AUBURN | Hugh Freeze is trying to strike a balance.

Auburn’s second-year coach knows his team needs to tackle and have physical practices. He also knows a roster that he’s in the process of rebuilding can’t sustain a lot of injuries.

His concerns were heightened Tuesday when Texas’ projected starting running back, CJ Baxter, suffered a season-ending knee injury during the Longhorns’ first full-pad practice.

Still, the Tigers are scheduled to hold their first scrimmage of fall camp Saturday morning at Jordan-Hare Stadium.

“We sure need to tackle some,” said Freeze. “I’m not on my phone all day, pretty much, and I open up dadgum Twitter/x, whatever you call it, to see a team in our conference lost their starting tailback. That keeps you up at night.

“Not all of the scrimmage will be live, but my plan currently, yes, there will be a portion of it live. In the portion of live, there will probably be a few people who don’t participate.”

Freeze is trying to be careful with certain key players during preseason drills, especially at running back, wide receiver and in the secondary where depth is a concern due to lack of numbers, experience or both.

“I don’t know how to balance that,” said Freeze. “I guess you can go the route of, you know, not having a lot of contact, but I just don’t know that you can win in this league without having some physical practices in camp. And it scares me to death, truthfully, because we need to stay healthy.”

Auburn has experienced some minor injuries before and during camp. Offensive tackle Tyler Johnson missed the first couple of practices with a hamstring injury, wide receiver KeAndre Lambert-Smith injured his ankle Tuesday and cornerback Keionte Scott has been battling a hamstring injury.

“We’re not that deep in places and so we’ve kind of stressed that heavily the last three days of trying to practice cleaner without people on the ground,” said Freeze. “And it has gotten a little better, but we had two days in a row where some really scary things when you watch the film that easily could have hurt somebody.

“Whether it’s an inside run and there’s, you know, defensive line runs a twist and everyone gets tangled up and now there’s five guys on the ground on top of each other. A running back going through the hole and that happens and it’s that far from hitting the bottom of his leg or his ankle somewhere. And then the one-on-ones are always a challenge to get the DBs to stay off, when they’re in trail position, to stay off the back of the receivers. That’s kinda how Dre Lambert got his ankle. So just most of it has been during the plays, just people getting after it and being physical and just too many bodies on the ground.”

Auburn will continue fall camp with a practice Friday morning and a practice/scrimmage Saturday morning at Jordan-Hare.