By KACE KIESCHNICK, Tiger Rag Staff Reporter
New Auburn football coach Alex Golesh brought a list of one with him to Southeastern Conference Media Days in Tampa, Florida on Tuesday.
“I don’t have any goals, other than laying a foundation for what our football’s going to be for years to come,” he said on day two of the press conference marathon.
Golesh, 42, takes over the Tigers after three years at South Florida, where he was 9-3 and 6-2 in the American Conference last season after going 7-6 and 4-4 twice. The Bulls had only won four games in the three years before his arrival. Golesh turned the USF program around with an explosive offense that averaged more than 35 points and 450 yards per game. He will need to bring that offense to Auburn if he wants to facilitate a similar turnaround at a place that is on its fourth coach since 2020.
The first step is already taken care of. The leader of that offense, quarterback Byrum Brown, followed his head coach to his new school. Brown was named second-team American All-Conference after completing 66.3 percent of his passes for 3,158 yards, 28 TDs and seven interceptions last year.
“Byrum Brown is one of the best quarterbacks in the country, and he’s shown that over the years,” Golesh said. “He’s just got to continue to be him every single day. And what gives him confidence is everything that we’ve preached from day one. It’s your daily process. It’s how you come in that building. It’s how you treat people. It’s how you take care of your body. It’s how you show up to work.”
That daily process is one that Golesh emphasized as he hammered the importance of building an identity at Auburn. He said he does not set goals. He sets standards.
“Our standard is to be the best version of us every single day,” Golesh said. “The standard when I got to Auburn was to get as as good as we possibly can as fast as we can.”
Golesh brought in a 39-player transfer class ranked ninth in the country by 247sports.com to try to accomplish that. His staff also put together a recruiting class of 21 with three four-stars and is ranked No. 21 overall.
“I love where our talent is,” Golesh said. “We’re plenty talented enough to go win every single game. This is a really talented league with elite players and elite coaches. And so what wins football games? The teams that can play on Saturdays and score one more point than the other, because they have a true identity of who they are.”
Of the 39 transfers, 13 came from Golesh’s 2025 South Florida team. LSU’s Lane Kiffin, by the way, brought only four from Ole Miss amid accusations of poaching.
Brown said that the group of his former teammates in new digs has a chip on their shoulder as they enter the SEC from the lesser group of six conferences.
“We just put our heads down and go to work,” Brown said. “Be the best us that we can be every single day, and I think that speaks for everybody that transferred. We just want Auburn to be its best and leave it better than we found it. And that’s the plan: bring Auburn back to where it should be.”
Auburn has had five straight losing seasons under two coaches – the last three by Hugh Freeze and the previous two by Bryan Harsin. That followed Gus Malzahn, who had eight straight winning seasons from 2013-20 with a national championship game appearance in his first season.
Brown said the adjustment to the speed of the SEC is nothing the former Bulls cannot handle.
“They’re a little faster, a little bigger, a little stronger, but it’s football at the end of the day,” he said. “We prepare week to week, so we can perform out on the field.”
LSU visits Golesh and the Tigers on Oct. 24. It will be the penultimate matchup in a four-game October gauntlet that sends Auburn to Tennessee, Georgia and Ole Miss.
But those teams are just “a little faster and stronger.”
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