Misery Index: Who’s to blame for Auburn’s glaring offensive woes?

Inside the bizarre little world Hugh Freeze has constructed at Auburn, it’s a bit of a shell game to figure out who’s to blame for the bad play calls fueling a bad offense.

In August, Freeze told the media that while Derrick Nix is the offensive coordinator and is responsible for the game plan, he would only call the plays on first down. The third-down calls would go to quarterbacks coach Kent Austin. And Freeze generally had responsibility for the second-down plays, though as the head coach he also has the right to overrule any of them and call whatever play he wants.

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Got all that?

But if Auburn’s division of labor sounded a little strange and overcomplicated back in the summer, it looks patently absurd now.

Because in Freeze’s third year, the Tigers’ offense is perhaps a bit more aspirational than it was in Years 1 and 2 but no less dysfunctional. And it comes down to this: In the fourth quarter of Auburn’s 16-10 loss to Texas A&M, the Tigers ran 11 plays for a net gain of one yard.

One single, pitiful, embarrassing yard.

And with the game on the line — in theory, anyway — Auburn’s last two play calls were fittingly laughable. After slogging to 155 total yards against the Aggies and going 0-for-13 combined on third and fourth down, equally unable to run or throw, Auburn faced third-and-1 with a chance to keep the game going.

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Somehow, Auburn didn’t even try to run the ball on the next two plays and hoped quarterback Jackson Arnold could drop back and do something he had proven incapable of for much of the game. Predictably, the results were so bleak that Arnold simply ate a sack on fourth down.

When game-ending play calls go so wrong, where do you point the finger? Usually, at the offensive coordinator. But with Auburn, who’s to say?

Maybe that’s how Freeze wants it. Maybe it doesn’t matter.

To be fair, even if the Tigers had doubled their offensive output in the fourth quarter and gained the requisite yard to keep that drive going, they still would have needed to drive 68 yards for a game-winning touchdown. There’s little evidence that was within the realm of possibility.

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But it all speaks to the same problem.

When Auburn hired Freeze, the theory was that he’d be an experienced, replacement-level SEC recruiter whose track record of having excellent offenses at Ole Miss and Liberty would equal a competitive on-field product at minimum. Sure, Freeze came with a whole set of off-field issues about previous NCAA violations, far too much time spent looking at social media and an inability to handle criticism, but the football part was supposed to be worth it.

It’s not.

Freeze is 14-16 as Auburn’s coach and 5-13 in the SEC at the same school that fired Gus Malzahn for going 14-12 in the league over his last three seasons and pulled the plug on Bryan Harsin after four wins in 13 SEC games.

How does this not end the same way, even with a $16 million buyout? (Who are we kidding? Buyouts have never mattered to Auburn.)

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In his first two years, the excuse was that Freeze tied himself to the wrong quarterback. But Freeze hand-picked Arnold out of the transfer portal this year and supposedly upgraded the talent around him. If that’s true, it’s not showing up in the results: Auburn’s offense gained 287 yards in its SEC opener against Oklahoma and 177 against the Aggies.

Maybe it’s time for just one person to call the plays. Because it shouldn’t take a village to figure out that you should run the ball at least once when you have two snaps to gain one yard.

After being subjected to such a ridiculous process with predictably bad results, while also wasting a truly elite defense, Auburn reigns as America’s most miserable fan base in Week 5.

Conference Champions of Misery

ACC: There’s a double whammy coming for Syracuse fans. First, it’s clear that quarterback Steve Angeli’s torn Achilles is a season-killer. Syracuse was just not the same team in a 38-3 home loss to Duke that we saw upset Clemson merely a week ago, and it might be a minor miracle at this point if they get to 6-6. But even if the Orange don’t win another game, Fran Brown will still be among the most desired coaches of this year’s carousel. With at least a half-dozen really good openings competing for a small number of top-tier candidates, Brown will practically be able to name his destination and his price if he wants to leave. Brown has already done enough to improve Syracuse in recruiting, on-field performance and swagger to draw interest from a wide variety of programs. He could leave for a better job in three months and Syracuse wouldn’t even get to celebrate the kind of breakthrough season that usually elevates a coach to those heights.

