Note: rankings for this series are set by TERSE, a D1 college football metric designed to imitate human rankings. These will shift as the offseason goes on, with more transfer data becoming available over time.
2023 marks the fourth year in which I’ve published a series of previews leading up to the college football season. I’m satisfied with the format I’ve settled on, and I don’t expect to make major changes to it next year unless some unforeseen event makes the writing I currently do impossible, but it’s taken a while to get to this point. Consistency has never been a hallmark of this series—it’s taken a substantially different form in every season I’ve run it. The 2020 previews were mostly focused on program trajectory with cursory looks at offensive and defensive returns; the 2021 previews pivoted to a heavy positional focus; the 2022 previews moved to Twitter and were pared down to focus almost solely on the upcoming season; and, of course, for 2023 I’ve limited myself to teams making new hires, ensuring I’m able to devote proper time to exploring what’s going on amid this time of transition. It’s been a journey.
One of the very few things that’s remained consistent over that time period is the tone of these previews. With very rare exceptions—usually on principle, as with every Liberty preview, or in occasional lapses of judgement1—my goal is to approach each program with the mindset of a somewhat optimistic fan. College football coverage often seems to forget that the people who read about specific teams tend to like those teams, and relentlessly focusing on the negatives isn’t going to draw anybody in. I might have qualms about a program’s current weakness (USF) or its poor process (UNLV) or its lack of investment (North Texas), but who in FBS doesn’t have something going for them? Stories that harp on how the Charlottes and Stanfords of the world are at a fundamental disadvantage ignore that overcoming fundamental disadvantages is where so much of college football’s joy and wonder comes from. It’s a great sport because we convince ourself that those teams can compete, and every so often we’re proven right.
With all of that being said, how exactly am I supposed to find a positive angle for Auburn? This isn’t anywhere close to the worst team in this series—in fact, it’s probably one of the best, nearly cracking the top 50 in TERSE—but it’s by far the biggest mess in FBS. Being even a bit of a Tigers fan, as I am through family affiliation, feels embarrassing, no matter how much I love them.
For lack of a better place to start, let’s recap recent history. It’s been just over a thousand days since the start of Auburn’s 2020 season, when (aside from the ongoing global pandemic) all seemed to be more or less normal. The Tigers were coming off a solid 2019 campaign in which they’d gone 9-4 and only lost games to top-twenty teams, including championship-bound #4 LSU and two-loss-bound #10 Florida and #4 Georgia. For anyone to even consider firing Gus Malzahn in the next year seemed absurd.
Less than three months later, he was gone. Auburn went 6-5, suffering three losses to top-five opponents, also falling to #14 Northwestern in their bowl, and seemingly basing the entirety of their decision to move on from Malzahn upon an early loss to 2-8 South Carolina. This might have been forgivable, given the Tigers’ high expectations for success relative to their rivals, if not for the massively extenuating circumstances and the staggering $21.7 million buyout they paid to get rid of one of the most successful coaches in school history.
There were, in my personal opinion, far too few questions asked about this decision. The fact that Auburn had fallen behind the likes of Georgia and Florida—perennial top-ten programs with inherent advantages given their recruiting base, storied history, and lack of immediate in-state competition—was usually considered enough justification for the move. But I think I could’ve forgiven it if not for what happened next: the unbelievably disastrous tenure of Bryan Harsin.
Things got off to a bad start before Harsin’s first game, as he refused to state whether he was vaccinated against COVID-19 amid Auburn’s mandate that all school employees receive the vaccine by December. Then the Tigers hit the field and went 6-7, their first losing season in nearly a decade (not coincidentally dating back to the last year before Malzahn’s arrival). There were excusable losses, as ever—hard to complain about dropping games to #10 Penn State, #2 Georgia, #14 Texas A&M, #3 Alabama, and #20 Houston, even if the ultimate goal was to reach some of those teams’ level. But Auburn also lost to two 7-6 opponents, Mississippi State and South Carolina, amid a five-game skid to end the season. It wasn’t all that ugly, especially for a first year, but it wasn’t exactly pretty either.
Hardly grounds to fire your coach, but Auburn very nearly did anyway. In February 2022, boosters who had been skeptical of Harsin from the start struck, heavily pressuring the athletic department to oust him after just a single season. “We do not make institutional decisions based on social media posts or media headlines,” the AD had to clarify during the ensuing coverage, which is never a good thing for your athletic department to have to clarify.
