Auburn wide receiver Deshawn Spencer makes a diving catch in the end zone for his first collegiate touchdown Saturday night in the Tigers’ 43-8 win over Southern Miss at Jordan-Hare Stadium. The Saraland freshman’s 8-yard TD catch from Byrum Brown came on a fourth-and-3 in the second quarter. (Photo by Zach Bland/Auburn Tigers)
AUBURN — Auburn coach Alex Golesh can already be compared to the school’s most successful coaches in one respect. As with Shug Jordan, Pat Dye and Gov.-elect Tommy Tuberville before him, Golesh has made Tigers fans feel good about their team for the first time in a long time.
Those men plugged the holes of a sinking ship and made the staunchest Auburn zealots feel that the program was in the proper hands. Golesh is doing the same.
The reason for such sunniness is not founded on the 43-8 win over Southern Miss Saturday night — the Tigers did what they were supposed to, nothing more, nothing less — nor on the obvious eye test, where fans can see Auburn is playing harder and tougher than it has in years.
Instead, it is based on Golesh’s surliness afterward as he took the podium and, upon listing all his team’s flaws, immediately reached for a barf bag despite 613 yards of total offense, 31 first downs and holding USM to 50 yards rushing.
Among the most pungent things he said were: “I want to throw up” and “It makes me sick” and “We’ve got a long way to go if we’re going to win any SEC games.”
His immediate predecessors, Gus Malzahn, Bryan Harsin and Hugh Freeze, would have been on a sugar high after a 35-point victory. Golesh — call him coach Grumpesh if you wish — let it be known that he is nailing a higher standard to the wall for his players to reach, much the same way that Dye would tell his players that they looked like *&#! after winning 50-0, then offered a weeklong glimpse of hell to make sure the *&#! was all wiped away, lest they think too highly of themselves.
Golesh vacuumed up all the negatives from Saturday night and put them in a scrapbook: Holding calls, false starts, a fumble in the red zone, a block in the back on a punt return, dropped passes and missed tackles on a long Southern Miss scoring drive just before halftime.
“I was just so beyond disappointed in the sloppiness,” he said after addressing his team. “I don’t care what the score is. That’s what I just told these guys. A win’s a win and winning college football games is hard. But if the standard is that, and that’s what it looks like, then we’re going to have a really long season. We have to have a sense of urgency on cleaning this up and that’s on me beyond anybody else.”
Nearby, Athletic Director John Cohen leaned against the wall, checking the temperature in the room and of his six-year, $44 million investment, and he had to be content that Golesh wasn’t waving a pom-pom and claiming the Tigers were back.
Golesh knows his honeymoon will last a year, as the program must pay for the pitiable recruiting in Malzahn’s later years, all of Harsin’s tenure and to some degree Freeze. It’s unlikely anybody on this team — built with the transfer portal — will have their name placed on the façade of Jordan-Hare Stadium alongside immortals Pat Sullivan, Terry Beasley, Bo Jackson and Cam Newton.
The only fireworks Saturday night — aside from Andre Jordan’s first-play pick-six which brought out the fangs of the 88,000 fans dressed in white — came from the fireworks themselves that shot out of each end of the stadium, leaving smoke billowing over the field.
While that same smoke hangs over his team, Golesh said he will redouble the teaching in practice to get rid of the correctable errors.
“We’ll get it right. … It’s the urgency and the detailing at which you practice,” he said. “You truly do play the way you practice. It’s the little detail. It’s like these holdings. Does it show up at practice? We obviously correct it but are we correcting it at a high enough level? The answer is no, otherwise it wouldn’t show up at the game.”
Even with a minimum of mistakes, it’s still unclear how this team will fare against top-tier SEC opponents, although if history foretells anything, the most successful AU coaches didn’t start well — Jordan was 5-5 in his first season; Dye and Tuberville were both 5-6.
Among the positives: The defense can hold its own. Alex McPherson is a superb kicker. The running game — including quarterback Byrum Brown’s impromptu scrambling — looks better, seemingly fulfilling Golesh’s pledge to “run the damn ball.” The Tigers ran the damn ball for 350 yards and lost only seven Saturday night despite the Golden Eagles bringing safeties down and stacking linebackers into the gaps to make it harder.
But in general, Southern Miss didn’t help blow away the fog surrounding this team. This isn’t the USM program of the 1990s with Brett Favre that beat Auburn by a point in back-to-back years in the winter of Dye’s career. After the 10-9 loss in 1991, I wrote that Dye “looked like he had just had his molars yanked out with a pair of rusty pliers.”
It turns out that was a prescient observation, as the Tigers were toothless in the intervening years aside from a combined seven 10-win seasons in 32 years.
Brown is and will be a loaded cannon rolling around loose on the deck, leading to unpredictable playmaking Auburn fans must get accustomed to. While he’s adjusting and settling in, one thing seems certain — Brown’s languid, easily readable release will be problematic in the SEC, especially with 10 new offensive starters, including the entire offensive line.
“There’s a couple I wish he would let go of in terms of just pulling the trigger and trusting yourself because he’s made those throws all over the place over his career,” Golesh said after Brown finished 18-of-29 passing for 226 yards and two touchdowns, including Saraland freshman Deshawn Spencer’s first college TD on a diving fourth-down catch in the end zone.
Spencer is getting moved around the formations and is going to be a weapon short and long.
“He attacks every day like a pro,” Brown said. “He comes in and puts his head down and works. He’s a man of few words but he’s always looking to get better and asking what I’m seeing, asking what he can do better.”
Bryce Cain, another Mobile-area player from Baker, is also proving his worth after being moved from wideout to defensive back and special teams, where he was a captain against USM.
“It hasn’t been easy for him,” Golesh said. “He’s here every morning with an incredible attitude and picks up other guys around him. He’s going to continue to help us on both sides of the ball.”
The help is needed, as a year of pouring the program’s foundation and a difficult schedule is a demanding parlay. This season marks the first time in history that Auburn will play at Tennessee, Georgia and Alabama in the same season. The Tigers open SEC play at home Saturday against Florida and also play LSU and egomaniac Lane Kiffin on the Plains.
Golesh is fond of telling his players to “be who you say you are.” Beginning this week and every week from here on out, everybody will see what that is.
