Hugh Freeze wants to play other teams in spring games

Spring football games are boring. We can admit that, right? People can get excited for them because boring football is better than no football, but they're a cheap imitation of the real thing. 

Hugh Freeze has a solution. 

"The solution is: allow us to scrimmage somebody on A-Day. Another team. I think everybody would get out of it exactly what they want. And let's adopt a charity to give all the proceeds to... Let Alabama play Troy and we play UAB or vice versa, I don't care. People will come see that," he said. 

Freeze then pivoted from an emotional appeal to a practical one. 

"You're decreasing your injury possibilities by 50 percent. Coaches are smart enough to control (the physicality) -- we're not going to hit each other's quarterbacks. I just think it would be great for the sport. I think it would be awesome. NFL gets to scrimmage against each other, high schools get to scrimmage against each other, and for the life of me I don't understand why we haven't gotten to the point where we can pull that off."

Freeze is far from the first person to make this argument -- although it's not all that often you hear it from coaches. NFL teams hold joint practices and play three preseason games. High schools scrimmage each other. Even at the college level, volleyball and soccer teams play spring exhibition schedules. It can certainly be done, the Powers That Be within the NCAA are just choosing not to do it.

(As an aside, it's ironic that Freeze threw out the idea of Alabama and Auburn playing Troy and UAB, respectively. Auburn has played UAB once all time and never played Troy or South Alabama; Alabama has never played any of the three.)

Here's my counterpoint: none of those sports are college football.

If Auburn brings in another team to play at Jordan-Hare Stadium, invites fans to watch and turns the SEC Network cameras on, it's going to feel like a game. Before long, coaches will feel compelled to treat it like a game, which means twisting the focus of spring ball -- teaching -- into opponent prep. 

And at some point, UAB is going to beat Auburn in one of these hypothetical spring games, which will turn the next four months of every Auburn coach's life into pure hell. 

Come to think of it, if the goal is to make spring games more entertaining, maybe that's the greatest argument for them after all. 

In the meantime, Auburn will play Auburn on Saturday at 1 p.m. ET on SEC Network+.