Auburn football coach Hugh Freeze went around to each position room this week and asked his players if they had their driver’s license.

“And is it current?,” Freeze said with a laugh during his time on Auburn’s Tiger Talk radio show Thursday. “That’s an important question for a football team, typically, is man, is it suspended? Because we need to know that if it is.”

And while Freeze said all that between chuckles Thursday night at Baumhower’s Victory Grille, there was a legitimate reason he asked his players about their driving habits.

Freeze specifically wanted to know how his players approached driving in foggy conditions.

While his players’ answers ranged from making sure their lights were on to just driving a bit slower, Freeze was chasing a specific, one-word answer.

“The word I was looking for was ‘cautious’,” Freeze finally revealed. “I was raised in the country and I’ve had to drive in some foggy conditions and you drive very cautiously. And I feel like that’s the way we play sometimes.”

Freeze’s anecdote on the set of Tiger Talk Thursday night was an extension of the message he shared with his team Monday morning as part of the team’s weekly “life talk”. Monday’s life talks are generally about 20 minutes long, Freeze says. And the inspiration for each of them come from various sources.

This Monday, the message was all about “closed doors and unmet expectations”, which was a spin off last Sunday’s sermon given by Miles Fidell, who serves as the pastor at Auburn Community Church.

“All of us face — at some point or another — closed doors or unmet expectations. And that’s never going to go away in life,” Freeze said Wednesday, echoing his message to the team. “And how we handle them, I think, will really determine how we get through them.”

Auburn’s last four games have presented some pretty foggy situations as the Tigers have faced three teams currently ranked in the top 15.

Meanwhile, Saturday’s game against Mississippi State is set to start a much more favorable stretch for Freeze and the Tigers, who are looking to snap a four-game skid.

Freeze is just hoping his team can work its way out of the fog and therefore get out of situations in which the Tigers feel they have to play cautiously.

“I want to do everything I can to remove the fog and the fear. Fear is just a liar and it’s really not real unless you give it power. And I want us to play really free and loose.”

Freeze added that Auburn had two “really good” practices on Tuesday and Thursday as the Tigers prepare to host Mississippi State at Jordan-Hare Stadium Saturday afternoon at 2:30.