ALEXANDER CITY — However strong Auburn football‘s efforts on the recruiting trail have been in recent years, it has been far from kind to Hugh Freeze and his staff in recent weeks.
Since early June, the Tigers have suffered four decommitments from blue-chip recruits in their 2026 class. Despite a couple additions in that span, their now six-man class ranks no better than No. 74 nationally.
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On Wednesday, during a coaches caravan event in Alexander City, Freeze admitted it’s hard to “feel great” about Auburn‘s current standing. But he’s also confident the Tigers will still sign a top-10 class during the current cycle.
“If my understanding is correct, with everything we’ve heard, the penalties for going over the cap are not fun,” Freeze said. “You have to manage that, and when you’re looking at rooms in our place — like the quarterback room, or the wide receiver room, or the D-Line room — where we’re not losing many players at all, on paper, and we like them, it’s really hard to just go out and be free, like we were the last few years, to go and recruit kids.”
The past two years, Freeze and his staff have landed the No. 10 and 8 classes in the nation, respectively, based on 247Sports’ composite ratings. Currently, the site has Auburn at 89th in the nation and dead last in the SEC. No other program in the league has fewer than nine commits — three more than Auburn’s current total.
“It’s hard to feel great when you’re not one of the top-ranked recruiting classes, and I think Auburn should be,” Freeze said. “But I’m confident in our administration and the way that they lead, and (I) trust them immensely that we’re doing things the right way. At the end of the day, that’s really what we have to do, in my opinion. We can’t put ourselves in jeopardy.”
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Adam Cole is the Auburn athletics beat writer for the Montgomery Advertiser. He can be reached via email at acole@gannett.com or on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, @colereporter. To support Adam’s work, please subscribe to the Montgomery Advertiser.
This article originally appeared on Montgomery Advertiser: Auburn football’s Hugh Freeze still confident Tigers can land top-10 class
