The new looked familiar for a long time but Auburn’s toughness shows through in thrilling win over Baylor

Auburn quarterback Byrum Brown looks for running room against Baylor in Saturday’s game in Atlanta. Brown scored what proved to be the winning touchdown with 3:21 left as the Tigers held to for a 17-16 win. (Photo courtesy of Auburn Athletics)

 

 

 

ATLANTA — For all the new faces and all the new coaches, what happened down on the floor of Mercedes-Benz Stadium for much of Saturday seemed very old for Auburn fans.

New coach Alex Golesh brought in more cumulative starting experience through the transfer portal (176 starts and 57 newcomers) than any SEC program. The player who excited Tigers fans the most was quarterback Byrum Brown, who followed Golesh from South Florida and was expected to thaw out the rancid Hugh Freeze offense.

But for much of the Aflac Kickoff Game, whenever Auburn had the ball, the crowd of 55,068 fans murmured that they could have sworn Freeze had been fired after they booed him off the field following a 10-3 loss to Kentucky last year.

They were a disgruntled lot on Saturday. They booed Baylor’s band. They booed when the Tigers were going to punt on fourth-and-5 inside the Bears’ 40 in the third quarter, then booed when Omar Mabson was stopped when Golesh called a fake.

The offense was barely registering a pulse and Brown picked a bad time to take five sacks and throw three interceptions for the first time in his career. The third one set up a field goal to tie it 10-10 with 7:12 remaining.

But after that, the misery evaporated. With a thunderstorm raging outside and a squall boiling inside the dome, Golesh felt his first Auburn team told the college football universe what it can do even with a loaded cannon pointed at its head — the way teams coached by Pat Dye and Shug Jordan always did and the way Freeze’s teams never did.

“I saw a bunch of dudes that played for each other,” Golesh said after the Tigers held on for a 17-16 victory — the program’s most famous 17-16 win since the Punt Bama Punt game in 1972, perhaps Jordan’s favorite win. It was also Auburn’s first one-point win since the immortal 28-27 Camback victory over Alabama on the way to the 2010 national championship. Ironically, Cam Newton, who directed the rally from a 24-0 deficit that day in Tuscaloosa, was an honorary captain at Saturday’s game.

“Are we a mentally tough football team?” Golesh asked rhetorically. “I would tell you we are today. I thought they showed a lot of grit. I thought they never put their head down. We took a giant step in terms of our identity.”

Brown suppressed any feelings about the bad day he was having when he led a 75-yard, 10-play drive to score from 11 yards out for a 17-10 lead with 3:26 to go — and that was after two offensive line starters got hurt. He followed running back Jeremiah Cobb’s block and plowed over a defender at the goal line.

“Cobb led me to the promised land,” said Brown, who wanted to get back to Auburn to roll Toomer’s Corner Saturday night — hopefully without getting picked off.

Golesh said he was determined to play grown-man football with an extra tight end in the clutch.

“We’re going to run it with Byrum,” he said. “We’re going to go punch this thing in and, mind you, with two sub offensive linemen in there. You saw Byram’s toughness there. You saw the O-line grit out, the tight ends grit out, the wideouts grit out.”

But the play Tigers fans will talk about for years — and the one that had some leaping off couches and turning their ankles in painful ecstasy — came 3½ minutes later.

Baylor quarterback D.J. Lagway, the former Florida star who also played on a sprained ankle, led the Bears on a 75-yard drive and threw a 5-yard TD pass on fourth-and-goal to Gavin Freeman to slice the lead to 17-16 with nine seconds left. A soft-spoken safety named Eric Winters got beat on the play.

Baylor coach Dave Aranda then went for two points and the win instead of a tie and overtime.

“Guys were playing through pain, discomfort and all that,” he said. “That’s one of the reasons for going for it. A bunch of guys getting Band-Aided up and we had a chance to close it out.”

Lagway found tight end Matthew Klopfenstein, who hadn’t caught a pass all day, leaking out uncovered to his right. Winters, who was lined up in the middle, came off his assignment, sprinted over the goal line, drove his helmet into Klopfenstein’s chest and kept him from squaring his shoulders with a textbook tackle, his career-high 11^th of the game. When Klopfenstein crashed to the turf, his shoulder pad brushed the goal line but the ball never did.

“There was no hesitation with that,” Aranda said of the attempt. “The book said to go for it. I just didn’t feel playing longer was going to benefit us. I thought he was in. For it not to be just sucks.”

Golesh was sucking in his breath on the two-point conversion.

“You could use whatever cliche you want,” he said. “Game of inches — it most certainly was in every way.”

Golesh had a feeling Winters would do something extraordinary Saturday.

“For a young cat, he’s special,” Golesh said. “That’s how he practices. That’s how he comes in the building every day. He’s not very outspoken yet. I’m going to keep pressing him to be outspoken because the guys around him respect him. I told him last night in our team meeting, “Man, because of the offseason you had, because of the camp you had, I cannot wait to go see you play.’ I told him, ‘You’re gonna make a play that makes a difference in this game.’ I just sensed it.”

Auburn had plenty of problems — from interceptions to fair-catching a punt inside its 5 to having difficulty moving the ball against Aranda’s defense that kept everything in front of it and “muddied the box,” as Golesh said, to make it tough to run.

And Brown may have discovered that passing for 3,000 yards and rushing for 1,000 — as he did last year to become only the 12^th player in FBS history to do so — won’t be so easy in the SEC. Golesh took the blame for Brown’s three interceptions, saying he wanted to press for explosive plays.

But while Baylor would probably be a middle-tier team in the SEC at best, the fortitude the Tigers showed at the end could be a good omen, especially if the defense continues to play well.

“It certainly wasn’t pretty in a lot of ways but finding a way to win is the first step and they found a way to win,” said Golesh, who afterward put on an old leather helmet symbolic of the Aflac Kickoff Game and tough-guy football.

“I only put it on for a second because the guys made me,” he said.

He could afford to be good-natured because Golesh likes the dynamic the victory provides his team.

“I told our guys to humble yourself enough to allow yourself to get coached,” he said. “We’ve got to get a whole lot better offensively protecting the quarterback. We’ve got to get a whole lot better being able to run the football the way we want to run the football. We’ve got to get a whole lot better with a couple of decisions. … It’s only gonna be better.”

Who knows? Golesh could turn out to be Jordan, Dye and John W. Heisman rolled into one. With one victory, he already looks better than Freeze ever dreamed of while standing on the first tee of the AU Club.

Any fool with a reasonable grasp of strategy can win some games at any cost — Lane Kiffin is proof of that. But more than that is needed to win championships and Golesh might be on his way to showing Auburn fans he’s more than a play caller with little else to offer.

(Call News Editor Jimmy Wigfield has been awarded the Best Local Sports Column by the Alabama Press Association for three straight years.)