WACO, Texas — However confident he was that Auburn football would go on the road and beat Baylor on Friday, Jackson Arnold didn’t see himself doing it like that.
“That” being a career-high 137 rush yards and two rushing touchdowns, nearly matching his 17 pass attempts with 16 carries and recording the most rushing yards by an Auburn quarterback in a single game since Nick Marshall ran for 214 yards in a win over Tennessee in 2013.
The performance by the quarterback who transferred from Oklahoma was as impactful as it was emphatic, and it was the driving force in the Tigers’ far-from-perfect 38-24 victory over the Bears on Friday night.
“I didn’t think I was going to run that much, but at the same time, I’m going to do what I have to do to help this team win,” Arnold said. “At the end of the day, too, I was telling people that heading into this game … they’re (Baylor) hearing about the hype about our receivers, our receivers. If you go and establish the run game early on and throughout the game, we’ll win this.”
It was a fitting case of early-season irony, as preseason expectations went by the wayside in a matter of plays.
Auburn coach Hugh Freeze, who developed his reputation as a builder of quarterbacks, went out and added Arnold, a former five-star prospect, from the transfer portal. He also added Eric Singleton Jr., widely considered the top receiver transfer in the nation, and a pair of veteran tackle transfers to boot.
Auburn was poised to light the world on fire through the air, but after one game the Tigers look like they’ll do it differently. And that’s OK. Because Auburn left Waco with a Power Four road victory, which has been hard for Freeze to find. It also left with something the third-year Auburn coach has yet to establish: an offensive identity.
“It was working for us,” Freeze said. “Our game plan is multiple, because you really don’t know how people are going to play you, and they have different flavors every week. But that’s certainly what we felt like was our best option … with what we were getting.”
It wasn’t just Arnold who toted the rock with authority. His yardage total more than doubled what Baylor ran for as a team, at 64 yards, but running backs Damari Alston and Jeremiah Cobb were right there, too, with 84- and 74-yard efforts that outdid their opponent.
There’s kudos to Freeze in all this. While he has tried time and again to establish, or rather force, his run-pass-option offense into existence on the Plains the past two years, he looked as flexible and keen on adjusting as ever in Waco.
Freeze took what he got, and now his program has a building block for the next 11 weeks.
Adam Cole is the Auburn athletics beat writer for the Montgomery Advertiser. He can be reached via email at acole@gannett.com or on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, @colereporter. To support Adam’s work, please subscribe to the Montgomery Advertiser.
