On Sept. 19, 2015, Hugh Freeze and Ole Miss ended Nick Saban’s Alabama football dynasty. At least that’s what the pundits said, when the Rebels beat the Crimson Tide for the second season in a row, this time at Bryant-Denny Stadium.

Freeze’s fast-paced offense made the Crimson Tide’s defense look antiquated, the UA offense was befuddled by a quarterback change, and the winds of college football looked to be shifting. Alabama simply looked sloppy, and the then-Ole Miss head coach seemed to have the Rebels primed for a run at the crown.

Eight years later, things have changed. Saban faces Freeze again Saturday, this time in the Iron Bowl at Auburn.

The two coaches careers have crossed in multiple ways since Ole Miss scored those two wins. Here’s a look at how they got here.

‘Create a path’

Saban loves second chances. When an Alabama player makes an off-field mistake, the coach looks for reasons to keep them around, help them find the right path.

In his mind, kicking someone off the team eliminates his opportunity to change their life. Ask him his reasoning and he’ll occasionally launch into a story of a time when he faced external pressure to boot wideout Muhsin Muhammad from his Michigan State roster.

Instead he kept Muhammad around, and the receiver made good, graduating, playing in the NFL and building a life for himself.

“There’s probably some occasion where most of us in this room, including myself, did something in our life that probably wasn’t a great choice and a great decision,” Saban said at SEC Media Days in July. “And we always want to try to create a path for players who have made a mistake to get a second chance, but also to help educate them on what they can learn from the poor decision or judgment that they actually made.”

That extends to staff as well. Saban’s reform school for fired coaches has become legendary, with graduates who went on to get another head job including Lane Kiffin, Butch Jones, Mike Locksley, Steve Sarkisian and more.

And in 2018, he reportedly wanted Freeze.

“I think Hugh Freeze is a really good coach,” Saban said in January of that year. “So we’ll keep evaluating and trying to make our staff as strong as we can make it.”

Since that 2015 game, Freeze’s career had hit the skids due to scandals of his own creation. It wasn’t even the NCAA investigation issues that hung over the program for years, which Freeze stoked in an infamous 2013 social media post encouraging readers to contact Ole Miss compliance with any alleged violations.

No, the married Freeze was done in by contacting escort services on his university-issued phone. The records were made public as part of a lawsuit involving his predecessor, Houston Nutt, and led to his forced resignation in 2017 for a “pattern of personal misconduct.”

Now, Saban wanted to give him a life raft, bring him aboard as an offensive assistant. Then Greg Sankey stepped in.

The SEC commissioner reportedly nixed the hire, pointing out that it wasn’t a good look for the league so soon after the firing. Instead of using the Saban method to get his next gig, Freeze took the head coach job at Liberty, where he was hired by Ian McCaw, the athletic director who resigned in disgrace from Baylor after a massive sexual misconduct scandal there.

Liberty, a conservative Christian school founded by the late Jerry Falwell Sr., allowed Freeze to rehab his image, in-part through the evangelical religion that he’s built into his public persona for years. Freeze was also fairly successful on the field, finishing 10-1 in 2020 and winning the Cure Bowl with the Flames, who were an independent FBS team at the time.

And in November of 2022, Auburn came calling. Bryan Harsin was fired, Lane Kiffin was staying at Ole Miss and the Tigers were willing to overlook Freeze’s baggage in the name of winning.

“Coach Freeze was completely transparent about his past transgressions,” AU athletics director John Cohen claimed in a prepared statement while introducing Freeze. “He showed remorse, and he’s had an accountability plan that he’s used for the last five-plus years.”

Changing with the times

As it turned out, the Saban dynasty’s demise had been exaggerated. Since that day at Bryant-Denny Stadium in 2015, Alabama’s head coach, never one to “waste a failing,” had used the loss as an opportunity to evolve.

During the losses to Ole Miss, UA’s defense looked ill-prepared to deal with Freeze’s high-octane attack. That issue has been remedied.

“When I was a defensive coordinator at the Cleveland Browns say, and I thought if I called base closed triple 88, six Bronco, that was telling everybody what to do on every formation. Saban said on The Pat McAfee Show in October. “If you try to make that call now against a fastball team, no way.

“We just have a one-word call for that. Buckeye.”

