Getty Image / Michael Chang
Hugh Freeze and the Auburn Tigers are coming off a brutal 4-loss stretch with 1-score losses to #12 Ole Miss and #1 Georgia, along with losses to #15 LSU and Jimbo’s unranked TAMU that weren’t so close.
Auburn is looking to put a stop to that skid with a win over Mississippi State on Saturday and Hugh Freeze is going full-blown Football Guy™ while drilling his players with questions that have nothing to do whatsoever with the game of football and it’s all part of some anecdote he took a comically long time to finish. Classic, Hugh.
This was all on Tiger Talk and Ainslie Lee of AL.com wrote about how Hugh Freeze went around to ask every player about driving conditions and driver’s licenses. Here’s the story:
“And is it current?,” Freeze said with a laugh during his time on Auburn’s Tiger Talk radio show Thursday. “That’s an important question for a football team, typically, is man, is it suspended? Because we need to know that if it is.”
And while Freeze said all that between chuckles Thursday night at Baumhower’s Victory Grille, there was a legitimate reason he asked his players about their driving habits.
Freeze specifically wanted to know how his players approached driving in foggy conditions. While his players’ answers ranged from making sure their lights were on to just driving a bit slower, Freeze was chasing a specific, one-word answer. “The word I was looking for was ‘cautious’,” Freeze finally revealed. “I was raised in the country and I’ve had to drive in some foggy conditions and you drive very cautiously. And I feel like that’s the way we play sometimes.”
If you’re confused, you’re not alone. But Hugh Freeze attempted to explain the line of questioning about driving. It was an extension of his ‘Life Talk’ on Monday night which is a weekly 20-minute talk with his team.
Hugh Freeze elaborated by saying “All of us face — at some point or another — closed doors or unmet expectations. And that’s never going to go away in life. And how we handle them, I think, will really determine how we get through them.”
For a Football Guy™ like Hugh Freeze, everything in life pertains to football. He can walk into a bathroom in the middle of the night and sit down into the toilet water because someone left the toilet seat up and see that as a sign from above to ALWAYS be paying more attention on the gridiron. Football Guys™ never miss an opportunity to relate life to football.
So, Hugh Freeze saw the foggy driving conditions as a way to talk about lifting the ‘fog and fear’ of life. Saying “I want to do everything I can to remove the fog and the fear. Fear is just a liar and it’s really not real unless you give it power. And I want us to play really free and loose.”
Deep stuff from the Head Football Guy™ at Auburn.
The War Eagles are 6.5pt favorites against Mississippi State. Saturday is supposed to be warm and partly cloudy. Weather shouldn’t factor into the game at all despite Hugh Freeze making his big todo about foggy conditions this week…