Hugh Freeze defends golf hobby: My focus is 100 percent on Auburn

As the old political saying goes: If you're explaining, you're losing. And right now Hugh Freeze is explaining.

The Auburn head golfing hobby has become a topic of conversation over the summer, which led Freeze to offer this explanation to former ESPN personality David Pollack's podcast. In fact, Pollack opened the conversation by asking about Freeze's golf game. 

“You know, everybody seems to like to talk about my golf game,” Freeze responded. “It’s not as good as it used to be.”

“This is that time where people are looking for things to write about,” he continued. “And I do love golf. I enjoy playing, but what people don’t realize is, you know, I assure you that I never missed a camp day or a recruiting day but if camp got over at three o’clock one day, and Jill (Freeze’s wife) and I go out at 4:30, we absolutely might do that.

“And I’m not apologizing for that part of it. But my focus is 100% on getting Auburn in that win column this fall. And I do think the biggest thing that’s causing most of it is the recruiting rankings right now, because we’ve been top 10 my two years here in recruiting, and currently we’re not. And good Lord, we could spend 30 minutes on why I think that is.”

Back in May, AL.com reported that the USGA's Golf Handicap Information Network listed Freeze as a 5.9 handicap, making him "one of the best golfers in the SEC coaching community." Freeze's skill on the course was not as much a concern to Auburn fans as his time spent on it -- the site said Freeze had reported 20 scores by that point in the year. He reported 10 more scores in June, the busiest month of the offseason recruiting calendar. 

At the same time, Auburn struggled on the recruiting trail through the month of June. The Tigers suffered three decommitments in June, and a fourth on July 1. As of this writing, Auburn's 9-man recruiting class ranks 78th nationally in the 247Sports composite, with no players in the national top 100 and two in the top 250. We are absolutely not saying that correlation makes causation in this case; Auburn's explanation is, essentially, that everyone is lying and/or cheating but them. But others are certainly happy to claim Freeze is more concerned with carding fours than nabbing 4-stars. 

It should be noted that, judging by his own Twitter account, Lane himself spends plenty of time deep sea fishing, and that all three of Auburn has finished ahead of Ole Miss in the 247 rankings every year since Freeze got to the Plains. Some other notable caveats:

1) In December, no one will care where anyone's recruiting class ranked in July.
2) If Auburn had gone 10-3 last year, very few people would care about this right now. If Auburn goes 10-2 this year and signs a respectable recruiting class, no one will care about this in December.
3) As Freeze himself acknowledged back in May, if Auburn goes 5-7 this fall, it wouldn't matter if he'd left his clubs back in Lynchburg. In the end, it always comes back to winning games. 
4) It feels counterproductive to champion work-life balance for a profession that too often burns its practitioners out and dooms families to live with absentee fathers and husbands, then ridicule those who dare to have a work-life balance. (And for what it's worth, Freeze's daughters are grown.)

But sometimes these things stick like barnacles to coaches whether they matter in the long run or not. Did Arkansas fire Chad Morris because he went back to Texas each Friday night to watch his son Chandler play high school football, or did they fire him because he went 0-14 in SEC play? Does it make a difference? They fired him regardless. 

And that's a whole lot of explaining right there.