When Auburn dismissed Bryan Harsin after a disastrous run on the Plains, the Tigers made it a priority to find someone who had plenty of SEC experience, knew how to run a high-functioning offense and could recruit with the best of them given that their two main rivals, Alabama and Georgia, were operating at peak efficiency.
Despite the obvious blowback that was always going to come with his hire, Auburn opted to bring in Hugh Freeze because he checked off all of those boxes after his successful rehabilitation stint at Liberty. If you could look past the off-field issues and investigations that forced him from Mississippi—and the Tigers definitely did that—then the choice made perfect sense.
