(Photo via Austin Perryman/Auburn Tigers)
Every Tuesday right here you can read The Auburn Corner, where we’ll get into a different topic on the Auburn Tigers, break down the previous game, preview the upcoming game, and everything in between. In this week’s edition, Auburn was overmatched in Baton Rouge and dropped their third straight. Did expectations get too high for the Tigers this offseason?
You can understand why there was so much excitement around the Auburn program in year one of the Hugh Freeze era. After the dark days that were the past two seasons under Bryan Harsin, for the first time in a long time, Freeze built some serious momentum on the recruiting trail on The Plains.
Couple this with the fact that Freeze brought in a quarterback via the transfer portal in Payton Thorne who had shown a demonstrated ability to perform against high-level competition and you can understand why the excitement built. In fact, for the first time in program history, all season ticket packages were sold out before the season opener.
Make no mistake. Nobody, not even the biggest of Auburn fans thought the Tigers were going to be serious competitors in the SEC this season. But the expectations for this team were certainly higher than what the product has been.
Six games in, it would be fair to say that the team that Hugh Freeze has put on the field has been a disappointment.
The offense is a complete mess. Freeze insists on using both Thorne and Robby Ashford, and one has to question at this point if he should simply choose one and roll with them.
Freeze has already said that we can expect to see both on Saturday against Ole Miss, a game where the Tigers are 7 point underdogs at home.
If Freeze is going to insist on doing the same thing with an offense that has for the most part been utterly unproductive, why should we expect anything to change?
Auburn had a nice performance against Georgia, but it was once again a game where the passing attack was virtually non-existent.
Surely, the Tigers will attempt to run the ball on Ole Miss. But if the Rebels can get up early, it may be another long day for Auburn.
