SEC Media Days: Hugh Freeze Discusses Difficulty Of Restoring 'Faith' To Auburn Football In Wake Of Bryan Harsin

NASHVILLE — Hugh Freeze is back in the SEC for the first time since his ousting at Ole Miss in 2016. The 53-year-old will begin his first season as head coach of Auburn football against UMass on September 2.

It's good to be back!

In the meantime, Freeze is working hard to bring "faith" back to the Tigers program. It has been a big point of emphasis over the course of his first eight months on The Plains.

Freeze's predecessor, Bryan Harsin, spent just two years with the program and won nine of 21 games. There was a palpable lack of excitement surrounding the hire before the former Boise State coach stepped in the door and it continued throughout his brief tenure.

Auburn got tired of Harsin, and fast. Boosters tried to get him out with false stories about off-field affairs, but failed. The school opened an investigation into the culture under his leadership, but found nothing.

Harsin managed to keep his job throughout all of the chaos. It was the consistent losing that saw the school kick him to the curb before the end of the 2022 season.

And then, despite controversy surrounding the decision, Freeze was hired at the end of November.

Hugh Freeze is tasked with restoring faith.

Although Harsin was able to stay at Auburn longer than anyone would have expected, it came with a cost. The entire program was deflated. There was no hope.

In that lack of ambition lied Freeze's first order of business. He needed to bring that energy back.

He spoke to the challenge at SEC Media Days on Tuesday. When he stepped into the job on Day 1, Freeze knew that he had to rebuild the culture his way, not Harsin's way— though he chose not to address the previous coaching staff.

Our culture is based on faith, attitude, and mental toughness, integrity and love and what do those things mean to us. Faith, obviously that's a word that can mean a lot of different things for a lot of different people, and certainly it means something for me, and the bottom line is if we aregoing to reestablish Auburn being what Auburn should be, we must have faith in each other.

That "faith" is three-fold, and he felt as though it was no longer there when he arrived. Freeze was not even talking about faith in the Lord, which is something that he keeps at the forefront as well.

That means faith in our administration, that means faith in our coaching staff, faith in the guy that lines up next to you, and that's probably where it needed to begin, because I think that was lost for whatever reason, and I'm not one to -- when I don't walk in someone else's shoes, I'm very careful not to judge or not to have an opinion that's not based in something that I really don't know.
But I did sense coming in that the faith in the whole family of Auburn football was fractured somewhat, and I think that is where I had to start in trying to repair that.

There are a lot of question marks surrounding Auburn in 2023. Freeze even went so far as to say that he has never had so many unknowns entering fall camp.

With that being said, before he could get to those answers, bringing faith back to the Tigers came first.