The origins of football and faith for Auburn’s Hugh Freeze

Years before they’d storm the field together at Vaught-Hemingway Stadium for the biggest win of their careers, Tom Allen had no idea who the 30-something-year-old position coach was who’d just walked into his office at Ben Davis High School in Indianapolis. The Blind Side movie hadn’t come out yet, Allen joked, so how should he have known the man who’d come to visit him was Michael Oher’s coach in high school?
The man was Hugh Freeze, an Ole Miss assistant at the time. Allen — now the head coach at Indiana — said it was unusual to see anyone from Ole Miss come to recruit in Indiana, but there Freeze was.
The two talked about a few Ben Davis players Ole Miss was interested in and then Freeze started to leave but stopped. Freeze noticed Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA) fanfare on Allen’s desk and a copy of The Purpose Driven Life, a book by pastor Rick Warren. Freeze sat back down, and the two talked about their Christian faith.
It’s actually quite fitting that Allen and Freeze bonded over religion. Faith is a central part of each of their programs. Freeze is very outspoken on his beliefs and quotes from the Bible often. But at that moment, Allen didn’t think where this chat would lead.
“There’s no question it was a connecting point for us,” Allen said in an interview with AL.com. “When you build a staff you really want guys just like you, guys that have the same values that you have and the things that you care about as a man and as a coach.”
Allen and Freeze would stay connected through FCA’s national conventions and in 2008, Freeze was hired as the head coach at Lambuth University in Jackson, Tennessee. An offensive-minded coach, Freeze brought Allen on as his defensive coordinator. Freeze got another head coaching job in 2011 at Arkansas State and hired Allen once again, this time as assistant head coach.
There, Freeze hired Dave Wommack as the defensive coordinator. Wommack had been out of coaching for a year in 2011. He previously had experience in the state as the defensive coordinator at Arkansas. So he took the job with Freeze.
“I really wasn’t aware of who he was or anything,” Wommack said in an interview with AL.com.
But they, too, quickly connected over faith.
Faith has always been crucial to Freeze’s makeup on and off the field. Off it, Allen said Freeze is an avid golfer and they would go fishing together. Both Allen and Wommack said they saw Freeze as an up-and-coming coach then. They knew he was going to change jobs quickly, but believed him to be someone who genuinely cared about their own families and his players off the field.
Allen and Wommack went with Freeze to Ole Miss. Throughout their time together, Freeze let Allen bring his son Thomas on the sidelines with him during games. Thomas Allen would be the one throwing the ball to linebackers during pregame warm-up drills.
“Not every head coach is like that,” Allen said. “He let Thomas travel with us when he was younger and he stayed in the hotel with me and ride with me and we’d run out on the field together.”
Allen said he and his son made sure to take a picture on the field at away games. Those were special moments as a father that busy traveling coaches don’t always have.
Though everyone shared a favorite memory: beating Alabama in 2014.
“I think Coach Freeze even said something in the pregame talk about you know, to look out after the game’s over because they’re gonna tear those goalposts down,” Allen said.
Ole Miss was ranked No. 11 going into that game, Alabama No. 1. Ole Miss scored two touchdowns in the final six minutes to take the lead and sealed it with a Senquez Golson interception in the back of the endzone. Golson was initially ruled out of bounds before officials looked at the replay.
“I’ll just never forget those words when they said after further review, they said his foot was in bounds and we just went nuts,” Allen said. “I think they partied for months in Oxford after that.”
“I said, ‘Look up on the big screen guys, we just beat Alabama,” Wommack said.
A lot has changed since. The 2014 season would be Allen’s last with Freeze. He spent the next year at USF before going to Indiana. Wommack retired after Freeze resigned in 2016 amid a scandal at Ole Miss where it was determined he used a university cellphone to call escorts.
College football is a small world. After hanging out with the linebackers, Thomas Allen went on to play linebacker for his dad at Indiana. Nearly all of Freeze’s coaches at Auburn either have ties to Freeze at a previous job or ties to Auburn itself. And the Wommack family still followed Freeze to Auburn. Dom Studzinski — Dave Wommack’s son-in-law — is Auburn’s head of strength and conditioning.
“There’s some anxiety along with anticipation, but he’s been there, done that before,” Wommack said of Freeze. “I look at Auburn as a top 10 school over the years but you know, it takes a while. It doesn’t happen overnight. I think he’ll do a good job with this team.”