AUBURN — It started off as "many" before it got whittled down to about eight.

Then it became three or four. By late November, it was one.

By the time toe meets leather for Auburn football's game against Ole Miss on Saturday (6 p.m. CT, ESPN), coach Hugh Freeze will have been on the Plains for 327 days. The 54-year-old's hire came on the heels of a failed tenure by former AU coach Bryan Harsin and the hire of John Cohen as the university's athletics director. Harsin was fired and Cohen was hired on the same day — Oct. 31, 2022.

Cohen, who was the AD at Mississippi State from 2016-22 before migrating to Auburn, made the decision to hire Freeze and bring him back into the Southeastern Conference following a coaching search that lasted 28 days. It's the third football hire Cohen has been in charge of making, with the first two being Joe Moorhead in 2018 and the late Mike Leach in 2020.

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Despite sharing a state for half a decade with Freeze at Ole Miss from 2012-16 and Cohen serving as MSU's baseball coach from 2009-16, the two rarely crossed paths. They'd see each other in passing at functions at the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame or at Old Waverly Golf Club, but it was never anything of note.

Except for a time in which Cohen spotted Freeze sitting in the back of a car at Old Waverly.

"I think he was changing shoes," Cohen recalled. "I just (knocked on the window and) said hello to him.”

Cohen didn't know he'd be interviewing him for a job less than a decade later.

'It became apparent pretty quickly'

Cohen didn't have much of a chance to get acclimated at Auburn.

With his arrival coinciding with Harsin's departure, the Tuscaloosa native's tenure immediately began with what may end up defining his time at Auburn.

Cohen recalls "many" parties reaching out to discuss the coaching vacancy in the search's infancy: "Those weren’t necessarily interviews," Cohen told the Montgomery Advertiser last week. "But they were discussions."

After getting settled, the true list of candidates started to take shape. It was a group of about seven or eight prospective coaches who Cohen said he and his staff focused on, though "it became apparent pretty quickly" there were going to be three or four candidates they would spend most of their time on.

Those de facto finalists were all sitting head coaches at other programs while they were being considered, according to Cohen, who also claimed Freeze was in the top three from "the very beginning."

“Listen, there’s been a ton of examples in this league of assistant coaches becoming great head coaches," Cohen said. "... (But) I think at this point and time our priority was someone who had been not only a head coach, but a head coach in the Southeastern Conference.”

Cohen sat across the table from Freeze for an in-person interview twice throughout the process. Those joining him in the room included executive deputy athletics director Rich McGlynn, who has been at Auburn since June 2006 and has overseen areas such as academics, facilities, ticketing and compliance, among others.

McGlynn played an integral role in the Cam Newton saga in 2010, writing a letter to the NCAA that assisted Newton in restoring his eligibility ahead of the SEC title game that season, according to a 2011 report by longtime Auburn beat writer Phillip Marshall of 247Sports.

"I felt like it was very important (to have McGlynn present) because Rich really has a historical perspective of Auburn," Cohen said. "... Rich’s knowledge of the institution was good. I also felt like if any of our candidates had specific questions about Auburn, I think he was a much better reference than I was because I had been at Auburn for just a few weeks."

Rumors swirled at the time of the search about who Auburn could be zeroing in on, with significant buzz circulating around current Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin. Cohen wouldn't say whether Kiffin was part of that list of three or four finalists, but he did note Freeze was the only person to officially be offered the job.

"I really can’t say how serious specifically Auburn was about Lane," Cohen said. "But I also can’t say specifically how serious Lane was about Auburn. All I will say is that it’s about fit. And in the end, we felt like coach Freeze was the best fit for Auburn.”

'The most with what they had'

Cohen consulted two analytics companies throughout the coaching search.

One of which was Dave Bartoo's Coach Rating Index, which ranks coaches in various categories and breaks them up into different tiers. The first tier is full of the usual suspects: Alabama's Nick Saban, Georgia's Kirby Smart and Clemson's Dabo Swinney, to name a few.

Freeze, who had been the coach at Liberty since 2019 following his ouster from Ole Miss in 2017, was not in that top tier. Cohen, however, viewed Freeze's time with the Flames as "a real gift" due to the fact that he was forced to coach with teams that perhaps lacked in talent compared to opposing rosters.

