It was way back in mid-July when local media members had Auburn’s first-year head coach Hugh Freeze cornered in a small breakout room within Nashville’s Grand Hyatt hotel minutes before he took the podium at SEC Media Days.

Freeze was asked about Payton Thorne — who he hadn’t been able to watch throw yet — as well as the countless other new additions to Auburn’s roster.

Needless to say, there was still a lot of unknowns.

However, Freeze seemed pretty sure about two things: He was going to have to recruit his tail off to right the ship at Auburn and offensive coordinator Philip Montgomery would be calling plays on offense once the season opened in September.

And to this point, both have been true.

Freeze and the Auburn coaching staff had a successful offseason on the recruiting trail, first flipping 5-star linebacker Demarcus Riddick from Kirby Smart and Georgia, and later pulling 5-star wide receiver Perry Thompson away from Alabama.

Would Auburn have been as successful in earning such commitments if Freeze didn’t have all 10 toes on the recruiting trail? Who’s to say.

More: Hugh Freeze has changed recruiting at Auburn. And all it took was a bit of effort.

But it certainly sends a message to a prospect when the head honcho himself is the one recruiting you and Freeze learned pretty quick that the previous staff left the cupboards pretty dry.

“I don’t want to be negative. Just, it was off from what I believe an Auburn roster should look like,” Freeze said at SEC media days. “Recruiting has been a little more challenging than I thought for Auburn, because of what I believe Auburn should be and what it’s proven it can be.”

So Freeze pushed all his chips towards recruiting and — for the first time in his career — surrendered play-calling duties to someone else.

“I hired Philip (Montgomery) to call plays,” Freeze said in July. “I think there’s so many dynamics going on in the college game right now to rebuild Auburn, that it was very, very beneficial to get someone who has done it at a high level and has the capacity to do that.”

Week 1 against UMass was like the honeymoon phase in Freeze and Montgomery’s play-calling marriage.

With all respect to Don Brown and the Minutemen, the Tigers were able to have their way and take what they wanted.

“It was easy Saturday. I mean, you just kind of looked at the call sheet and the things we had planned are the things we called, and they tended to work in the run game,” Freeze said of the offensive play-calling after Auburn’s win over UMass. “I don’t think that was a great test for, truthfully.”

Freeze acknowledged the play-calling dance would likely become more difficult as the games became more difficult.

Though, he might’ve been faced with that sooner than what he expected as the Tigers went on the road to Cal and sputtered on offense.

But even then, the offensive troubles that night likely weren’t a result of play-calling, but rather the result of Auburn’s offense giving up four turnovers – of which each felt to come during a promising drive down field.

“We’re not overreacting to anything,” Freeze said after the Tigers squeaked out a 14-10 win over the Golden Bears. “Philip is going to be fine. We’re going to work together this week and see if we can’t get a great plan in place to not repeat last week’s performance.”

Auburn’s offense didn’t repeat the Cal performance the following week against, well, Samford.

Instead, Thorne tore through the Bulldogs defense with both his arm and his legs, replicating numbers that haven’t been seen at Auburn since Nick Marshall in 2015.

However, the play-calling dance against Samford was much like the one against UMass – everything was there for Auburn’s taking.

Then the disaster at Texas A&M happened.

Auburn couldn’t sustain a drive worth a lick in College Station as the Tigers went 3-for-15 on third down and had more than 10 yards to gain on third down more times than it didn’t.

And like the lackadaisical showing at Cal, there were a number of factors contributing.

Perhaps the most notable was the Texas A&M defense creating 15 negative plays and tallying five sacks.

Was that the result of the offensive line? The quarterbacks not getting rid of the ball quick enough? Receivers not getting open? Play-calling? Simply being outmanned by a defensive line full of blue chips?

Simply put, the answer to all of those questions is yes, it was a bit of this and a bit of that.

But for Freeze, whose background lies heavily in piloting explosive offenses, watching the Tigers’ offense total just 200 yards, 56 passing yards and never finding the end zone was hard to do and not step in.

The result of Saturday’s mess at Kyle Field left Freeze itching to be more involved in the offensive gameplan.

“Boy, this is something I’m struggling with,” Freeze said Monday when asked about the play-calling duties ahead of Saturday’s matchup with Georgia. “That’s all I probably need to say.”

Freeze’s response came off a bit sassier than perhaps he intended.

Montgomery still has the backing of Auburn’s head coach.

“I think Monty and them are doing a great job right now trying to correct the issues we all see,” Freeze said Monday, adding that he and Montgomery had met a number of times between Saturday’s loss at Texas A&M and Freeze’s press conference Monday.

Are there still gripes? Absolutely.

One of the things written on Freeze’s complaint card this week was Montgomery’s decision to abandon the run-pass option scheme that had proven successful for the Tigers the week prior.

“The week before, we were very effective in the RPO game, and in this game, we threw zero RPOs. That’s not something I’m happy about,” Freeze said Monday. “We’ve gotten away from that, and I don’t really understand that.”

So while Freeze isn’t totally ready to snatch the play card out of the hands of Montgomery, it’s obvious his foot is beginning to tap with impatience.

And it’s not just Freeze that’s growing irritated. He knows Auburn’s passionate fanbase is too.

“We’ve got to figure out our identity… I know, people don’t like to hear it,” Freeze said. “People want success now. They want you to win now, every single game. I get all of that. This is not my first rodeo with taking over a program that has struggled and I’m certainly not at all fazed.

“I’m hungrier than ever to move forward and get better, and we will. Some of that’s going to help in recruiting, but in the meantime, you’ve got to get the ones you have better.”

It’s all a juggling act.

And the stage of Saturday’s circus is a pretty big one with Kirby Smart and the top-ranked Georgia Bulldogs coming to town.

Obviously, an upset over the two-time defending national champion Bulldogs would likely send a sold-out crowd rushing onto Pat Dye Field. That’s what a win over Georgia would mean for Auburn now in its current state.

But the spectacle of Saturday is equally as important for the future of the Tigers’ football program as Auburn’s attendance list of recruits is lengthy and impressive. Freeze isn’t sure Auburn has enough tickets to fulfill each recruit and his family, so he leaves that up to his recruiting staff.

Instead, Freeze’s job on Saturday is to find a healthy balance between finding a way to win a football game and finding a way to win some big-time recruiting battles with one of his biggest competitors of both wars on the opposing sideline.

“We’ve got to make sure they see what Auburn is really about while they’re here for a game of this magnitude,” Freeze said.