’re in the direction of a winning football team. Freeze and his ilk have a short time to master a brave new world.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZMCxu9GtqmhqYGeAcH2RaGlpZ5Okua2xxp5kn6efqa%2BiuMtmmqiZk52ytHnSnJinnJGhfA%3D%3D