Another week and another high-profile college football coach has been fired as the annual coaching carousel is fully revved up entering November.
Embattled Auburn coach Hugh Freeze made a public plea for his job two weeks ago and said he’d welcome the same kind of statement of support that the athletic directors at Wisconsin and Florida State had given their hot-seat coaches.
Freeze was instead fired Sunday morning after a 10-3 loss at home to Kentucky.
It was Auburn’s fifth loss in the last six games to drop the Tigers to 4-5, but it was the worst of them all as Kentucky had lost 10 straight SEC games going back to last season and had lost 19 of its previous 20 meetings in the series.
That will be the exclamation point on a disappointing tenure for Freeze, who was in his third year at Auburn and departs with a 15-19 record. He did not have a winning record in any of his three years there.
“I have informed Coach Freeze of my decision to make a change in leadership with the Auburn Football program,” athletic director John Cohen said in a statement. “Coach Freeze is a man of integrity, and we are appreciative of his investment in Auburn and his relentless work over the last three years in bolstering our roster. Our expectations for Auburn Football are to annually compete for championships and the search for the next leader of Auburn Football begins immediately.”
Defensive coordinator D.J. Durkin was named the Tigers’ interim head coach. Durkin was previously a head coach at Maryland from 2016-18 and the interim head coach at Florida for one game in 2014.
It’s no surprise Freeze was let go as Auburn fired his predecessor Bryan Harsin midway through his second disappointing season and before that fired Gus Malzahn after eight consecutive winning seasons.
No, Auburn wasn’t going to have any further patience with Freeze.
He came from Liberty, where he was good but not necessarily elite while winning more than eight games in only one of his four seasons. And he previously spent five years in the SEC at Ole Miss, going 39-25 before having 27 of those wins formally vacated from the record for NCAA violations. He was also forced to resign after an investigation into phone records showed he had frequently called a female escort service.
So he was an interesting choice for Auburn — and, ultimately, not a successful one.
Freeze is the fourth SEC coach to be fired this season, following Arkansas’ Sam Pittman, Florida’s Billy Napier and LSU’s Brian Kelly. Additionally, UCLA’s DeShaun Foster, Virginia Tech’s Brent Pry, Oklahoma State’s Mike Gundy, UAB’s Trent Dilfer, Oregon State’s Trent Bray, Penn State’s James Franklin and Colorado State’s Jay Norvell have been fired during this season.
So who should Auburn look to hire next? Here are five names that make sense for the Tigers.
Potential Coaching Candidates For Auburn
Arizona State coach Kenny Dillingham
It seems only a matter of time before Dillingham continues climbing the ladder to a bigger job after his success in two years at Arizona State. The Sun Devils won the Big 12 and reached the College Football Playoff last year in his first season as a head coach as he was named the conference’s coach of the year. ASU is 6-3 this season.
Dillingham was highly successful as the offensive coordinator for one year at Oregon before that. He was also the OC at Auburn for a season in 2019.
The question is, what job will entice Dillingham enough to leave his hometown and his alma mater?
Tulane head coach Jon Sumrall
Sumrall is the “it name” from the Group of Five ranks this year and will have his name thrown into the hat for a bunch of Power Four conference jobs.
He won back-to-back Sun Belt championships at Troy, going 23-4 in two seasons there, before moving to Tulane last year. The Green Wave went 9-5 in his debut season and are 6-2 this fall.
Sumrall came up through the ranks in the SEC as a linebackers coach at Ole Miss in 2018 and then Kentucky from 2019-21, adding the co-defensive coordinator title his last season there.
Former Penn State coach James Franklin
Franklin is going to be a head coach again somewhere, probably in the next month and likely somewhere big. While he gets knocked for his record in big games, there’s no disputing his overall success at Penn State, where he went 104-45 over 10-plus seasons before being fired after a 3-3 start this year. That included six seasons of 10 or more wins and a 13-3 mark last year on the way to the CFP semifinals.
Also, Franklin has succeeded in the SEC, going 24-15 over three years at Vanderbilt prior to moving to Penn State.
This feels like the right kind of job for him — Auburn isn’t going to be able to compete with LSU or Florida in the Lane Kiffin sweepstakes, but it also will want to make a splash with this hire.
Georgia Tech head coach Brent Key
This is Key’s first real breakout year. Including his eight-game stretch as interim head coach in 2022, he had hovered around a .500 record before leading the Yellow Jackets to an 8-0 start this season — their best since 1966. Georgia Tech took its first loss Saturday against NC State, but that doesn’t change the fact that the former college offensive lineman has given his team a hard-nosed physical identity that would sell well in the SEC.
Key is from Birmingham, Alabama, and coached the offensive line at Alabama from 2016-18, so he has ties to the state. But Georgia Tech is his alma mater, and it’s unclear what factor that will play as other schools show interest.
SMU head coach Rhett Lashlee
This may be a tough one, as Lashlee just signed a lucrative contract extension with SMU that, per ESPN, makes him one of the 10 highest-paid coaches in college football. But with his ties to Auburn, he has to at least be mentioned here.
Lashlee served as offensive coordinator for the Tigers from 2013-16 under Malzahn. Since then, his career has taken off as a first-time head coach at SMU since 2022. He led the Mustangs to back-to-back 11-win seasons and a College Football Playoff appearance last year, and he has SMU at 6-3 this season after upsetting then-No. 10 Miami this weekend.