Everything Auburn HC Alex Golesh Said After Florida Loss

The Auburn Tigers suffered it first loss of the season on Saturday night, losing 44-39 to the Florida Gators at Jordan-Hare Stadium.

After beginning the season 2-0 with high hopes of getting on the right foot in SEC play, Auburn will have to wait at least another week to get into the win column in conference play.

Here's everything Alex Golesh had to say after his first losses as the program's head coach.

Opening Statement

“First of all, thanks for being here. Grateful to our fans, our students and the band. It was awesome. The environment was incredible. We obviously didn't play well enough to win that game. You start off — obviously, offensively — and the first three drives were abysmal: three-and-out, three-and-out, three-and-out. About as abysmal as you can get. Then you just leave the defense out there for as long as we did. Obviously, we've got to answer. The story of the game: we tie it at 17 and then we give up 17 unanswered between the middle of the second quarter, the end of the second quarter and then more than halfway through the third quarter. Three offensive plays and 17 points later, now you're in a dogfight trying to claw back, and you can't run the offense the way you want to run it. The story of the game is that middle part of it.”

“Then defensively, the explosives — obviously, the double pass was a dagger. The explosives we gave up. I don't know how many there were, but it felt like they came at inopportune times. Then you're fighting back and clawing back, and you take the sacks. Then, obviously, the big touchdown — 45 yards on fourth down — and that's the dagger. I can give you some coach talk about fighting and all that. The expectation, I understand it, is to win that game here, and we didn't. So, this is really the first bit of adversity — real adversity — that we've had to face as a team. I just challenged our guys to handle it the right way. There's a certain way winners handle it. There's a certain way losers handle it. We've got to go handle it the right way. That'll be growth for us as a program. Again, I understand the expectation. The expectation is to win. We've got to run the ball better. We've got to be more efficient starting the game. You've got to eliminate the explosives. We've got to take advantage of the penalty discrepancy. We didn't. We've got to be better across the board and really in all three phases. We're not explosive enough in the return game. We had two shots at onside kicks; we didn't get either one. There's a lot to clean up in that phase as well.”

“We’ve got to go back to work. We're right in the middle of it. Like I said, I understand the assignment. It wasn't good enough in all three phases. It wasn't good enough. The coaching side, it wasn't good enough by me. I think in every imaginable way, we lost our composure in the first quarter on both sides of it. I thought we were ready. I thought we were emotionally in the right spot. We had a hard time communicating. We didn't execute offensively, and you get in the hole, fight back and that's where we ended up. Then you end up in a hole in the third quarter again. You can't put our defense out there as much as we did early in the game. We kind of saw the ramifications of that in the beginning of the third quarter. We've got to be way better. We will be. I believe in these dudes. I think we've got the right guys. I know we've got the right people in that locker room. I believe we're going to go fight back, but we'll find out.”

On the defense, allowing 44 points

“I thought the short yardages were disappointing early. I thought, for the most part, up until the big explosive run, obviously, the key to the game was controlling Jadan Baugh, who is as special as he is. I thought, for the most part, we did a decent job. There were a lot of missed tackles. There were some misalignments. They did a good job with some unbalanced stuff that we didn’t adjust as well as we needed to, and that’s what I mean by composure and emotions of being able to go from play to play.

“It was like when you give up a third and short or a fourth and short, and now you’ve got to go reset, and you've got to go play, and I didn’t think we emotionally handled that well. Again, there were some misfits, there were some missed tackles, and again, you’re still in it, and you’re still fighting, and it’s the explosives that you had to limit, and these guys have done it through their first two, where these chunks that you can’t give up, especially in second and short, third and short, where you know it’s coming, and we certainly did.”

On the rushing attack

“We didn’t run it well enough today. I want to watch the film and see why, see where that is, in the second half. You just felt like you had to go chunk yards, especially in the fourth quarter, but I couldn’t answer that right now to you. I would agree with you that it’s certainly below where we want it, and we’ve got to find a solution, but I can’t really tell you why right this second.”

On going for an onside kick with six minutes to go

“You’re looking at the first one, it’s a two-possession game and, at that point, you’re sitting there, and the timeouts, used them on defense, so at that point, two possessions, it’s your only shot, and knowing that you’re going to have to go score, you’re going to have to kick the onside. If you give it to them with no timeouts, you’re going to have to get an immediate stop, and then maybe get it with under a minute. So, that’s why the usage of timeouts, where you know they were 7 of 16 on third down. You look at fourth downs: they were three for three, and two of them were shorts. One of them was the one there at the very end, which was another dagger, I think put the defense in a tough spot early with how fast Florida was back on offense, but I wouldn’t say that’s what went into it. Truly knowing how many possessions you’ve got is what went into the onside kicks.”

