Auburn head coach Hugh Freeze often finds himself having to remind his team of college-aged boys that growth doesn’t come from where they think it does.

“I tell them all the time, man: The growth, really — unfortunately in life and in football — the growth usually happens more in the valley than it does on the mountaintop,” Freeze said following Auburn’s heartbreaking 27-20 loss to the No. 1-ranked Georgia Bulldogs Saturday night.

And while all of Auburn’s football team was in the valley in last week’s loss to Texas A&M, perhaps no one found himself farther from the top than Auburn quarterback Payton Thorne.

During the third quarter against the Aggies last week, Thorne watched from the sideline as Robby Ashford and Holden Geriner took over the reins of the Auburn offense. Thorne had been benched midway through his first SEC road game.

The talk of the town following the 27-10 loss in College Station centered around what Freeze and the Tigers were going to do at the quarterback spot moving forward. It seemed like everyone outside of Auburn’s locker room had come to the conclusion Thorne wasn’t the answer.

Even former Auburn basketball player Charles Barkley sounded off on the matter and said Auburn should “pray for better quarterback play.”

But Freeze’s opinion was the only one that mattered. And his leash hadn’t quite run out on the junior Michigan State transfer.

“We had a good meeting Sunday night and obviously, I feel like there’s things that our staff has let him down on also,” Freeze said during the SEC coaches’ teleconference on the Wednesday following the game in College Station.

“And some of it is him and he knows that. He owns it. But I promised him we would do a better job coaching him this week and preparing him.”

Freeze spent a lot of time with the offense in the days leading up to Saturday’s game against the top-ranked Bulldogs.

In the open portion of Tuesday’s practice, Freeze was seen working with Auburn’s wide receivers, who haven’t been strangers to criticism this season.

Meanwhile, after Thorne was sacked five times against the Aggies, Freeze added Wednesday that pocket presence was another point of emphasis in the week leading up to Saturday’s game.

Freeze was also more involved in in the play-calling against Georgia after he expressed being unhappy with offensive coordinator Philip Montgomery for abandoning RPO play calls – which had worked to that point – against the Aggies.

All of those were important steps in restoring Thorne’s confidence after he went 6-for-12 for just 44 yards against Texas A&M.

But all of those efforts would’ve been moot had the Auburn quarterback not fixed his own mindset first.

“We kind of ditched last week,” Thorne said Saturday night.

“We threw it in the garbage and learned what we needed to, but we weren’t hanging our heads over one game… So we put our heads back down and went back to work this week and tried to fix to the best we could the things that were tripping us up. I thought we made progress on that.”

Thorne finished his day 10-for-19 for 82 yards through the air against the Bulldogs – a mark that wasn’t much better than one he posted against the Aggies.

But unlike his errant misses against Texas A&M, Thorne’s misses against Georgia were narrow.

Of Thorne’s nine incompletions, six of them hit the hands of the intended receiver.

On the ground, Thorne led Auburn’s rushers for the second game this season as he tallied 92 rushing yards against Georgia – of which 61 yards came on a single trot down the Georgia sideline in the opening half.

“I read the defensive end, he crashed, kind of lost view of me so I pulled it and our two tight ends did a great job of blocking the two guys out there,” Thorne said of his 61-yard rush. “I tried to take off. Unfortunately, I wasn’t fast enough to get all the way to the end zone. You know, those DBs are really fast.”

A score there would’ve been great – especially considering the Tigers were forced to settle for a field goal to take a three-point opening lead instead of a seven-point opening league.

But the Tigers failing to eclipse the goal line wasn’t an end-all, be-all situation – especially in the first quarter.

Instead, Thorne’s sprint to the Georgia 30-yard line forced the Bulldogs to respect him and Auburn’s run game – something Georgia head coach Kirby Smart knew his team would have to do coming into the afternoon.

“In the past, we haven’t struggled with that kind of run game,” Smart said. “They hurt us. They caught us with some things they did and we expected it. That’s what’s disappointing. You expect it and you don’t stop it.”

The coach of the No. 1 team in the country admitted that his team knew to be on the lookout for Thorne and Auburn’s quarterbacks to call their own number. He also admitted that it was frustrating to watch his team neglect to stop the quarterback run anyways.

Talk about a confidence boost.

But we wouldn’t be telling the whole story if we didn’t say that Thorne and Auburn’s passing attack didn’t still leave plenty to be desired.

Auburn tallied just 88 passing yards against Georgia on Saturday, meaning the Tigers have passed for less than 100 yards in each of their three games against Power 5 opponents this season.

The good news is Auburn is 2-1 in those games. But that will surely catch up to the Tigers as the season progresses, hence Freeze harping on the importance of being balanced offensively.

“Offensively, I think we’re going to have to run the football in a lot of different ways and make it look different. We did some of that today,” Freeze said Saturday. “Then, be able to complete the passes that we need to complete when they are open. We had some of those again today. But our identity has got to stay balanced on offense.”

Becoming more balanced doesn’t happen overnight. Especially to a team that’s been plagued with inconsistencies at the most important position on the field.

“It’s a work in progress. Trying our best to mesh and figure everything out. But it’s still new to everybody,” Thorne said. “We’re still trying to figure out how to work everything best and what we’re doing exactly. But I think we made progress this week.”

Often times there’s pain in progress.

And that was certainly the case Saturday night as the loss to Georgia left Auburn’s locker room deflated by the would’ve, could’ve and should’ves of what could’ve been.

But there was progress – both for Payton Thorne and the Auburn offense.

The hope now is that the progress gets carried into the bye week as the Tigers prepared to visit the LSU Tigers on the road — a place Thorne has yet to prove he can compete at a high level.