Auburn has parted ways with Hugh Freeze as its head coach following a 10-3 loss to Kentucky over the weekend. The Tigers named defensive coordinator DJ Durkin their interim head coach for the remaining three weeks of the season.
On Monday, Auburn athletic director John Cohen met with reporters and discussed the future of the Auburn football program.
Here are some important, noteworthy quotes from Cohen on Monday:
Cohen on what he is looking for in his next head football coach
“All the characteristics, somebody with an edge. Somebody who’s highly competitive. In my career, I’ve found that one or two things have to happen. The head coach of almost any sport either has to have a tremendous edge to them, or they have to be surrounded by assistants who have an edge to them. There are many ways to define that, but you can call it blue collar, you can call it hard-nosed, you can call it aggressive. You can call it all those things, but usually, priority No. 1 is defining the part.
“Then, intelligence, strategic, forward-thinking. All those things matter. At this level of college football, you’re obviously going to have somebody who has a track record in all these areas, and you can look into that track record with the utmost seriousness. You look at somebody who can lead a building, lead a staff, lead 18 to 22, 23, 24-year-olds to compete in the best league in the country.”
Cohen on the timeline that went into the decision to depart with coach Freeze
“We all go through our own process. In my process, I want to make sure. I want to write things down. I want to say I got a good night’s sleep, but I didn’t sleep at all on Saturday night. But I want to be able to process everything that happens, because the last thing in a leadership role you ever want to do is have a knee-jerk reaction to anything. I needed some data., and I needed to, again, write everything down.
“I try to take notes on my phone and other places during the course of the game so that I could go find that on video or rethink that by our staff. So, I took time after the game to get my thoughts together and reached out to coach Freeze late, late morning on Sunday.”
Cohen on Freeze directly
“I do just want to say, Hugh Freeze, his wife Jill and their entire family are world-class human beings. I know that a lot of you in the media here who have dealt with Hugh directly, you know exactly what I’m talking about. And that makes these decisions even more difficult. But he is a special man. I will always have a relationship with him, and he did some positive things in his three years.”
Cohen on the decision to name Durkin interim head coach
“I think D.J. has done an incredible job with our defense. When you’re at practice, when you watch him coach in-game, it’s pretty evident that he does have an edge. He’s someone with incredible energy and he’s somebody that the players, the student-athletes relate to. He is somebody who has strategic vision. And will we give him consideration? Absolutely, he will get consideration. But I want to go further than that. I mean, I think that D.J. is somebody who has earned that opportunity, and he will be a part of a pool that we will consider.”
Cohen who will help with the search for a new coach
“We’re not sure if we’re going to use a search firm or not. Really, one of the reasons to use a search firm is for background checks and things of that nature. If we use one, it will be more of a peripheral background type situation, even though we have opportunities to do those things on our own. I’m not sure if I will use a search firm. I will tell you this. There is no question that I will take information from industry experts, and I will take information from people who really understand college football at a high level.
“We will go to people who have incredible data, and we will go to people who really understand all four corners of the country in this great sport. But I am the committee. Even though I will listen and I will do as good of a job as I possibly can of taking in information, I will be the committee.”
On the timeline for officially replacing Freeze
“The candidates that we are talking to, are they still playing at that time? Who are they playing for? And will they still be in a bowl? I assume that every single candidate we are going to speak to outside of the building is going to be in that situation. We are going to work as quickly as we possibly can to try to get it done as quickly after the Iron Bowl as possible.”
On when he began to consider firing Freeze
“It was just a general inefficiency of our offense, especially in fourth quarters. I think you find out a lot about your team when you watch a fourth-quarter offense. Are they going to attack the game and say we’re down a score, we’re going to get this done? For whatever reason, that was not happening offensively during the course of the season and that was something that was noticeable. Everybody in this room knows that’s something that’s got to change, and it’s got to change quickly.”
On buyout negotiations within Freeze’s contract
“We are in discussions with Coach Freeze’s representation right now. That’s not done, and I anticipate that is probably not going to be done for a while.”
On what he learned from his first coaching search at Auburn
“I think the group of coaches that are available now are considerably different than it was three years ago. Anytime you talk with industry experts and listen to their opinion, and kind of sifting through fact versus fiction, you continue to learn. I feel like I’m always learning. I feel like every time I’m in our locker room after a football game, I’m learning. There is great knowledge out there. I certainly know that John Cohen doesn’t have all the answers, and I know that I need information, and there are sources out there to go get that information and we will pursue that.”
