The box of a puzzle has a picture with the finished product on the cover. It’s to have a guide for putting all the various pieces of different shapes and sizes together.

In a way, that’s a metaphor for Auburn’s football team.

Auburn’s puzzle contains at least 40 pieces that weren’t here a year ago. They come as transfers from small schools and Power 5 programs alike in an Auburn transfer class ranked among the five best in the nation. They come from highly regarded freshmen who could make an immediate impact.

And Hugh Freeze only had a few weeks to put it all together.

“That’s the challenge, I don’t even know all the names yet, truthfully,” Freeze said at SEC Media Days in July. “We’re gonna have to wear tape on the helmet again. We recruited kids after spring practice, I haven’t coached them. I haven’t been able to be with them a whole lot, and truthfully it’d be hard to sit here and say I truly know them. Or that they know me. It’s one of the — I’ve never felt quite like this.”

Now, as Auburn makes its final gameday morning preparations to face UMass in the season opener, Freeze has finished a month of August where he worked to remedy what he didn’t know.

When Freeze talked about putting tape on everyone’s helmet to learn names, he hadn’t yet named Michigan State transfer Payton Thorne as Auburn’s starting quarterback. Nor had he officially slated three transfers to start on his offensive line, two more up front on defense, another at linebacker and one of his starting receivers too.

Of the over 40 new players on this team, about half of them hadn’t practiced for Auburn until this fall, with transfer commitments coming after Auburn’s spring game.

So come the start of preseason practices in early August, almost exactly a month before Auburn’s kickoff at 2:30 p.m. Saturday against UMass — which will be broadcast on ESPN — Freeze said this was a feeling he’d never had coming into a season.

“This is the most uncomfortable fall camp I’m going into, and it’s because of the new world,” Freeze said before Auburn’s first fall camp practice. “We have players that we added after spring ball. One’s a quarterback. I haven’t coached him a single practice. And everybody’s asking what do you think? I have no idea. And so it makes me feel a little anxious that I feel like I may be behind in our evaluation of who we are and what we can do. And maybe we are.”

The start of fall camp was him dumping all the pieces out of the box and onto the floor to start working and organizing what piece goes where. That meant moving four-star rated freshman Keldric Faulk from jack linebacker to defensive end, or figuring out how to organize his over eight-man rotation at wide receiver, or playing Western Kentucky transfer Gunner Britton at all five spots on the offensive line.

Part of putting the puzzle together meant building chemistry in the locker room. That began over the summer during workouts and continued into fall camp. Britton said he and Thorne played golf together. Tulsa transfer Dilllon Wade said he bonded with other offensive linemen through meals at Baumhauer’s Victory Grill. He’s a fan of the Bam-Bam shrimp, by the way.

Thorne brought in a folder with a photo of each of his teammates in it so he could learn their names and faces.

If you walk past somebody in the hallway, I just feel uncomfortable if I don’t know their name,” Thorne said after being named Auburn’s starting quarterback. “I’d be lying if I said I know everybody’s name already. I’m still trying to learn everybody. It’s just a weird feeling. I don’t like working with people if I don’t know their name.”

Linebacker Eugene Asante isn’t exactly a new face around Auburn at this point — now a year since his transfer from North Carolina — said he and the team had a meeting with the new players when they arrived, and he made a point of telling his teammates he wanted to learn more about them. He seems to have followed through.

There’s the jack linebacker room, which is led by a trio of transfers in Jalen McLeod from Appalachian State, Stephen Sings V from Liberty and Elijah McAllister from Vanderbilt. Those pieces seem to fit together well, they say.

“We’ve definitely bonded,” McLeod said. “We all are bringing what we’ve got to the table, and we talk and communicate. We’re friends. It’s the best in meetings.”

To help enforce the culture the team is trying to build with so many pieces coming together at different ages and stages of their careers, Auburn has a Culture Council. There are 12 members of the group. Three of them are transfers.

East Carolina transfer Avery Jones mentioned Kam Stutts, a sixth-year who spent his whole career at Auburn and a member of the Culture Council, as someone who helped him make his own adjustment to Auburn.

In the puzzle, this preseason is like putting finding all the border pieces and putting together the frame. The next step is filling in all the pieces in the middle.

The framework is the first depth chart and the optimism surrounding Auburn heading into its first game of the season. The meat of the puzzle, the most difficult part oftentimes, is going to be the games. That stage of the building is now beginning.

But Freeze still feels uncomfortable. Freeze has frequently brought up his long-term vision for Auburn when describing what he’s looking for, and those goals aren’t going to happen in his first season. Building a program — putting the puzzle together — takes time.

“It’s been quite challenging,” Freeze said during his SEC conference call with media on Wednesday. “And still, quite truthfully, you’re still trying to put the pieces together.”

For this year, Freeze hasn’t had time, at least not much.

Freeze admits he doesn’t know what to expect when he starts working on the rest of this puzzle. Games aren’t the environment he can control in practice.

He’s going to keep rearranging his pieces. Maybe, they’ll eventually fit together.

Matt Cohen covers Auburn sports for AL.com. You can follow him on Twitter at @Matt_Cohen_ or email him at [email protected]