Auburn head coach Hugh Freeze says he wasn’t paying much attention to Ole Miss head coach Lane Kiffin’s social media antics when Auburn was in the process of hiring away Derrick Nix from Ole Miss.

“Can people quit calling me and telling me (Derrick Nix) is at (Auburn),” Kiffin wrote on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.

Kiffin paired the post with a picture Nix working at the Ole Miss facility.

Eventually, Nix reached a deal to become Auburn’s next offensive coordinator and to reunite with Freeze, who Nix coached under for five years at Ole Miss.

And who broke the news on Jan. 17?

It was the Ole Miss social media accounts, which posted a statement penned by Kiffin.

“Look, I love Lane, I love his family and y’all believe it or not, I’m not reading a lot of Twitter these days,” Freeze said Feb. 29 when asked about Kiffin’s antics.

“But Nix… I hired him first, so I guess I have a right to him,” Freeze joked.

In the first staff he assembled, it was former Tulsa head coach Philip Montgomery who Freeze brought over to be the Tigers’ offensive coordinator. But after a year of watching Auburn’s offense sputter and use an atypical two-quarterback rotation in 2023, Freeze made the decision not to retain Montgomery on Jan. 5.

Montgomery’s firing sparked the search for a new offensive coordinator at Auburn and from the very start, all signs pointed towards Nix considering he and Freeze’s history from their time back at Ole Miss.

“This is not a negative toward anyone else, but yes, I’m very much more comfortable walking down the halls and walking in the offensive room and saying, ‘Alright, now, I know what means,’ and, ‘the adjustment I’m going to do off that if they do that,’ comes naturally to me,” Freeze said. “Excited to again see Derrick step into a leadership role there along with the other guys that we have.”

But Freeze knew what he was getting in bringing in Nix, who Freeze calls “one of the best recruiters, best men, best football coaches that I’ve been around.”

However, the history between Freeze and Nix means very little to Auburn’s current crop of offensive players, who are just now beginning to get their first taste of a Nix-led offense as spring practices have gotten underway.

That said, it hasn’t taken long for Auburn’s players to see the offense take strides in the right direction.

“The two words that stand out to me are urgency and energy. That’s what I feel like he’s brought so far,” Auburn quarterback Payton Thorne said of Nix on Feb. 29. “Our detail is way up — attention to detail on offense. Just practice Tuesday, it’s only one practice, but it felt like winning football. It felt like good offensive football.”

With Nix in the fold, Freeze hopes to return back to the “only thing I’ve known that has given us success everywhere we’ve been,” which is an RPO-driven run game and the play-action passes off of it.

The Tigers tried incorporating some of that into the mix last season, but didn’t have all the pieces they needed to execute.

“In order to do that you’ve got to have a receiver or three that can win in some one-on-ones and quarterbacks that can execute it,” Freeze said. “I do think our quarterbacks can do that.”

During the first day of practice on a windy Tuesday afternoon in Auburn, Thorne admits he and the Tigers’ offense’s execution wasn’t the best.

“It’s Day 1 rarely are you going to execute at the highest level,” Thorne said. “But just the way that practice moves and the tempo we went at, the finish on every play as a ball carrier and everything that we’re emphasizing… I’m in complete support and I’m completely behind Coach Nix and obviously Coach Freeze. He’s been outstanding so far.”