Hugh Freeze has no team. Auburn fired him on November 2, 2025, nine games into his third season, and no program has hired him since. This profile checks his status as of July 29, 2026, then lays out the record, the money and the routes back into a job.
Short answer: the 56-year-old is out of college football for now. Auburn cut him loose after a 10-3 home loss to Kentucky left the Tigers at 4-5. His three years there finished 15-19 and 6-16 in the SEC. The school owes him $15.8 million. Alex Golesh runs the program now.
Career snapshot
| Item | Detail about Hugh Freeze |
| Age | 56, born in 1969 |
| Current job | None. No head coaching or staff role announced as of July 29, 2026 |
| Last job | Head coach, Auburn, 2023 through 2025 |
| Auburn record | 15-19, and 6-16 in the SEC |
| Buyout | $15.8 million |
| Replaced by | Alex Golesh, hired from South Florida |
| Earlier college jobs | Lambuth, Arkansas State, Ole Miss, Liberty |
| FBS record on the field | 98-61 across four schools |
Key takeaways
- He is not coaching anywhere in 2026, and no school has announced him.
- Auburn moved on the morning after a three-point home loss to Kentucky.
- His three Auburn seasons produced one bowl trip and no winning season.
- The school owes him more than $15.8 million to go away.
- His Ole Miss record reads two different ways, depending on whether you count the wins the NCAA erased.
Why Auburn Fired Hugh Freeze
Hugh Freeze and the Tigers opened 3-0 with wins over Baylor, Ball State, and South Alabama. Then they lost five of their next six games. The last of those was a 10-3 home defeat to Kentucky, in which Auburn managed just one field goal, a loss that ultimately sealed Hugh Freeze’s fate as the program’s head coach.
Auburn acted the next morning. D. J. Durkin finished the season as interim coach and went 1-2, and the Tigers ended 5-7 with no bowl game for a second straight year. That split matters. The 2025 record everyone quotes as 5-7 is really 4-5 under Freeze and 1-2 under Durkin, and almost nobody separates the two.
Four weeks later, Auburn hired Alex Golesh away from South Florida on a six-year contract. He opens the 2026 season against Baylor in early September. What happens to that rebuild is one of the better storylines in our college football coverage this fall.
Season by season: the full coaching record
Most profiles hand you a career total and stop there. Nobody puts every season from Arkansas State, Ole Miss, Liberty and Auburn in one table with conference records attached. Here it is. We cover this in more depth in Justice Haynes.
| Season | School | Record | Conference | Note |
| 2008-09 | Lambuth (NAIA) | 20-5 | Mid-South | His first college head job |
| 2011 | Arkansas State | 10-2 | 8-0 Sun Belt | League title, then left before the bowl |
| 2012 | Ole Miss | 7-6 | 3-5 SEC | Won the BBVA Compass Bowl |
| 2013 | Ole Miss | 8-5 | 3-5 SEC | Beat Georgia Tech in the Music City Bowl |
| 2014 | Ole Miss | 9-4 | 5-3 SEC | Lost the Peach Bowl, finished No. 17 in the AP poll |
| 2015 | Ole Miss | 10-3 | 6-2 SEC | Beat Oklahoma State in the Sugar Bowl |
| 2016 | Ole Miss | 5-7 | 2-6 SEC | No bowl, and he resigned the next July |
| 2019 | Liberty | 8-5 | Independent | Won the Cure Bowl |
| 2020 | Liberty | 10-1 | Independent | Finished No. 17 in the final AP poll |
| 2021 | Liberty | 8-5 | Independent | Beat Eastern Michigan 56-20 in the LendingTree Bowl |
| 2022 | Liberty | 8-4 | Independent | Left for Auburn before the bowl |
| 2023 | Auburn | 6-7 | 3-5 SEC | Lost the Music City Bowl to Maryland |
| 2024 | Auburn | 5-7 | 2-6 SEC | No bowl |
| 2025 | Auburn | 4-5 | 1-5 SEC | Fired in November |
Add the four FBS stops together, and he sits at 98-61. Two things bend that figure. Win totals get quoted without noting he left both Arkansas State and Liberty before their bowl games, so those two bowl losses belong to interim coaches. And the NCAA later wiped out most of the Ole Miss column.
From a Memphis high school to the SEC
His path here was not the usual one. He coached at Briarcrest Christian School in Memphis through 12 seasons and went 94-30 there, a stretch that reached a national audience through the film The Blind Side.
Lambuth University in Jackson, Tennessee, gave him his first college job, and he went 20-5 across two years. Arkansas State hired him next. He won the Sun Belt at 8-0 in league play in 2011, then took the Ole Miss job before the GoDaddy Bowl kicked off.
Liberty was the reset that made an SEC return possible. Four seasons, 34-15, three bowl trips and a top-20 finish. Coaching arcs that steep turn up often in our athlete profiles archive, and his is one of the odder ones in the sport.
The Ole Miss case that still shapes his record
He resigned at Ole Miss in July 2017 after the school found calls to an escort service on a university phone. The NCAA infractions case around that program landed in December of the same year.
Penalties included a postseason ban, scholarship cuts, probation and the vacating of wins across several seasons. On the field, he went 39-25 at Ole Miss. On the official ledger, he is 12-25. Most pages give you one of those numbers and never mention the other, which is how the same coach ends up with two records from the same five years.
What the buyout costs Auburn
Auburn signed him to a six-year contract averaging about $15.8 million per year. Firing him with three seasons still to run meant paying to end it early. The settlement came to $15.8 million.
That figure is hard to feel without a comparison to what coaching pays everywhere else. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median annual wage for coaches and scouts at $15.8 million as of May 2024. Auburn’s payout is roughly 336 times that, for work nobody will do.
Numbers like this are why the money side of college athletics now draws as much attention as the scores. That is why buyout math sits beside game analysis in our sport news and analysis.
What to expect from Hugh Freeze in 2026
Nothing is on his calendar. He has no team, no coordinator title, and no announced television seat. Almost every profile still describes him as Auburn’s head coach, because almost nobody runs a dated status check on a coach once the news cycle moves on.
Three routes back look plausible:
- Another head job in the winter carousel. He has won at three levels, and programs with fan bases in a hurry hire coaches with SEC experience every cycle.
- A coordinator or analyst seat. Offensive coaches with his track record often take a year inside a staff before running a program again.
- Television. The studio circuit absorbs recognizable coaches quickly, and it keeps a name in front of athletic directors.
Timing is the interesting part. Coaching buyouts normally shrink once the coach takes another paying job, and Auburn has not published the offset terms on his deal. Waiting a year costs him nothing. Signing early could cost Auburn less.
FAQ
No. As of July 29, 2026, he holds no head coaching job and no announced staff role at any school. We check coaching status against school and conference sources before publishing.
He is out of the game and collecting his Auburn settlement. He has not taken a public role since the firing.
Results. The Tigers went 15-19 in his three seasons, missed a bowl twice, and lost five of six after a 3-0 start in 2025.
Alex Golesh, hired from South Florida four weeks after the firing on a six-year contract. His first game comes in early September.
He is 98-61 in FBS games on the field, plus 20-5 at NAIA Lambuth. The NCAA vacated most of his Ole Miss wins, which drops that stretch from 39-25 to 12-25 officially.
He is 56. He was born in 1969 and coached high school ball in Memphis before any of this.
