Hugh Freeze: I could have beaten Nick Saban four times

Most times, the best questions are the simplest, and ESPN's Marty Smith asked a great one to Hugh Freeze: "How did 4th-and-31 impact your life?"

I know you know this, but type "4th and 31" into the YouTube search bar and you get this. 

In the roughly three seconds it takes Freeze to form an answer, eight months of his life flash before his eyes. The difference between being the Auburn coach who sprung a massive upset in his first Iron Bowl and the coach who lost that upset on by surrendering a 4th-and-31 is incalculable. It's the difference between owning 10,000 shares of Apple and one single apple. (Okay, I know the difference there is actually calculable, but go with me here.)

Auburn has managed well in spite of the loss -- at this moment, the Tigers are one of the hottest teams in the nation on the recruiting trail -- but imagine the wind in their sales if they'd beaten Nick Saban in his last Iron Bowl. 

Instead of 6-7, Freeze is 7-6 at worst in his first season on the Plains, and quite possibly better than that considering Auburn doesn't mail in a Music City Bowl appearance when they're not coming off two consecutive embarrassing defeats (the Tigers had lost 31-10 to New Mexico State the week prior to Alabama.)

The difference outside of Jordan-Hare Stadium would've been equally drastic. Alabama doesn't reach the College Football Playoff with two losses. Had nothing else changed, Florida State moves up a line from No. 5 to No. 4. Heck, maybe a demoralized Alabama doesn't defeat Georgia a week later in the SEC Championship, and the CFP selection committee takes all four undefeated Power 5 teams, leaving 12-1 Texas out. Gone is the classic Michigan-Alabama Rose Bowl, and in, perhaps, is a Georgia 3-peat.

But all those possibilities faded away the moment Jalen Milroe's pass found Isaiah Bond's hands. 

"We've got to coach better," Freeze said. "If you're not accountable through the week in little things, it will show up on third down, on fourth down. Some of that fault is the culture, some of it is coaching. Maybe we didn't coach it good enough." 

Perhaps an addition: Don't rush two and drop nine. When you rush two, you're effectively rushing none. And any QB worth his salt can find an open receiver when given all day to throw, even against a 9-man secondary.

"Not winning that game sucked," Freeze concluded.

Freeze went on to say that the silver lining in the cloud dumping 10 inches of rain on him was that his team, in Year 1 under his leadership and seven days removed from a loss to New Mexico State, held a lead on Alabama with 32 seconds to play. "It was a mixed bag of 'This is awful' and 'Man, we can play with them.'"

And though no one knew it at the time, that would be Freeze's final chance at slaying the ultimate giant in the profession.

"Nick is incredible, but I should have four wins against him," Freeze said. "We beat him twice (at Ole Miss) and went up 24-3 the third year, and I wasn't smart enough to slow it down. And then last year easily could've gone our way."

Saban and Freeze coached against each other six times, with Saban winning four. Alabama won 33-14 in 2012 and 25-0 in 2013 before Ole Miss won 23-17 in Oxford in 2014, in one of the most memorable games of the 2010s. 

The following year, Ole Miss won 43-37 in Tuscaloosa; the Tide accumulated 503 yards of offense that night, but turned the ball over five times to Ole Miss's zero, while the Rebels also pulled off one of the wildest plays in recent memory. To say this game could've gone either way is an insult to every understatement ever uttered. 

In the 2016 game Freeze referenced, Ole Miss indeed led 24-3 with 2:47 to play in the first half, but the Tide cut the deficit to 24-17 by halftime and built a 48-30 lead at one point -- a 45-6 run in roughly 27 minutes -- before the Rebels pulled the score to a respectable 48-43 final. Ole Miss never had the ball with a chance to take the lead after trailing by 18.

And then there was last year's game. 

All things considered, a 2-4 record is probably fair, considering the fortune involved to get the second of Freeze's two wins. Only Freeze and Les Miles defeated Saban in back-to-back seasons, and only Miles (in ten tries) and Gus Malzahn (eight) notched more wins than Freeze's two. 

Still, the 2023 Iron Bowl was in Auburn's grasp, and a win there would've left Freeze with the best winning percentage of any coach to face Nick Saban's Alabama more than twice: at .500. 

But what's done is done, and Freeze will be judged moving forward on racking up more wins against Kalen DeBoer than DeBoer scores against him.