"Beating SEC schools and ACC schools when you’re at a small school like Liberty ... it takes a special type of coach," Cohen said. "... Coach Freeze has a history of doing that. All of that shows up in the analytics. ... What’s really interesting about the tier one coaches, at least that I looked at, (is) the talent disparity was so great. It’s hard to evaluate a coach when they are never at a talent deficiency. ...

"That next group (after tier one) has moments where they’re (at) a talent deficiency. That’s when you really find out if somebody can coach, in my opinion. ... Don't get me wrong ... schools and coaches who are never at a talent deficiency, they still have to go get that talent and they have to cultivate that talent. It’s not a criticism in any way, but certainly I think Hugh’s story was pretty unique.”

Another category Freeze ranked highly in within the system was his ability to develop quarterbacks. Freeze helped Bo Wallace briefly reach the pros and Chad Kelly enjoyed a four-year career in the NFL before he joined the Toronto Argonauts in the Canadian Football League, where he still plays.

Freeze also had Malik Willis at Liberty. The former Auburn QB transferred to the Flames in 2019 and was later drafted in the third round of the 2022 NFL Draft.

"Both of those (analytics) groups were really high on the numbers portion of what Hugh brought to the table," Cohen said. "That was eye-opening, especially when you consider (that) college football is so much different than any other sport from this standpoint: Any other sport is going to have so many different schools (and) coaches who have won national championships.

"I mean, in football — if you look at the last 15 years — it’s a tiny amount of coaches who have won national championships who are actually still coaching. You really have to dig deep to find out who did the most with what they had."

Freeze's controversial history and 'fit'

Freeze saw great success at times during his run with Ole Miss, winning 10 games in 2015 and leading the Rebels past Saban's Crimson Tide twice. He captained the conference's No. 1 offense in his fifth season and guided that team to a win over Oklahoma State in the Sugar Bowl.

But his tenure at Ole Miss ended in controversy. Freeze resigned in 2017 following a scandal regarding recruiting violations and contacting numbers associated with escort services using a phone provided by the university. He also found himself in hot water at Liberty for direct messaging a woman on X, formerly Twitter, after she made negative comments about Liberty's athletic director, Ian McCaw, who Freeze worked under at the time.

The woman, a former Liberty student, was a plaintiff in a lawsuit against Liberty accusing the university of mishandling sexual assault cases. Freeze was defending McCaw's character in the messages, and screenshots showed he said he was "open to talk about issues" the woman had.

USA TODAY also reported in 2017 allegations against Freeze coming from former students at Briarcrest Christian School, where Freeze taught and also coached football and girl's basketball. One of the women, Katie Dalmasso, said Freeze forced her to change her shirt in his office because it violated the school's dress code. Dalmasso said she was in eighth grade when it happened. Freeze denied the allegations when they first appeared in 2017 and said in a statement he "handled disciplinary issues professionally and in accordance with the school's policy."

Cohen and his staff conducted what he's previously called a "thorough examination," reaching out to those who've been involved with Freeze in various capacities. Those contacted included members of the NCAA who investigated Freeze at Ole Miss, compliance staff and former players ranging from the girl's basketball team at Briarcrest to Freeze's Rebels team, according to Cohen.

The policemen and state troopers assigned to Freeze at his various schools were reached as well, among others, Cohen added.

"It was pretty deep," Cohen said. "Listen, I can’t remember how many total people it was, but it’s eight hours worth of calls seven days a week for several weeks.”

Cohen said the majority of people he spoke wanted to "dispel any type of internet craziness" regarding Freeze, though some raised concerns: "The only people we talked to who didn’t have favorable opinions about coach Freeze were people that had never met him before and personally had a conversation with him before," Cohen said. "But it’s still important to get that information from people as well.”

"I used the example when I was speaking to (reporters in November) about the ‘F word,’ right?" Cohen said. "Fit. Of all the people we looked at, I felt like from the beginning (Freeze) was the best fit for Auburn. But when you’re making a hire of this magnitude, you have to dig deeper.

"It doesn’t matter who the candidate is. You have to find out everything you can possibly find out. You have to use every professional group that does background work that you can possibly find. We found a ton of information about all of our candidates.”

Richard Silva is the Auburn athletics beat writer for the Montgomery Advertiser. He can be reached via email at rsilva@gannett.com or on Twitter @rich_silva18.

This article originally appeared on Montgomery Advertiser: John Cohen explains how he landed on Auburn football's Hugh Freeze