On the role that Name, Image and Likeness will play in the search
“I’m really proud of our administration. We’ve worked so incredibly hard in the area of third-party opportunities for student-athletes, which I think is going to be a game-changer. I think it’s going to be a differentiator. There’s absolutely no way to know who’s got what. There’s no way to know where we are versus the people we’re competing against, but just having had conversations in our industry about this subject, I think Auburn is ahead of the curve.
“I think Auburn has been extremely creative, and I think we have been able to generate revenue from many different sources. It’s something that we have done out of necessity at a very early stage. I think whoever runs this football program moving forward is going to benefit greatly from not only the revenue share opportunities, which everybody in our league has, but also the third-party opportunities, which might not be available to everybody in the Southeastern Conference and around the country.”
On how he judges coaches in the new financial climate of college football
““I think that’s one of the things, the evolutionary process of the coaching profession in Power Four football is how many schools around the country had a GM (general manager) three years ago when we went through that search? I don’t know that a ton of them already had a GM. When you look at the amount of resources that Auburn and the people that we were competing against, the amount of resources that were driven to name, image, and likeness prior to House v. NCAA coming into effect, it was a really low number. It is exponentially higher now. I can’t be predictive and know exactly what everybody else is doing, but I know what we’re doing, and I know it’s going to be extremely competitive.
“It’d be hard for me to imagine that there are 10 other schools that are going to be able to provide what we are doing in the third-party market to help our student-athletes in the entire country. Again, we have the best fanbase. We have sold out Jordan-Hare (Stadium) 19 times in a row and we have this incredible opportunity for our student-athletes. We have the foundation of Auburn University, and everything it brings, from the creed, to this campus, to the education it provides. The great history here not only in athletics, but academically as well, and in research. Auburn has it all, and now it’s time for Auburn to have it all in the sport of football. We’re not going to rest until that happens.”
On the pressure of selecting the new coach
“I think pressure is one of those self-induced things. I’m going to put pressure on myself to do everything, to try to do everything the right way just like I know all of you do. I know that I owe this to this fanbase. I grew up in the state of Alabama, and know how special this fanbase is and again, I wake up every morning saying, We got to get this done. We got to get it done for the people who are at the top of the upper deck. The people who are in our suites, the people who are on the field. We’ve got to get this done. I know it’s been talked about how we’re close, right? I’m not going to say that we’re close. Close doesn’t matter. Getting it done matters.
“But I will say that we have an elite defense. I will say that there are a lot of areas of the game in which we excel, but the offensive side has really hurt the production of this football team, and we’ve got to get that fixed. We have to. Now, is it fair to bring up D.J. Durkin here and say, ‘Hey, fix our offense?’ No, that’s not fair, but what we have done is we have given him the opportunity, especially with our staff and anyone else, to step forward and say this is going to be your program for the next three weeks. Do the things that you feel like need to be done internally for us to be more competitive on both sides of the football. And we have a lot of confidence that can happen.”
On his words to the fanbase
“Our fanbase is incredible. The moment I stepped onto this campus and went to my first football game, which was Texas A&M, it was obvious to me, this place is different. We have incredibly loyal fans. Fans who have shown patience. We have fans who have given in every way. They’ve given their time, they’ve given financially and they have given in every way.
“Now it’s time for us to give back, and that’s one of the many reasons we had to make this decision. It’s time for this football program to give back to this fan base. They deserve it, and I’m going to spend every minute of every day that I’m awake trying to give our fans exactly what they deserve, which is the best. And that’s the direction we’re going to go.”
On the influences from others at Auburn to make a decision
“I’ve heard all these myths about things like donors at Auburn, or the Board of Trustees members, or administrators, or power brokers in our own family. That has not been my experience in three years, not one time, have I had a donor or a board member or anybody else who helps guide this great university come to me and say, ‘You need to hire this person. You need to terminate this person. You need to do this.’ I mean, certainly the comments, you know, hey, the hot dogs weren’t very good.
“I mean, you will get that type of commentary, but that has not been my experience. That’s one of those things that might have been created by other schools in the state of Alabama. That myth is not reality. We’re in a tough spot right now. We’re going to get to the other side of it, and we’re going to give our fans what they absolutely deserve, but we’re not going to live in a world of myths, because what you just described, I appreciate the question, but it just doesn’t exist.”