Auburn QB Robby Ashford is ready to hush his doubters
You name it and Auburn sophomore quarterback Robby Ashford has heard it.
He’s only a running quarterback.
He should’ve stuck with baseball.
Maybe they should move him to wide receiver or running back.
And perhaps his personal favorite: He can’t throw.
“I feel like it’s a stereotype that I can’t throw the football,” Ashford said Tuesday afternoon.
All the noise started during Ashford’s whirlwind-of-a-first-season on The Plains, where he took over the starting quarterback job midway through the season — beating out TJ Finley, who has since gone on to transfer to Texas State.
Ashford finished last fall 123-for-250 through the air — good for a completion percentage of 49% while tallying 1,613 passing yards, seven touchdowns and seven interceptions. Meanwhile, Ashford added 710 yards and seven touchdowns with his legs in 2022.
Nonetheless, it was a lot for the then-freshman transfer to wrap his head around.
“Last year was just all types of crazy,” Ashford said. “I mean, transferred in, the coach I committed to is gone, I didn’t even get a full year. So, it was all crazy, just a lot of ups and downs.”
To top it all off, Ashford says he spent the last nine games of the 2022 season with the same injury Texas quarterback Quinn Ewers recently suffered.
ESPN’s Pete Thamel reported Sunday that Ewers suffered a Grade 2 AC joint sprain in his throwing shoulder and is expected to miss “some time.”
“You see Texas’ quarterback? He’s sitting out with the injury that I played nine games through,” Ashford said Tuesday. “That should tell you, in itself, what I was going through. But people don’t really want to look at that.”
As a result of his injury, Ashford said he wasn’t able to throw during the final five weeks of practice last season and was instead having to rely solely on “mental reps” to get him through the week and only throwing on Saturdays.
But that isn’t an issue this season as Ashford has been full-go through fall camp and the first seven weeks of the regular season. And that alone has got him feeling more confident.
“I feel a whole lot better. I feel way more confident. I mean, just with the guys we have, I have the utmost confidence in them,” Ashford said. “So just being able to get those physical reps instead of mental ones when I was hurt, it’s definitely paid off really big for me.”
Auburn head coach Hugh Freeze has said all along that Ashford is too athletic not to see the field and that he’ll always have packages.
And Freeze has been a man of his word as Ashford has played in each of Auburn’s seven games to this point and recorded his first start of the year last week against Ole Miss.
However, Ashford still hasn’t been asked to throw the football much this season as he’s thrown just 26 passes, completed 14 of them and has recorded 145 passing yards, two touchdowns and an interception.
“I look at it as, right now, it’s me more of a running guy,” said Ashford, who has tallied 180 rushing yards on 40 carries and five touchdowns — tying with running back Jarquez Hunter as the Tigers’ leading scorer.
“But I know I can sit back there and throw the ball around the yard. I did it last year, before I got hurt.”
While it’s hard to say exactly when Ashford got hurt last fall, if you take away his final four performances in 2022 — playing off his comment of not being able to throw in the final five weeks of practice — Ashford averaged just more than 162 passing yards per game and a 52.6% completion percentage.
In those final four games, Ashford averaged 78.5 passing yards per game and was completing passes at a 41.5% clip.
And while it is worth noting there was a lot going on at Auburn in those final four games after the firing of former head coach Bryan Harsin and running backs coach Cadillac Williams taking over as interim head coach, it might be worth hearing Ashford out.
As Auburn’s offense continues to sputter using this funky quarterback rotation between Ashford and junior Michigan State transfer Payton Thorne, Ashford sounds ready to try and silence the naysayers and prove he can throw the football.
“I feel more comfortable as a whole,” Ashford said. “Whoever says I can’t play quarterback, I really don’t care. They couldn’t do half of what I do. They can sit behind a phone screen and type all they want. It’s never going to faze me.”
And while Freeze hasn’t made mention of any significant changes to his approach at the quarterback spot, between his discontent with how the offense is currently operating and the fact that Ashford started last week’s game, it’s hard not to feel like there might be a shift happening.