Auburn first-year head coach Hugh Freeze and the Tigers took to Jordan-Hare Stadium Saturday morning for the team’s first fall scrimmage.

As has been the case throughout fall camp, one of the first questions Freeze fielded in his post-scrimmage meeting with the media was in regard to the Tigers’ ongoing quarterback battle.

At the start of fall camp, Auburn’s quarterback race featured four guys in true freshman Hank Brown, redshirt freshman Holden Geriner, sophomore Robby Ashford and junior Michigan State transfer Payton Thorne. As of Thursday, the competition had seemingly been trimmed to three as Brown wasn’t a part of the rotation during the media’s limited viewing window.

In Saturday’s scrimmage, which wasn’t open to the media, Ashford, Geriner and Thorne all took snaps, Freeze said.

“That the ball goes in the right spot and hopefully it’s accurate when we do throw it,” Freeze said when asked what he wanted to see out of his quarterbacks Saturday. “The accuracy hopefully will come, but we’ve gotta take care of the ball and we’ve have to be playing in the right space on given plays in our offense and I thought all three did that fairly well today.”

Freeze added that both Ashford and Geriner threw touchdown passes Saturday. Meanwhile, while Thorne didn’t record a scoring throw, Freeze said the Michigan State transfer did complete two passes that were ruled just out of bounds.

“They all… they did not turn the ball over,” Freeze said. “That’s priority number one in offensive football, so that was good.”

Also factoring into Saturday’s quarterback play was the fact that Auburn’s wide receivers didn’t have their best stuff.

Albeit having an “incredible week” coming into the scrimmage, Freeze said that wasn’t the case Saturday.

“We had some guy who had some good catches today, but we had way too many opportunities in the RPO game that the quarterback made the right decision to throw the ball and a receiver is… he’s either loafing, which we can’t have, or he chose to run the wrong route,” Freeze said. “And you’ve got to look at us coaches first on that and be sure to get that cleaned up. But this week, I thought we took a step forward in the totality of that room.”

With Auburn’s season opener against UMass just three weeks out, the clock is ticking for Freeze to name a starting quarterback, which he said he will do before the Tigers take Pat Dye Field at Jordan-Hare Stadium on Sept. 2.

And instead of helping Freeze get closer to that decision, it sounded like Saturday’s scrimmage left him with more questions.

“Yesterday, I had my mind made up,” Freeze said. “And after today, I need to watch the film before I say.”