Can Auburn football turn things around? The numbers say it should.
ESPN’s Bill Connelly had the Tigers first on a list of teams that could improve its record greatly in 2025. Let’s dive into the reasons why.
AUBURN — Hugh Freeze has made it clear that rebuilding Auburn into a championship contender was going to take time.
The roster he and his staff inherited before the 2023 season had been wrecked, in a short amount of time, by bad talent acquisition and even worse talent retention. Compared to the who’s who of the SEC, Auburn was behind — and it was going to take multiple years of strong recruiting classes to close that gap.
But that’s just to get a roster that was capable of being title-worthy, week in and week out. Recording winning seasons and having a chance to pull off upsets? That’s always been in Auburn’s DNA as a program, even when it isn’t firing on all cylinders.
In Freeze’s first season, Auburn took Georgia to the fourth quarter for the first time in years and had Alabama absolutely dead to rights late in the Iron Bowl. Even with ugly performances like a lopsided loss to New Mexico State of all teams, the Tigers proved that they could be competitive again, even if they weren’t close to a finished roster product.
They showed that again at times in 2025, even though their final record regressed and they missed a bowl game entirely. Auburn knocked off a Texas A&M team that still had College Football Playoff hopes in a marathon, multi-overtime game. A week later, Auburn’s season came to an end in a frustrating 28-14 Iron Bowl loss.
“I’ve said it before: some of the teams we’re playing, and in this particular game, they’ve had top-5 recruiting classes a lot of straight years,” Freeze said that night. “We’ve had one top-10 class and hopefully we’re getting ready to have a second. Nobody really wants to hear that. I know it’s true.”
“At the same time, we had chances to win games with who we are. And that’s the frustrating part for everyone, me included.”
No one should realistically expect Auburn to compete for an SEC championship this season. The Tigers don’t have that type of team right now, and they’re coming off of four straight losing seasons for the first time since 1950. They need to get above .500 first and foremost.
But Auburn should have ended the winning season drought last year. It should have been a better team in the win-loss columns. Freeze himself said it after the Iron Bowl, and he’s said it several more times this offseason.
While the Tigers might not be where they want to be with their talent level quite yet, they were fully capable of so much more.
And that’s what makes Auburn a strong candidate to turn it around in 2025 — at least where the numbers are concerned.
Last Friday, ESPN’s Bill Connelly wrote about the concept of “luck” in college football and which teams were the “unluckiest” in 2024.
In that piece, Connelly identified Auburn as arguably the unluckiest team in the country last year and was his top candidate for a “major turnaround.”
“Auburn enjoyed a better success rate than its opponents (44.7% to 38.5%) and made more big plays as well (8.9% of plays gained 20-plus yards versus 5.7% for opponents),” Connelly wrote. “That makes it awfully hard to lose! … There’s nothing saying this was all bad luck, but even with a modest turnaround in fortune, the Tigers will have a very high ceiling in 2025.”
From an analytics perspective, “luck” can manifest itself in several important ways in football. Here’s a good summary of it from the piece:
As loath as we may be to admit it, a large percentage of a given college football season — with its small overall sample of games — is determined by the bounce of a pointy ball, the bend of a ligament and the whims of fate. Certain teams will end up with an unsustainably good turnover margin that turns on them the next year. Certain teams (often the same ones) will enjoy a great run of close-game fortune based on some combination of great coaching, sturdy quarterback play, timely special teams contributions … and massive amounts of unsustainable randomness. Certain teams will keep their starting lineups mostly intact for 12 or more games while another is watching its depth chart change dramatically on a week-to-week basis.
As we prepare for the 2025 college football season, it’s worth stepping back and looking at who did, and didn’t, get the bounces in 2024. Just because Lady Luck was (or wasn’t) on your side one year, doesn’t automatically mean your fortunes will flip the next, but that’s often how these things go.
In last week’s mailbag, I pointed out that Auburn went 1-5 last season in games decided by 10 points or less. Close games aren’t coin flips in terms of how they’re ultimately decided, but the results themselves are usually close to 50/50 for teams.
They have a way of working themselves out over time, which is how someone like ESPN’s Bill Barnwell can have a strong hit rate on picking overachieving NFL teams that “fail to keep up their luck in close games” the next season — and vice versa.
Just getting to .500 in close games last season would have ended Auburn’s streak of losing records. And that’s before you dig into how several of those games actually played out, which is a huge reason why the numbers like the Tigers’ chances of turning things around this fall.
But that turnaround can only happen if Auburn learns its lessons from 2024 and actually corrects those mistakes in 2025. What are those? Let’s dive in.