On Byrum Brown’s slow start in the first quarter

“We’ve taken a lot of pride in feeling like we know what’s happening and starting it fast. I thought we had a really good plan; obviously, we didn’t. So, I think that’s more on me than it is anybody else. I got to do a better job of figuring it out, specifically getting him going. I thought his process was high-end through the week, and I thought it was today going in. That’s more on me than anything else. I got to do a better job giving him an opportunity to go get going. It’s the first down inefficiency for us in general today, and really, that was almost the whole game. It’s the inability to run it or throw it there on first down to get yourself into second and manageable.”

On showing support for his players after the game on the field

“I was telling them, keep your head up. It’s my program. They’re my players. I lost today, and I own it. Like, you’ve got to love on them when you win, you've got to love on them when you lose. They’re somebody’s kid. They’re our kids; like, they’re still kids regardless of what it is that they got to grow up and go play better football, but that would be what’s going through my mind.”

On certain parts of the team being “sloppy”

"I think, when I use the term sloppy, it’s like careless almost at times where the detail is lacking. Ball security is one of those things. Communication is one of those things, like the detail of what you have to play with when you’re playing really good football teams, or just football teams in general, like what separates good and average and great and bad is the true execution, which is all detail. And detail, like I said, it’s communication to start with. It’s alignment, it’s assignment, it’s technique and fundamentals. I don’t know if sloppy was the word today. I didn’t execute early on offense, didn’t communicate well enough on defense to get checks right, get in the right defense, get everybody on the same page. I don’t know if I would use the term sloppy today, I would tell you the detail lacked. Why that is, I got to figure it out.

Like I said, I felt like we were so emotional early, and you want to play with emotion. You want to play with your hair on fire. You want to play hard. You still have to play detailed, and you got to control your emotions, and I don’t mean emotions in the sense of late hits or crazy things. I just mean, simply, being in the right state of mind to go communicate and line up and play to play, and when you have a relatively young team, it’s the understanding of each play is independent of itself and that one doesn’t snowball into the next, into the next. We’re not there, like we’re not there as a football team, and I’m talking aobut offense. I’m talking about defense. I’m talking about special teams. You look at us offensively early, there’s no rhythm. It’s where one guy jacks it up here, one guy jacks it up here, we get beat on a technique deal in pass pro and it’s what it looks like. You end up three-and-out, three-and-out, three-and-out, and the defense is on the field the whole time, and so now you’re trying to create something on defense. So, you’re more aggressive than you need to be, and that’s what it looks like. You’re in a hole that you’re trying to dig out of.

The thing I’m happy or proud of, I guess you could say, is they’ve, through three games, stuck together. Even you go into the locker room, like there’s no finger-pointing. There’s no division of any sort. Offense not playing well, defense: we got your back. Defense not playing well, offense, we got your back. That’s a start. That’s a foundation. Well, now you’re in conference play, like you got to go execute at a high clip, and we are super inconsistent there. I got to figure out why. I got to fix it, like today, and we got to go pay better.”

On deep-shot plays down the field

“I think I say selfishly, maybe greedy would be the word, of trying to create a chunk to get it going, and I have a lot of faith in our ability to create these shot plays. I’ve got a lot of faith in Byrum. I’ve got a lot of faith in the wideouts. I think we continue to grow offensively on the O-line. You feel like you’re already going to be in third and manageable, so take the chunk there. I got to look at it and see if we were right in what we did. I can’t tell you that I would take it back necessarily because we needed to create explosives. We did. When you’re down like that, there’s times where you got to be patient enough to go grind it out, and there’s times where you feel like, man, like we have to go create a chunk, and I certainly felt like we did at that point.”

On the defense’s physicality

“I think there were times when we were as physical as physical gets, and I think there were times when we didn’t create knockback up front. It’s hard, without watching the film, to tell you the truth on that. Like, there’s times we needed knockback. Some of those third and shorts, fourth and shorts, you need knockback. We didn’t create it, and then there was times I thought we were physical. I thought there was scenarios on the perimeter where we got to go set an edge, and we didn’t, and I also thought there were times we were getting checks. Half of us had it; half of us didn’t, which is, again, it’s a coaching deal. It’s a composure deal, so it’d be hard for me to answer, truly, about the physicality. One of the big time keys to winning, really on all three sides of the ball, was to be more violent than the guys we were playing. I would tell you at times I felt like we were, and then I thought at times we were certainly not.”

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