Auburn head coach Hugh Freeze pulled the trump card. He used his veto power. He acted as the CEO of Auburn’s football team.

Whichever wording one prefers, Freeze did it last week ahead of Auburn’s matchup with Mississippi State.

Freeze had made it clear early in the season that he wasn’t a fan of the Tigers’ two quarterback rotation between Payton Thorne and Robby Ashford. But that’s what Auburn’s offensive staff believed gave the Tigers the best chance to win football games.

So Freeze obliged.

But that changed leading into Saturday’s game against the Bulldogs.

Freeze had seen enough. He was fed up with the approach and it was time to “put up or shut up,” as Freeze put it Saturday night.

“There wasn’t really a conversation,” Freeze said Monday morning during his weekly press conference. “It was just ‘This is what we’re doing,’ and that’s it. This is what we’re doing, and we’ll figure out which one can either do it or not, and if none of them can, we’ll just we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.”

Fortunately for Freeze and the Tigers, there wasn’t ever a bridge that needed crossing Saturday.

With the exception of a pair of designated run plays for Ashford, Thorne was the guy Saturday night. The keys were his. It was his offense run. And he ran it.

Thorne finished the day with a 20-for-26 passing performance under his belt. His 77% completion percentage was a career high for him – even dating back to his time at Michigan State.

Meanwhile, Thorne also became the first Auburn quarterback since Bo Nix against LSU in 2020 to pass for three touchdowns and not toss an interception against a SEC opponent.

Not to mention, Thorne passing for 230 yards was a sight for sore eyes considering the season-long struggles of Auburn’s passing game.

“He was really confident in the plan and it showed,” Freeze said of Thorne. “I just thought he played really solid, really confidently and I thought our kids responded to that around him well.”

Thorne connected with 11 different receivers in Saturday’s win. And though Freeze said Saturday night that he was most excited about Auburn’s wide receiver room finally notching some production, he admitted Monday that none of that would’ve been the case if not for the effort of the Tigers’ offensive line.

“We protected him the best that we have,” Freeze said Monday. “That makes a huge difference.”

Given the kind of chaos the Mississippi State defense can cause with all the movement they throw at an offensive line, Freeze said on the Thursday before the game that avoiding backwards plays would be crucial to Auburn’s success.

The Bulldogs’ defense tallied four tackles for a loss on Saturday, which resulted in a combined loss of just 14 yards.

“I expected a lot more negative plays than we had,” Freeze admitted Monday.

And some of that success was the result of Freeze once again putting his foot down.

While Auburn’s offensive linemen rotate in and out through the course of every game, there was more of that being done on Saturday – a direct reflection of a conversation Freeze had with the Tigers’ offensive line coach, Jake Thornton.

“Jake (Thornton) and I met last week, and I just said I’m convinced that this is going to be better for us,” Freeze said Monday.

Auburn offensive linemen Kam Stutts and Gunner Britton have been dinged up, but not enough to keep them off the field completely, Freeze says. So the veteran tandem has continued to be a staple along the offensive line on Saturdays.

And though Stutts and Britton are among the Tigers’ best along the offensive front, Freeze saw value — especially in the long term — in getting them more rest and rotating them in and out more.

“We’ve got to rotate those guys to hopefully, I mean, it’s a long season,” Freeze said. “We’ve got four more games, and we need all those guys to play significant snaps.”

It worked on Saturday.

Auburn didn’t give up a sack, while running back Jarquez Hunter notched the first 100-plus-yard performance of any Auburn running back this season.

“I think rotating them is in the best of us, but to handle all the stuff that State throws at a team the way they did in the first half was really, really remarkable, truthfully,” Freeze said. “I expected a lot more negative plays than we had. And they protected the quarterback really well, the first half especially.”

Like Auburn’s refreshing success from the quarterback spot, that started with Freeze using his veto card as head coach.

What he said went last week.

And fortunately for Auburn, those conversations in which Freeze might’ve gone over the heads of his assistant coaches didn’t go south, Freeze says. They weren’t ugly.

“But you get to a point where the only thing that I know, is got to be what I’m comfortable with, and this is what I think we need to do. … It’s not like they were fighting me on it,” Freeze said. “Usually it was, ‘Alright, should we have this package? Should we have this package with this?’ And it was just, ‘No, this is the only thing that we’re going to do.’”