The 2015 loss to Ole Miss didn’t cost Alabama the national title, the Crimson Tide made the College Football Playoff and won. But it did make Saban rethink his approach to things going forward.

Besides the defensive changes, he evolved the offense. Lane Kiffin had arrived as offensive coordinator in 2014 and was the catalyst for bringing modern offensive football to Tuscaloosa.

Before, the Crimson Tide was winning titles with the likes of Greg McElroy and Jake Coker at quarterback. Extremely serviceable for the system, but not the dynamic presence of players like Jalen Hurts, Tua Tagovailoa, Bryce Young or even Jalen Milroe.

Saban had once doubtfully pondered the way offense was moving in college football.

“Is this what we want football to be?” he famously asked in 2012.

It ended up being a rhetorical question, Saban got with the times, spurred on by the constant need to win. He and the Tide captured more titles in 2017 and 2020 and have been in contention nearly every season since.

Freeze and Saban last met during the Auburn coach’s final season at Ole Miss in 2017. Freeze’s last win against Alabama came in that 2015 game.

When the two coaches stand on opposite sidelines Saturday at Jordan-Hare Stadium, at least one of them has changed significantly.

‘The Iron Bowl is what it is’

Freeze is here, at least in part, because he beat Saban. The coach acknowledged how imperative the matchup with Alabama is to his program.

“The Iron Bowl is what it is,” Freeze said at SEC media days. “And I don’t have to be educated on that. I’ve been a part of some big rivalries and understand that in most polls this would be No. 1 in the rivalry, so I know what it means to the people that support our university and our football program.”

The Tigers got rid of Gus Malzahn in 2020, after he won three games against his counterpart in Tuscaloosa throughout his seven-year tenure. Harsin never it done, flaming out on the plains after two seasons.

Freeze hadn’t been squeaky clean since his exile in Lynchburg began. He was exposed for sending unsolicited direct messages defending McCaw to Chelsea Andrews, a sexual assault survivor and former Liberty student who had been critical of the AD and was one one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit alleging the school mishandled sexual misconduct allegations.

There was also a cloud from a 2017 USA Today report, where former students of Briarcrest Christian School in Tennessee, where Freeze coached and taught, claimed he, among other things, had made a female eighth-grade student change shirts in his office.

Cohen claimed Auburn did its due diligence in hiring Freeze. However, according to Andrews, she was never contacted during the vetting process.

“Everything he disclosed to us turned out to be accurate after speaking with credible industry sources,” Cohen said during an introductory press conference where he didn’t take any questions after his prepared remarks. “In this way, coach Freeze was honest and truthful, another Auburn Creed characteristic.”

Across the state, Saban has been going through another relative dry spell. The Tide hasn’t won a national title since 2020, while Georgia has become the sport’s dominant power in the meantime.

A loss to Texas in Week 2, followed by a rough showing at South Florida revived the dead dynasty narrative. But Alabama is entering the Iron Bowl undefeated in SEC play and still in the hunt for a spot in the CFP’s field of four.

The Tide has looked better nearly every week.

“I love it,” Saban said after UA beat Tennessee in October. “It’s been great. The challenges are great. I enjoy coaching this team. That’s not to say they’re not taking years off my life, but I’m OK with it. It’s fun because they’ve got a good spirit about them.”

Alabama has already locked up a spot against the Bulldogs in the SEC title game. But before that, to keep its playoff hopes alive, it will have to go through a familiar face.

Freeze’s team has been inconsistent this season, bowl-eligible but coming off a blowout loss at Jordan-Hare Stadium against Conference USA’s New Mexico State. That’s not out of character for teams he has coached, even the 2015 team that beat the Tide lost to unranked Memphis and Arkansas, and last year’s Liberty squad beat Arkansas and BYU before losing its final four games, including an even worse defeat at the hands of NMSU.

But Freeze can get teams up for big games. And Jordan-Hare Stadium has been a house of horrors for Alabama, including the 2021 game where the No. 3 Crimson Tide needed four overtimes to sneak past Harsin’s unranked Tigers.

“Our players are going to have to be zeroed in on making the adjustments that we need to make,” Saban said Wednesday. “And I’m sure we’ll probably see something different in the game than what we practiced, so I think Hugh’s one of the best, most difficult preparations that we have when we play against his offenses.”

The game is set to kick off at 2:30 p.m. Saturday in Auburn. It will be aired on CBS.