Auburn athletic director John Cohen considered several elements before hiring Hugh Freeze as the Tigers’ head football coach. He weighed Freeze’s reputation for developing quarterbacks, a winning record at Ole Miss and Liberty, an extensive background check, and advice from search firms to select Freeze.
Cohen deliberated over the choice with lots of compassion. He knew there would be many feelings about Freeze, but he chose to ignore emotion over what he discovered through his fact-finding search.
“I don’t get to decide how people feel. I’m powerless over that,” Cohen said. “I’m charged with making the best decision for Auburn. I’m not saying that people’s emotions and feelings aren’t their own. I’m not saying they’re not important. However, I know what I’m charged with doing. My job is to hire the best person for the position.”
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Cohen came to the Plains to replace Allen Greene as athletic director after 14 years at Mississippi State, working his way from baseball coach to athletic director. He worked at the University of Florida, Kentucky, and Missouri, enhancing his knowledge of the Southeastern Conference.
Cohen’s relationship with the conference and with Auburn goes back to growing up in Tuscaloosa watching Bo Jackson become a Heisman Trophy winner.
No matter what the job description says on paper, the primary function of an athletic director at Auburn is running a successful football program. Cohen knows his tenure at Auburn will be defined by a coaching hire he had to make shortly after his October 31st hire date. After much deliberation, using two search firms, and lots of background checks, the choice was Hugh Freeze.
Cohen didn’t take questions from reporters when the school announced Freeze as the Tigers’ head coach. However, he took time this week to sit down with AL.com to address several issues, including hiring Freeze.
“Our research showed us that he was transparent,” Cohen told AL.com in his office on campus. “We asked him what happened, and he told us. We did the research, and everything he said matched our findings. There’s trust involved there, and there’s integrity.”
Selecting Freeze came with lots of scrutiny from fans. The concerns go back to allegations of inappropriate behavior as a high school coach in Memphis, his 2017 resignation from Ole Miss, and recent direct messages via Twitter to a woman who was part of a lawsuit against Liberty for how the school handled sexual assault allegations.
Freeze wasn’t named in the lawsuit against Liberty. However, several observers perceived the head football coach sending messages to a sexual assault survivor defending athletic director Ian McCaw as troubling. Auburn received lots of emails, tweets, and backlash from fans. Cohen was respectfully undeterred by the negative feedback because he trusted the process of hiring Freeze.
“When you’re talking to people, this person over here, and you say, ‘I want to know the answer to these 20 questions about Hugh Freeze,’ and then you go 500 miles away 30 minutes later, when these two people don’t know each other, and you get the same set of answers — you’re onto something.”
Cohen expressed the belief that Freeze has learned from his transgressions, and those lessons can be helpful to him as a coach.
“I haven’t been around many coaches that admit transgressions in their lives to their players. I think it’s incredibly valuable to do that,” Cohen said. “It took me a long time as a coach to realize that I can admit to my players that I have failings and I’ve made mistakes. I didn’t want to do that when I was 40 years old. I didn’t want to do that when I was 30 years old.
“But you get to a point where you realize this is valuable because they’re going to make mistakes as well. All of them are. And when you do make a mistake, what’s the next step? That’s what’s incredibly important. We try to eliminate any issues, but when you do make a mistake, what’s next, and what do we learn from that?”
Signs of success are showing up with how Freeze is building his coaching staff and the Tigers’ recent haul in the transfer portal. Will it be enough to justify hiring Freeze? Only time will tell, but Cohen is confident that Freeze’s willingness to openly address and confront his past with an eye toward the future will work.
“It’s obvious in today’s society that negative gets you more,” Cohen said. “I didn’t want that to be one of the decision-makers for me. There was going to be some form of criticism, no matter who we hired at Auburn. But, knowing what I know, the amount of work we put into our background check, and the amount of work we did getting to know Hugh in every way, I felt very comfortable with the decision.”
Nubyjas Wilborn covers Auburn for Alabama Media Group.