Potential Auburn coaching candidate just raised his price tag for the Tigers

Liberty head coach Hugh Freeze could be a possible target to replace Bryan Harsin at Auburn.

While Hugh Freeze is having great success now at Liberty, he could be making his triumphant return to the SEC West as a serious candidate to replace Bryan Harsin at Auburn.

Harsin still has a job, but it is clearly of the lame duck variety. Auburn parted ways with the man who hired him in its former athletic director Allen Greene. Although Freeze left Ole Miss on most scandalous terms, winning prolifically is a great way to forgive and forget. More importantly, desperation makes people do a lot of crazy things. Everybody knows how desperate Auburn is.

While Freeze agreed to a new contract at Liberty that runs through the 2023 season, he is only making around $5 million a year over the life of the deal. It is a bump in pay, but it may not make a difference when Auburn decides to make a change at head coach this offseason. It really comes down to how much the price of lumber is and who ends up replacing Greene as athletic director.

One name to keep an eye on as Greene’s long-term successor is Mississippi State athletic director John Cohen. Despite being a Mississippi State alum, money talks and Cohen could be had at the right price.

Wouldn’t it be something if two men from either side of the Egg Bowl unite and take over Auburn?

How seriously should we take Hugh Freeze as a potential Auburn candidate?

Although it did not end well for him in Oxford, Freeze won a lot of games during his brief run at Ole Miss. His Rebels teams gave Nick Saban and Alabama trouble, a team that just so happens to be the arch-rival of, you guessed it, Auburn! Freeze has shown at Liberty he can win prolifically and develop talent. He did more for Malik Willis in Lynchburg than Gus Malzahn ever did at Auburn…

Admittedly, this is going to be something the league office is not going to love if a program like Auburn brings Freeze back into the SEC. Then again, would they rather Auburn hire someone like Urban Meyer? Deion Sanders may be a good fit, but there might be some reservations from the Auburn boosters about if Coach Prime’s secret sauce cooked up in the HBCU can work in the SEC.

Ultimately, Freeze will be back coaching in the Power Five sooner rather than later. Liberty may be doing its part to keep him for as long as it can, but this is an inevitability at this point. More importantly, major college programs who are down on their luck are going to take a chance on Freeze and view him as a serious candidate. It may not be the Tigers per se, but he will get a gig.

Once they do pull the plug on this failed Harsin experiment, expect for Freeze to be a candidate.

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