Harsin was retained, at least for the moment, but starting 3-5 the following season and getting rocked by 7-6 Arkansas made the matter academic. The Tigers installed fan and team favorite Carnell “Cadillac” Williams ahead of November, went 2-2 with solid challenges to 9-4 Mississippi State and #7 Alabama, and managed to hold itself together through the end of a largely miserable 5-7 season. The roster rallied around Williams in that month, finally demonstrating the support that hadn’t emerged for Harsin in 22 months at the helm. Naturally, Auburn hired…Hugh Freeze.
The Tigers’ new coach has experience in the SEC, having coached Ole Miss from 2012 to 2016 and reached the top ten during his tenure there. He also left the Rebels’ program in ruins, completing his tenure with a collapse to 5-7 (2-6 SEC) and dead last in the West, bringing on an NCAA investigation that led to crippling penalties, and resigning when it was revealed he’d repeatedly used an escort service despite having been married for over twenty years. If all that wasn’t enough, the job he took to rehabilitate his image was at Liberty, a morally repugnant institution for which athletic representation is inexorably tied to ideological support.
Everything you read in the last seven paragraphs encompasses just three years of the Auburn football program. It is a mess—a fun one to watch, even one I can’t help but want the best for, even as I disagree with almost every move they make—but a mess nonetheless. How is one supposed to find realistic optimism for a program like this?
I’m not sure I can. So, failing that, I’ll do my best to act as a Tigers fan necessarily has to: eyes shut tight, fingers crossed, heart hoping that somehow, everything will work out better than it has any right to.
The Last Five Years
There’s not much point going over Auburn’s recent history further, but while we’re here, do those first two seasons represent a realistic peak for the program? They’ve been better at times, of course, but it always feels a bit like an accident, and it almost always leads to greater turmoil for a team that certainly doesn’t need any more of that. Maybe I’m just a pessimist, considering the likes of Gene Chizik and Tommy Tuberville were able to go undefeated here, but the Tigers are very high on my personal list of programs that might be happier if they just enjoyed being a perennial 8-5 team a bit more.
2022 and 2023
To play devil’s advocate for a moment, while the 2022 team was improved in that final month, it still wasn’t exactly good. On both offense and defense, it was a tale of one stellar unit (rushing offense, passing defense, both top 25 in EPA/play) and one awful one (passing offense, rushing defense, both bottom 25). Williams did a lot right at the helm, but starting quarterback Robby Ashford looked particularly lost under his watch, going 32-for-77 (41.6%) for 79 yards per game and 4.1 per pass. He did turn the run defense right around, though—they were averaging a ghastly 263 yards allowed per game in the six games leading up to his tenure, then surrendered a total of just 365 in his four outings as HC.
Auburn won barely half as many games as Mississippi State (5 to 9) last season and lost head-to-head, yet they enter 2023 with the same projected win total (6.5). That says something about the high floor fans are always going to expect from this team, justified or not. Realistically, nobody knows what to expect from this team—it’s largely a hodgepodge of transfer talent with uncertain levels of actual talent. Admittedly, though, the names are intriguing: Jyaire Shorter (23.7 Y/C at UNT in 2022) at receiver, Rivaldo Fairweather (426 yards, 15.2 Y/C at FIU) at tight end, and Brian Battie (1185 yards, 6.8 Y/C at USF) at running back are names that make G5 watchers sit up and pay attention. How they’ll perform on a cobbled-together roster in the SEC, though, obviously remains to be seen.
The Next Five Years
I worry often about whether I’m taking an excessively negative view on a player, coach, or team in college football. I’ve made that mistake before, and I do consider it a mistake—I truly don’t think there’s a point in caring about this sport if you’re only here to expect the worst. There are exceptions to the rule, as ever, but it’s important to make sure you’re not jumping to conclusions.
Sometimes, though, the sheer quantity of evidence is just overwhelming. The book on Hugh Freeze has too many repugnant chapters (like getting called out by a sexual assault victim he DM’d to call her a liar while Auburn was considering hiring him) to believe his feel-good story about getting a “second” chance to be a respectable human being. Same goes for the book on Auburn, which is far too full with stories of their shortsighted and overoptimistic AD decisions to think they know what they’re doing with this hire. I would be lying if I said I wanted this team to win in the immediate sense, even if I generally want the best for them.
Where does that leave us? Hopefully, back here in a couple years. The upside, I guess, is that if Freeze washes out as quickly as the Tigers’ track record and towering expectations would suggest, we won’t have to put up with this embarrassing chapter of Auburn history for long. In the meantime, all we can hope is that sometime between now and the next coaching carousel they crash, this program learns to look past its boosters and plan for the future. If there’s a future in which the Tigers find a way to battle with the likes of Alabama and Georgia for dominance in the SEC, I don’t think—and I certainly don’t hope—it’ll start here.
I’m never going to live that 2022 Southern Miss preview down, am I?