Auburn football can't rest on 2024 recruiting if Hugh Freeze wants to prove he 'leapfrogged'
AUBURN — Auburn football coach Hugh Freeze has a blueprint.
Freeze's five-season tenure at Ole Miss wasn't some generational run — he left Oxford, Mississippi, with a conference record under .500 — but he did have some notable success. He led the Rebels to their first 10-win campaign in more than a decade in his third season, and he earned back-to-back victories over then-Alabama coach Nick Saban from 2014-15.
He was able to do that by bringing in talent. Those acquisitions, of course, come with the caveat of NCAA violations. But in the new age of college football, there's no reason to think Freeze's recruiting prowess will slow down on the Plains.
That was obvious in the Class of 2024, anyway, as the Tigers netted a group rated by the 247Sports Composite as the No. 10 haul in the country. It's a collection of newcomers that's headlined by a couple of blue-chip receivers in Cam Coleman and Perry Thompson and four-star quarterback Walker White, along with six other top-200 prospects.
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The talent added in 2024 — 18 scholarship freshmen — is right inline with Freeze's blueprint.
"I think if you'll go back and look at my interviews when I first started, I said I really believed the 2024 and 2025 class would tell the story of our tenure here," Freeze said at the Reese's Senior Bowl on Jan. 31. "I believe that. I think for '24, we were solid. We won a lot of good battles. Top-10 class in the country."
Phase two of the plan, which has already begun, is the next step.
"I think we need to follow up '24 with a top-five class, and then, obviously, follow it up in 2026. But I do think two classes stacked back to back, I've seen that work at Ole Miss when I was there," Freeze added. "That's what we did, and in Year 3 we were competing (with) and beating the best.
"I think we can do that at Auburn, also."
The Tigers currently have eight players committed in the Class of 2025, with five of them being four-star recruits. It's a collection of verbal commitments that currently ranks No. 6 nationally and No. 3 in the conference behind LSU and Oklahoma. It's a promising start — just like the Class of 2024 was for the bigger picture — but there's a long way to go.
Freeze brought in the No. 8 class in his first full recruiting cycle at Ole Miss, and he followed it up with the No. 15 haul the next year. The Rebels had never been inside the top 15 of the rankings in the modern recruiting era before that.
The Ole Miss blueprint is being followed, and Freeze has reason to believe it can bear better results at Auburn.
"Truthfully, I feel like — and this is no offense to another school or anything — but I feel like I've leapfrogged where I was at that time (Ole Miss) by being in this family and this culture here," Freeze said at his introductory press conference in November 2022. "I loved my time there, but I see this as one of the top-10 football programs in the nation. And I believe that."
Richard Silva is the Auburn athletics beat writer for the Montgomery Advertiser. He can be reached via email at rsilva@gannett.com or on X, formerly known as Twitter, @rich_silva18.
This article originally appeared on Montgomery Advertiser: Auburn football recruiting has a foundation. Tigers must build in 2025
