John Cohen knew his decision wouldn’t be universally well-received, regardless of who he tabbed as Auburn’s head coach.

The Tigers’ new athletics director was tasked with making a major hire — arguably the most important personnel choice his position entails — immediately upon taking over the reins of Auburn’s athletic department. Cohen was hired Oct. 31, just hours after Auburn fired then-coach Bryan Harsin and named Cadillac Williams as interim coach for the remainder of the season.

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What followed was a four-week long search by Cohen, aided by the search firm TurnkeyZRG, a pair of analytics firms in Matrix Analytical Solutions and SportSource Analytics and a bevy of industry experts, that led Auburn to hiring Hugh Freeze as its next head coach.

“You have to be comfortable with the process,” Cohen told AL.com this week. “And I’m very, very comfortable with the process we went through.”

Auburn’s hiring of Freeze came with its share of backlash from fans and outsiders alike. Freeze has a well-documented and complicated past that included his resignation at Ole Miss amid personal and professional controversy in July 2017, which led to a two-season exile from coaching before he resurfaced at Liberty and spent the last four seasons working to rehabilitate his career and image.

After not fielding questions at Freeze’s introductory press conference Nov. 29, delivering only a prepared statement that lasted nearly five minutes, Cohen discussed with AL.com the search process that ultimately led Auburn to Freeze, and why despite Freeze’s checkered past, the Tigers’ new athletics director is at peace with how the search unfolded and the hire he made.

“Every athletic director has this very long list of things, criteria that is very important to them,” Cohen said. “Well, as you go through that criteria, it was really important to me that, you know, we dove into Coach Freeze’s history as much as we possibly could.”

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Cohen’s criteria included a detailed list of 58 traits — which he held up on a sheet of paper during his own introductory press conference in early November — that he wanted to identify in a candidate. Among those characteristics and qualifications Cohen sought were SEC experience, quarterback development, recruiting prowess, community involvement, family background, relationships and social media presence.

According to Cohen, Auburn identified Freeze as a viable candidate “very early” in the search, even as interviews were conducted with 18 different coaches. The interest was mutual; Freeze has not shied from the fact that he coveted the Auburn job if and when it came open.

Freeze checked many of the boxes for Cohen off the bat: He had SEC experience at Ole Miss, where he had a 10-win season in 2015, made two New Year’s Six bowl games, twice defeated Nick Saban’s Alabama teams and got the most out of his quarterbacks. The advanced data from the two analytics firms Auburn enlisted only backed that up.

“He was the highest-ranked coach, analytically, on our board,” Cohen said. “That was a factor. It was not the factor. But statistically, he was the highest-ranked coach on our board.”

Of course, Auburn still needed to do a background check and its due diligence when it came to Freeze, who’s a polarizing figure in college football given his past. While Freeze has had success at every stop of his career, including a 34-15 mark at Liberty while winning at least eight games a season, controversy has often followed him.

He resigned at Ole Miss during just a couple months before the start of the 2017 season after program administrators and then-AD Ross Bjork became aware of a pattern of concerning behavior. Not long after Freeze’s resignation at Ole Miss, it was discovered that he made at least a dozen calls to escort services from his university-issued cell phone. Following his resignation, which came during NCAA investigations into the Ole Miss program, USA Today published a story reporting alleged inappropriate behavior by Freeze during his time as a high school coach at Briarcrest Christian in the Memphis area. Freeze vehemently denied those allegations.

After spending two seasons away from coaching, Freeze was hired at Liberty in December 2018 following a very brief stint with the AAF’s Arizona Hotshots. Freeze again found himself involved in controversy last July, when he sent unsolicited direct messages to a former Liberty student. The student was an outspoken critic of Flames athletics director Ian McCaw — who hired Freeze — and other university leadership, and she was among the plaintiffs in a lawsuit against Liberty for its handling of sexual assault claims and Title IX cases.