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Big Ten: The nation’s most predictable program continues to be predictable. After all the offseason hype about this being the year for Penn State, there wasn’t much about the Nittany Lions’ 30-24 double overtime loss to Oregon that suggests this team is going to do something different than lose to elite teams the way it always does. “Big Game” James Franklin is 1-15 against top-five opponents and 4-21 against the top-10 since he’s been at Penn State. And a couple of those wins have asterisks, including the 2023 Rose Bowl when Utah quarterback Cam Rising missed much of the game with an injury. Not all of these losses have played out exactly the same way, but struggling so consistently against top competition isn’t a coincidence. Penn State just does not have that extra gear on offense you need in big games, and the Nittany Lions proved it again by managing just 276 yards against the Ducks.

Big 12: Rich Rodriguez has done his best work with quarterbacks who can run the ball like Pat White or Khalil Tate, but West Virginia didn’t have one of those when it brought Rodriguez home for a second stint as head coach. Maybe they should have thought of that first because all Rodriguez’s return has done so far is expose how deep into the abyss West Virginia’s program has sunk. After a 48-14 loss to Utah, the Mountaineers have been outscored by a combined 89-24 in two Big 12 games while also absorbing a nonconference loss to Ohio. While the talent isn’t there to compete at the power conference level, the coaching inspired a few “Fire Rich Rod” chants this week. Rodriguez has been around college football so long, it’s hard to believe he’s only 62. He should have several good years left, but this one is a write-off. By next year, we should be able to tell whether this homecoming was a stroke of genius or a desperate appeal to donor nostalgia.

Group of Five: It feels like Georgia Southern exists in an infinite identity crisis. Ever since joining FBS, the school has waffled between leaning into its history as a triple-option program and then hiring coaches for the express purpose of weaning its fan base off that style of football. Clay Helton has handled the delicate balance better than most, but there are now real signs of trouble in his fourth year. Georgia Southern got smoked by James Madison in its Sun Belt opener, 35-10, while its offense floundered with 192 yards and a not-so-meaty 1.0 yards per rush. For a program deeply rooted in its “run the dang ball” ethos, that’s unacceptable. Helton had his best season in 2024 by going 8-5, but this looks like a major step back at a place where it doesn’t take much for the fans to start pining for Erk Russell and Paul Johnson.

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HEADSET MISERY

Kirby Smart: It would be inaccurate to call Smart a conservative coach, but he’s not a huge gambler, either. That’s why it was so shocking to see him decline an easy 25-yard field goal that would have tied the game against Alabama early in the fourth quarter after Georgia trailed by two scores for much of the game. With Georgia facing third-and-3 from the 8-yard line, Smart already decided that the Bulldogs were going to use the hurry-up offense and try to catch Alabama off guard if it was a short fourth down. But that plan blew up spectacularly when defensive lineman LT Overton chased Cash Jones to the perimeter and got him on the ground quickly before he had any chance to turn the corner and pick up the first down. That turned out to be the last opportunity Georgia would get to tie or take the lead, and Smart is now a shocking 1-7 in games against Alabama with two straight losses to Kalen DeBoer.

Sam Pittman: There’s a lovely house on the shores of Lake Hamilton, complete with a slobbering hog fountain, waiting for him in a few months. It’s all but over at Arkansas, and it would even be a mild surprise if Pittman is on the sidelines when the Razorbacks return from an open date on Oct. 11 at Tennessee. Losing 56-13 at home to Notre Dame while giving up 641 yards is the kind of loss that you don’t come back from when you’re already on the ropes. But Pittman seems to be taking it in stride, which is a lot easier when you’ve got around $11 million waiting for you as a retirement gift. As Pittman told the media, “If I was a fan I’d be mad at me too. I’d be frustrated as hell with me.”

