Auburn’s first A-Day spring game under head coach Hugh Freeze will have a different flavor than years past.

As Auburn has progressed through its first spring with a new staff, Freeze has toyed with different formats for the team’s spring finale, which is set for Saturday at Jordan-Hare Stadium. Freeze has gone back and forth with different approaches for the A-Day scrimmage, and he believes he has settled on a format for this weekend.

“Spring games for us, when it’s us against us, is I don’t want to waste a day,” Freeze said Monday before the Tigers started their final week of practices. “And the temptation and challenge for us as coaches is it (the spring game) can be a wasted day — not a wasted day for the fans or for recruiting or any of that, but for the practice itself. You want to make all 15 of our practices count. And that’s a very difficult setting for us to really do what we want to do.”

Read more Auburn football: Observations from Day 12 of Auburn’s spring practice

Auburn trying to strike right balance with new up-tempo offense this spring

Trio of transfers has “absolutely improved” Auburn’s offensive line this spring

Instead of splitting the team into an orange side and a blue side, Freeze’s solution is a format that will include starting the defense out with a predetermined amount of points and then tasking defensive coordinator Ron Roberts’ unit with keeping the offense below that total over the course of the scrimmage. No quirky scoring formulas or bonuses for interceptions or forced fumbles. Just put the ball down, offense vs. defense for four quarters, with drives starting at various different spots throughout the field.

It’s a more situational approach than the typical first-team vs. second-team scrimmage that Auburn has utilized under prior coaching staffs.

“If the defense can hold the offenses to under that point, the defense wins the spring game,” Freeze said. “And they’ll get to eat steak or something. And the losers will eat a hot dog. Something like that. That’s the best format I know. I don’t want to come up with some system where we have to calculate points based on anything other than what’s normally points in football.”

While Auburn’s A-Day game will look a bit different this season, Freeze wants to strike a balance between putting on a good show for Auburn’s fans — who will have to pay $10 for general admission tickets to Jordan-Hare Stadium — without giving too much away to the teams on the Tigers’ 20223 schedule. It’s a juggling act in today’s state of college football, when every program’s spring game is either broadcast on national television or streamed online through the league’s media partners (in Auburn’s case, SEC Network+ this weekend).

“We’re going to give them a game that day that I hope they can enjoy but yet understand, gosh, we don’t really know who we are offensively right now,” Freeze said. “That’s probably the way I want it to be perceived by most, because we’re a new staff and one of the advantages that we might have coming into the season is there’s nothing really on tape of what this new staff is exactly like.”

Freeze hopes his team can put on a good and entertaining display Saturday at Jordan-Hare Stadium, where kickoff is set for 1 p.m., but he also wants Auburn fans to understand the Tigers are still very much a work in progress. The team will have had 14 total practices under its belt entering Saturday, with a new staff and several new additions at key positions — and nearly five months before the team’s season opener against UMass.

The product on the field Saturday will, Freeze hopes, look considerably different than the one that trots out there Sept. 2. Expectations, he said, should be tempered.

“When you have unrealistic expectations and they’re not met — I think this is anything in life, period: football, life — unrealistic expectations lead to frustration,” Freeze said. “And so, I just don’t want anybody to be frustrated. We’re probably, headed into the next year, are going to be quite good at getting in a huddle and slowing things down. You might see that Saturday. Is that who we really are as an identity? I don’t know. I’ve never been that. But you might see some of that. All the coaches do it, and maybe I’m falling into that, but I really just don’t want to show too much of what we think we might be really good at.

“That was, truthfully, just me being candid with them. They’re going to see us hit and they’re going to see us tackle, and they’re going see people run the ball and people throw the ball. Will it be exactly the same that they see this fall? I sure hope not. I hope it’s better and probably a little different.”

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