Freeze was not involved in that lawsuit, which has since been settled, but his unsolicited messages in defense of McCaw, whom he described as “the most Jesus-like leader” he’d been around, sparked discourse. Freeze issued an apology for the messages during a one-on-one interview with ESPN on the day he was introduced at Auburn, calling them “an inadvertent misstep with no ill intent.”

“One of the most important things was our investigation,” Cohen said. “Our research showed that his transparency — these two things are happening at the same time: Tell us what happened; he tells you, you research it, it’s identical to what he’s saying. So, there’s some trust involved there. There’s some integrity. I find it interesting that — and I’m not talking about Hugh’s situation here, but in life — a lot of folks who might criticize, who want to come up with their own set of facts, then you do the actual work, and you ask all the questions, and you dive into the history and you get to find out the actual facts — some of the very people who might want to cast stones are the same people who have some things that they might want to cover up themselves.

“So, when you’re talking to people, this person over here, and you say, ‘I want to know the answer these 20 questions about Hugh Freeze,’ and then you go 500 miles away 30 minutes later, when these two people don’t know each other, and you get the same set of answers — you’re onto something.”

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Cohen has said he approached the search with the “utmost seriousness” and classified it as a thoroughly vetted process that included a deep dive into Freeze’s past and his background — not just from his time at Ole Miss, but every stop throughout his career: Briarcrest Christian, Lambuth, Arkansas State and Liberty. Cohen reached out to more than 100 sources for references and background on Freeze’s past “from all areas of life.” Among those interviews were some of Freeze’s former women’s basketball players at Briarcrest Christian — some of whom are now mothers and parents, Cohen noted — as well as law enforcement officers who have worked as part of Freeze’s security detail at different schools. He also spoke with administrators and former players from each of the institutions Freeze has been at. Cohen also made a point to reach out to “people who had nothing to do with athletics” and speak to them about their experiences and interactions with Freeze.

“We just kept following the trail, as you would with any hiring,” Cohen said. “And I’m accused of being a little bit more tedious about these things than others. You know, with some of the folks that were working with us on this, I’d asked the same question to 50 people, and I might ask it twice, and it’s like, ‘My God, John, we’ve been through this.’ You know, I just wanted to make sure. So, I feel very, very comfortable.”

In their discussions about the job prior to Cohen signing Freeze to a six-year contract worth $6.5 million annually, one aspect of Freeze’s past transgressions particularly stood out to the AD: Freeze told him he planned to be open and forthcoming with his players about his mistakes and try to use them as learning opportunities moving forward

It’s something Cohen, a former baseball coach and the former AD at Mississippi State, said he has not seen many coaches willing to do.

“I think it’s incredibly valuable to do that,” Cohen said. “And it took me a long time as a coach to realize I can admit to my players that I have failings, that I have transgressions, and that I make mistakes. I didn’t want to do that when I was 40 years old. I didn’t want to do it when I was 30 years old, but you get to a point in your life where you feel like this is valuable, because they’re going to make mistakes as well. All of them are. And when you do make a mistake, what’s the next step?

“That’s what’s incredibly important — trying to eliminate any issues that you have. But when you do make a mistake, what’s next? And what do we learn from that? I think I think Coach Freeze had a great relationship with his players at Liberty based on that, and I think he’ll have a great relationship with our student-athletes here based on that.”

In the two-plus months since he hired Freeze, Cohen has been impressed with the work the Tigers’ new coach has done, particularly on the recruiting and evaluation front. That hasn’t been a surprise to Cohen, but he believes it has validated the process that ultimately led to Freeze being hired on the Plains.

“Knowing what I knew, the amount of work that we put into our background check, the amount of work that we did into getting to know Hugh in every way, I felt very, very comfortable with the decision we made,” Cohen said. “…I’m not sure anybody did more work on Hugh Freeze than we did. In that way, I feel very comfortable with him as our head football coach at Auburn.”

Tom Green is an Auburn beat reporter for Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @Tomas_Verde.