Brian Kelly: So, is it OK to ask him about the offense now? If you remember a couple weeks back, Kelly did not like it at all when the first question of his press conference after a 20-10 win against Florida was about why the Tigers were struggling to convert third downs and put points on the board. “You’re spoiled,” Kelly said, berating the reporter for focusing on a negative after a victory. But journalism isn’t about stroking a coach’s ego. It’s about digging into pertinent issues to inform your audience, and it looks like an even better question now after LSU’s 24-19 loss at Ole Miss. While it’s no season-killer to lose to a good team on the road, the Tigers gained just 254 total yards, ran for just 57 yards on 22 attempts and converted 2-of-11 third downs. In retrospect, the Florida game foreshadowed this performance and Kelly was pumping sunshine when he should have been coaching.

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Lincoln Riley: He made clear he wasn’t happy with Southern Cal kicking off at 8 p.m. Pacific Time against Michigan State last week, then turning around this week and traveling a couple thousand miles to play Illinois at 11 a.m. Central. “It is what it is. We don’t make the schedule — clearly,” he told reporters. But navigating these so-called “body clock games” is now mandatory if USC plans on competing for Big Ten titles and getting to the College Football Playoff. That task is going to be significantly harder this season after Illinois kicked a 41-yard field goal at the buzzer to hand USC its first defeat, 34-32. Though not a bad loss, per se, it was a winnable game that got away despite USC’s offense racking up 490 yards and storming back from a 31-17 fourth-quarter deficit to take the lead with 1:55 remaining. Now USC heads into the meat of its schedule with upcoming games against Michigan, Notre Dame and Oregon, and the Trojans don’t seem much closer to the program they expected to be when Riley made the shocking move from Oklahoma.

Dave Doeren: The 3-0 start to this season for NC State now seems very much like a mirage after the Wolfpack lost at home to Virginia Tech, 23-21. It’s never a good look to lose to a school that was so bad it fired its coach after the third week of the season, and the Wolfpack will only be favored a couple more times this season since most of its tough games are backloaded in late October and November. This is very dangerous territory now for Doeren, whose 13-year tenure has been defined by being a little too good to justify firing him but not so good that other schools were beating down his door. If this becomes a second straight losing season for the Wolfpack, it will not be an easy call whether to bring him back for Year 14.

MOMENTS OF MISERY

Florida State couldn’t beat the replay booth: Was it a catch? Probably not. Well, maybe. No, it wasn’t. But are we sure? Seminoles fans aren’t pleased instant replay overturned an apparent Duce Robinson catch in double overtime against Virginia after it was originally ruled a touchdown. That left the Noles with just one play to keep the game alive, they couldn’t make it, and their feel-good start to this season ended in a 46-38 loss at Virginia. Keep that play in mind should this loss ultimately cost Florida State a shot at the ACC title and College Football Playoff. It was truly that close, and you can make an argument watching the play in slow motion that Robinson had enough control for the replay booth to let the call on the field stand. At the same time, the ball caromed off his right hand, then left hand, then left shoulder and back off the left hand before he could get the ball in between his mittens. Then, as Robinson ran through the end zone, it was clearly sliding off his fingertips, which is why it got ruled incomplete.

Wake Forest got hosed: Georgia Tech’s 30-29 overtime victory in Winston-Salem should come with an asterisk. With 1:48 remaining and the Yellow Jackets out of timeouts, they should have been flagged for a neutral-zone infraction by a Georgia Tech defender that would have given Wake Forest a game-clinching first down and a 23-20 victory. In fact, it was so obvious that Wake Forest quarterback Robby Ashford thought he had a free play and chucked the ball toward the end zone. But much to the surprise of the Wake sideline, no call was made. Forced to punt, Wake Forest couldn’t hold off a 54-yard drive for a tying field goal. Georgia Tech then won in overtime when the Deacs failed to make a two-point conversion. Sure, a losing team can always point to other plays, but this is one occasion where one mistake by the officials changed the outcome and they have every right to be furious.

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Pitt picked the wrong fight: After Pittsburgh’s Rasheem Biles took an interception 75 yards to the house for a 17-0 lead, a bizarre scene unfolded on the sideline. After the ball boy in Louisville approached Biles to retrieve the football, which is of course his job, things quickly went off the rails with some pushing and shoving that resulted in Biles ultimately keeping the ball and giving it to his family in the stands. But Pitt’s 17-0 lead ultimately turned in a 34-27 defeat, so maybe that was a karmic turning point. When the ball boy wants the ball, give it to him.