Auburn football coach Hugh Freeze spoke on Thursday's broadcast of "The Rick Burgess Show" to discuss faith and his upcoming appearance at host Rick Burgess' "The Man Church."
Freeze, who is very outspoken about his faith, is one of the speakers at The Man Church Conference at Gardendale First Baptist Church on Friday and Saturday.
The Thursday radio appearance mainly centered around faith and God but did touch on football.
The coach told Burgess that while there is a call to live differently than the rest of the world and to repent when you mess up, God does not expect men and women to be perfect, which would be the message at the conference.
Freeze has a history from before his time at Auburn from problems with paying players and calling escorts while at Ole Miss, claims of forcing a female student to change clothes in front of him during his high school coaching days, and direct messaging a sexual assault victim on social media at Liberty to defend the athletics director there.
Upon accepting the job at Auburn, Freeze pleaded with fans to give him a chance to earn their trust.
Burgess concluded the interview with a question tied to football and building relationships around faith with players in the day and age of the come-and-go transfer portal.
He asked Freeze, "For men of faith and those that are in these positions—there was a time that if you went into a sport, your coach became either the second most influential man in your life (if you had a father that was engaged, but if you don't, the number one most influential man in youe life). But there was a time that you stayed in a program and that guy could help turn you into a man. I remember saying even with my own sons, this is the closest thing I have to the military if we were not going to do military, I wanted them involved in sport, and of course it was football because of the impact it could have on their lives. How do you still have that influence when these players are now allowed to come and go and never stay? Do you just say, 'I've got to make my moment with them count?'"
"First, I really struggle with that, Rick, with this new world," Freeze replied. "And I'll just say, you first hire a staff that believes in the same core values that you do and that will have the same message that you do."
"And then, secondly—and I think this is vital in life and my situations that you're mentioning right now—those circumstances, I have zero control over," he continued. "And I had to finally give that up and say, 'God, you're bigger than circumstances, you're bigger than the transfer portal ... you know the one-hundred-and-whatever men that you want to put under me for this given year, time and maybe just this given semester in the world we live in, but, you know who they are, and you know what they need. Just, may I be found faithful in being a transformative faithful coach in that season and not worry about the circumstances of what the new world brings of who I'm going to lose after the semester. I really, really had to give that fight up because it was stealing my joy."
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