For the third time since the decade began — and the second time since John Cohen was hired to be Auburn's athletic director — the Tigers are searching for a new head football coach.

Prior to officially introducing DJ Durkin, who has served as Auburn's defensive coordinator since 2024, as the interim head coach, Cohen talked about the things he is looking for in the individual who will be placed at the helm of the program.

"All the characteristics," Cohen said. "Somebody with an edge. Somebody who is highly competitive. In my career, I've found that one or two things has to happen: The head coach of almost any sport has to either have a tremendous edge to them or they have to be surrounded by assistants who have an edge to them. There's many different ways to define that. You can call it blue collar, you can call it hard-nosed, you can call it aggressive, you can all it all those things. That's usually priority No. 1, to find that part. Then intelligence, strategic, forward thinking, all those things matter."

While calls on him to pull the trigger on letting Freeze go began to grow increasingly loud as the losses piled up this season, Cohen was patient making his decision to do so.

He wanted to avoid making a decision too quickly and causing a problem for the program.

 "I want to be able to process everything that happens," Cohen said. "Because the last thing in a leadership role that you ever want to do is have a knee jerk reaction to anything. I needed some data, I needed to write everything down and try and take notes on my phone and some other places over the course of the game so that I could go find that on video or rethink that and run it by our staff. I took time after the game to get my thoughts together and then reached out to Coach Freeze late morning Sunday."

No matter who ends up being Auburn's next head coach, Cohen is determined to make the right decision.