AUBURN | One of the most important traits a successful college head coach must have is stubbornness. It can also be one of the worst.

As the head of a program that has more than 100 players and upwards of 50 assistant coaches and support staff, you have to set the standards and ensure that everyone is meeting them.

You have to have a firm belief in your philosophy and plan for every facet of your program or the coaches and players under you won’t believe in you or your vision.

All five of the coaches I’ve covered at Auburn over the last quarter century have had that stubborn streak — some more than others. I didn’t cover Nick Saban at Alabama but it sure seemed like he made absolutely certain that every part of his football program was run his way.

Of course, that stubbornness can backfire because good coaches also need to be able to adapt. They need to adjust their schemes and how they teach players to deal with an always evolving football landscape.

In college, especially, you have to adjust how you recruit, build relationships and treat your existing players due to the new era of NIL and the transfer portal.

There are plenty of examples out there but Jimbo Fisher is a good one of a coach that was successful and stubborn, but unwilling to adapt in certain areas such as his offensive system and flamed out spectacularly at Texas A&M.

This is not the first time I’ve written or talked about this very subject but it’s worth revisiting because of what occurred with Auburn and Hugh Freeze over the past week.

Freeze certainly has that innate stubbornness that’s made him a very successful coach, and when you hear him speak it’s obvious that it’s been difficult for him to adjust to this new era of college football.

Difficult but not impossible. He’s adapted.

And his flexibility showed this week when he chose to go with redshirt freshman Hank Brown, who had played as a backup in just two career games, to start at quarterback over senior Payton Thorne, who has accumulated 40 career starts in the Big Ten and SEC.

That was a bold move, especially when you consider that bringing back Thorne as the starter and building a better offense around him was one of the biggest decisions Freeze made in the offseason.

While you’re criticizing Freeze for that decision, you have to also credit him for going with Brown.

There are many tougher contests to come but it certainly looked like the right decision against New Mexico. We’ll see how Brown develops in his new role as SEC play starts this week.

Now, Freeze has a luxury on his bench in a very experienced former starter and a team captain in Thorne, who can step up in case of an injury or the offense needing a spark.

Perhaps having the pressure of being the starter off his shoulders will help Thorne perform better if he’s asked to step in for Brown in the future.

But Freeze will need to be stubborn with Brown now. Every young quarterback is going to take some lumps in his first year as a starter and AU’s conference schedule isn’t going to afford a lot of breaks.

Stubbornness and adaptability are traits that don’t necessarily compliment each other, but a successful coach better have a healthy supply of both and have the wherewithal to know when to double down and when to pivot.

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In today’s musical journey, we go back 45 years to the release of the first hip hop song to chart on the Billboard 100. On Sept. 16, 1979, The Sugarhill Gang released “Rapper’s Delight,” which peaked at No. 36 in the U.S., but hit No. 1 in Canada, Spain and the Netherlands, and No. 3 in the UK. The song had its origin when The Sugarhill Gang founder Sylvia Robinson overheard, Big Bank Hank, an employee at Crispy Crust Pizza in New Jersey, rapping along to a version of the song on his boom box the late 1970’s. Hank joined the band shortly thereafter and used a verse from DJ Cassanova Fly for his part in the song. The song used part of a melody from Chic’s “Good Times,” which led to a settlement and songwriting credits to Chic’s Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards. It’s ranked No. 251 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. It’s ranked No. 2 on VH1’s list of the 100 Greatest Hip Hop Songs of All Time. It was inducted into the Library of Congress in 2011 and the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2014. “Rapper’s Delight” remains the best-selling 12-inch vinyl single of all time.

The Sugarhill Gang was formed in Englewood, New Jersey in 1979 by Robinson, who served as the producer, and the trio of Henry ‘Big Bank Hank’ Jackson, Michael ‘Wonder Mike’ Wright and Gary ‘Master Gee’ O’Brien. It was named after the Sugar Hill neighborhood in Harlem, which was the home of many prominent African Americans in the early 20th Century including Thurgood Marshall, Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway, and served as an important part of the Harlem Renaissance. “Rapper’s Delight” was the band’s only top 40 hit in the U.S. but they released five studio albums, nine compilation albums and 15 singles through 2009. Two of their singles, 1980’s “8th Wonder” and 1981’s “Apache,” became hits in Europe and peaked in the top 15 of the Billboard R&B chart. The original trio disbanded in 1989 but the band was reformed in 1994 by Joey Robinson, the son of Sylvia Robinson. Big Bank Hank passed away from cancer in 2014. Wonder Mike and Master Gee still perform with the band. One of their most recent performances came in 2019 when they performed “Rapper’s Delight” on Jimmy Kimmel.