Auburn's Hugh Freeze Opens Up On SEC Officiating Following UGA Loss

The announcers are biased against us. The media is biased against us, and the referees are biased against us.

Those are three universal truths among fans, regardless of the team or sport.

However, is it paranoia if they really are out to get you?

Auburn Tigers head coach Hugh Freeze has to be asking that question since the end of the first half of his team's latest loss to the Georgia Bulldogs.

Up 10-0 with time waning in the 2nd quarter, Auburn quarterback Jackson Arnold appeared to have broken the plane of the goal line twice before being denied by officials on the field. Both plays were upheld by replay officials, and both calls like would have been upheld if they were called touchdowns.

It got worse for the officials without ever really getting better, but Stephen Atkinson of Auburn Tigers On SI rehashed their nightmare, so I won't have to.

The SEC Office has already issued an apology to Auburn for how they mishandled a key play in the Oklahoma Sooners game (they didn't mention blown pass interference calls), but Freeze probably won't get an apology this week for missed calls that were judgment-based, rather than procedural.

Freeze has enough problems with this team, but he's getting awfully tired of having to battle the officials as well.

"It sure feels like we're not getting many breaks," Freeze said after the game. "It's difficult to take for sure. There's a lot of things. I felt like we broke the plane. The nose of the ball just has to break the plane. Thought we had a pretty good shot of that, but it didn't go our way."

"I don't know how they... shoulda had a delay of game or a timeout called, not a whole new play," Freeze said of one of several official stoppages that benefited the Bulldogs. "Still not sure what happened there. There's a lot of times I make bad calls. Officials do the same.

"But it certainly feels, we're not getting many of the breaks."

Good teams make their own breaks, and the Auburn Tigers haven't been a good team for a long time. Still, one can't help but pinpoint the exact moment the game turned for Georgia in Jordan-Hare on Saturday night.

Arnold was diplomatic about the call and how it changed the game.

“I really didn’t think it affected us. I think everybody was very positive after that," Arnold said of the would-be touchdown turned fumble. "Obviously, (the touchdown) is something that we wanted, and we wanted to get called our way. But I don’t think it affected us. Win the half still up a touchdown. So it didn’t affect us emotionally, but it would have been great to have."

Auburn star defensive end Keldric Faulk was a bit less guarded in his response to the same question.

“Yeah, that was definitely devastating," Faulk admitted. "We thought that he scored. I feel like it did carry over. I felt like everybody's heads weren't in the right space. Even with that, we still had plenty of chances to go out there and win, even with the missed touchdown. We still had plenty of chances to go and win. I feel like we can't use that as an excuse about how we didn't win.”

Faulk is right. The Tigers had halftime to regroup, the ball and the lead in the third quarter, and a raucous Jordan-Hare crowd behind them.

But they keep finding ways to lose, and it seems the officials keep helping shove them over the cliff.