During a Monday appearance on WJOX FM's "McElroy & Cubelic in the Morning," ESPN's Paul Finebaum said Auburn had "no choice" but to fire head football coach Hugh Freeze after an abysmal outing at home versus Kentucky over the weekend.
Finebaum acknowledged that Freeze's tenure was "better" than that of his predecessor, Bryan Harsin, but he still described it as "a complete and total failure."
“I mean, I think it was nice of Auburn to let Hugh Freeze walk off the field," Finebuam told hosts Greg McElroy and Cole Cubelic. "I think I might have just thanked him right then and said, we'll see you another time, but this is over because that's really that's how it felt. Cole, I don't want to get in your way, you were there. But to me, there was no turning back after that.”
According to the ESPN radio host, Freeze was not the same coach as he was at Ole Miss and Liberty.
“[T]he only positive thing I could say, Greg, was it was better than Bryan Harsin, but it was still a complete and total failure," he outlined. "There's no getting around that. I think over these two or three years, we've all tried to say good things about Hugh Freeze because personally, I think most of us have liked him and appreciated what he brought to the table, but he never could move the needle."
"A lot of the same mistakes kept being made," Finebaum continued. "And ultimately, I just think, and I don't know if maybe illness has affected him or not, but this has not seemed to me to be the same coach that I remember at Ole Miss and even at Liberty. Something was missing; he just didn't seem to have that one molecule necessary that could get him over the top."
"And I think for a lot of reasons, he failed. And people want to blame the administration and blame other people. I don't think that's it. I think the administration gave him the toys to play with, and he simply failed in many different respects," he concluded.
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