Auburn made one especially good decision when it hired Hugh Freeze: It left the escape hatch easy to find.
If Auburn fires Hugh Freeze, it could spread out his buyout payments across more than four years.
Hugh Freeze’s recruiting momentum might buy him a third season, even while Auburn languishes on the field.

Auburn made one especially good decision when it hired Hugh Freeze: It left the escape hatch easy to find.

While Freeze melts on the Plains, his buyout after this season would total $20.3 million. If you think that safeguards Freeze, you don’t know Auburn.

Auburn isn’t known for a level-headed handling of coaches, but it shrewdly structured Freeze’s buyout. How so? Like this: If Auburn fires Freeze, it could spread out its financial obligations to him in monthly payments throughout the remainder of his contract, which runs through the 2028 season.

In other words, don’t think of the cost of firing Freeze as one giant flush of cash.

Instead, think of it as an annual hit of less than $4.9 million for the next four years.

That’s an absorbable expense for a robust SEC athletic department, especially if it means swapping Freeze for a better coach. Cost of doing business.

Athletic departments usually get whipped at the contract negotiating table, but structuring Freeze’s deal with a savvy exit route shows intellectual maturity on Auburn’s part.

Hugh Freeze struggles to match low bar Bryan Harsin set

When Auburn fired Gus Malzahn (buyout: $21.5 million) and Bryan Harsin (buyout: $15.6 million), contracts obligated Auburn to pay the axed coach half of their buyout within 30 days of their firing.

That put Auburn on the hook for a big financial hit upfront, and it nonetheless fired Malzahn and Harsin, two coaches who cutperformed Freeze.

Auburn’s bills to Malzahn are paid. It remains on the hook for about $4 million to Harsin, according to his contract terms.

If Freeze wins his next game – Auburn (2-5) plays Saturday at Kentucky (3-4) – he’ll have the same record as Harsin did when Auburn fired the Idaho interloper on Halloween of his second season.

Freeze is 8-12. His second season looks worse than his first. When Auburn hired Freeze, he’d only ever experienced one losing season. He’s on pace for back-to-back losing seasons at Auburn.

“It’s disappointing for the Auburn family,” Freeze said.

Auburn’s family doesn’t handle disappointment well.

Most disturbingly, this former offensive guru presides over an offense that ranks among the SEC’s worst.

Just how bad could this get? Well, Auburn’s five remaining opponents all have better a better record than the Tigers. Auburn last won fewer than five games in 2012. It fired Gene Chizik that year, two years after Chizik won a national championship.

Auburn keeps finding new ways to lose. Freeze’s Tigers led Missouri throughout most of the second half Saturday in Columbia, before MU marched 95 yards for a game-winning score.

“It makes you sick, physically ill, when you don’t get across the finish line,” Freeze said.

This coaching carousel projects to be relatively quiet. Auburn, if it opened, would become the best job on the market. If Auburn waits and fires Freeze next year, it likely would enter into a more crowded carousel.

Best argument for Auburn football to retain Hugh Freeze: Recruiting

When Auburn hired Freeze, I thought he’d be an upgrade over Harsin for three reasons: He’d improve an offense mired in a yearslong stall; he’d elevate recruiting; and he’d better mesh with Auburn’s culture.

The first point proved incorrect. Freeze didn’t fix Auburn’s quarterback woes, and its offense remains as poor as it performed with Harsin and as bad it as it was in Malzahn’s final season.

To the final point, Freeze meshes fine with Auburn – if he starts winning. But, all the handshakes and Southern catchphrases in the world won’t save him if he keeps losing.

What could save Freeze, at least for another year? His recruiting class. On this point, he’s been a major upgrade on Harsin, an ineffective recruiter unsuited to the NIL era.

Auburn’s class ranks fifth nationally in the 247Sports Composite. Keep an eye on that ranking. If the losses mount, and a few recruits decommit, the argument to retain Freeze becomes nonexistent.

Anyway, the strength of a school’s NIL collective influences recruiting as much as any coach, and a coaching change wouldn’t necessarily wreck a class at a school where a strong collective is in place. Consider, Texas A&M signed a top-20 class last year, a month after firing Jimbo Fisher.

If Freeze continues to lose and Auburn boosters think they can hold most of the class together without him, then what’s to stop a firing? Don’t think the answer is Freeze’s buyout.

Auburn paid more – and paid it faster – to fire a better coach than Freeze.

Blake Toppmeyer is the USA TODAY Network’s national college football columnist. Email him at BToppmeyer@gannett.com and follow him on Twitter @btoppmeyer.

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