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On Saturday afternoon, Auburn head coach Alex Golesh picked up another milestone in his first season: winning an SEC game.
The Tigers took down Vanderbilt 21-15 at Jordan-Hare Stadium, picking up their third win of the season in a game that was dominated by defense and special teams. Now, Auburn heads into its most difficult stretch of the season with a conference win under its belt.
Here’s everything Golesh said after the game:
“Appreciate everybody being here. We’re not going to take it for granted; I’m going to keep saying it: I’m beyond grateful for the Auburn family and our students. They continue to bring that incredible energy. I promise you as we build this thing, they’re going to have a lot to cheer about as we go. It’s gratifying to walk through that student section at the end and thank them for hanging and sticking it out with us. Super grateful to everybody that came in, and however many sellouts in a row, people continue to show up, and our players are beyond grateful.
The game was funky in a lot of ways. It’s hard to put a finger on the offensive start; it really is. I’ve got to figure it out, and we’ve got to figure it out. We’ve got to find ways to get going early but today was very much a game of response. Defensively, as not pretty as it was, we were one for five on fourth down. We got stops on third down and then we didn’t on fourth down and that was a little bit of the story defensively. Kept fighting, kept swinging, kept fighting, kept swinging. Offensively, we had to go at the end to get the ball to 6:20 and be able to go find a way to tough it out. Which I thought was really, really positive. There’s a bunch of negative in-between. There was a handful of explosives in the first half. We gave up four defensively when we had three offensively, and we flipped it in the second half, had five offensively and held them to two. I thought that piece was huge in the second half. The punt block, I think it was Omar Mabson II on the pump block and then Cade Carlson to pick it up. I thought obviously, a six-point game, that was a seven-point touchdown and PAT. And that was the difference in the game. The message to the guys is really, really simple. It’s been this way all week, the ability for us to reset and play play-to-play. The ability for us to be able to go and finish a game. Today we had to go finish it and we finished it.
A lot of credit, I told Clark [Lea] this before the game, and I told him again after. He’s a guy that’s built the program from nothing, and those guys are finishers. Those guys find ways to finish games, and it's been that way for two years for him and for us to be able to go and find a way to finish it, I think is huge for us. Credit to Vandy, that quarterback is tough as nails. That kid’s really, really special. They play their tails off, and Clark’s built an incredible program there that they are proud of, and they should be. For us, 1-0, and now we’ve got to be able to reset and go on the road for the very first time this year and go find a way."
“I’m trying to not say anything completely crazy, I’ve been known to do that. It felt like it was really hard. You could tell, man, did we try. It felt like it was tough at times. I felt like getting in some open sets and running it that way was going to benefit us, and it did. I felt like getting in some open sets and running by at some critical times was going to help. We certainly tried with Jeremiah, tried with Bryson, tried with Omar. I thought, at times, it was really, really good. I thought when we got going, it’s the same story when we can pick up the first down, the first first down, and then we can get the run game going and kind of learn on it a little bit. I thought, at some critical times, we were able to go run it.
Obviously, huge third and short there. The second down to go ice the game was absolutely huge right before the two-minute. I thought, at times, we were able to go move it. We got to continue to grow there and continue to get better.”
“I thought, obviously, the last two were the biggest two. The last one, cover zero, and for us to be able to hold up and, you could tell, I mean, we kind of tried a little bit of everything on third down. They make it hard. I said it earlier in the week; they make it really hard. They’re going to pressure, and they’re going to pressure from all over the place and the ability to go pick it up. I thought Byrum handled, you know, it’s going to sound unique. One of the keys for us to have success on offense was to be able to handle the pressure, to be able to handle the cover zero looks, the all-up looks, I thought handled it extremely well, like there wasn’t hit justs taken left and right. That was, I think, maybe as big of a story in the game. I thought we handled it well.
I thought, on third down in the first half, we were on the right stuff. We didn’t execute, there wasn’t bodies running free all over the place, but we just didn’t execute. I thought in the second half, we did a really good job of not just protecting it, but also executing, and a lot of time went into that. That was like a, if you couldn’t handle it, it was going to be a giant issue, and obviously, the pass pro piece has been a giant issue for us, and that was going to be the key for us offensively. There’s a lot of other things that we got to be better at, but that piece, I thought Byrum handled extremely well, and so did the front and so did the tight ends and the backs.”
“I thought we were slowed down on third games the whole game, to be honest with you. You were going to have to because of the presentations you were getting. I mean, you watched it, like there’s just bodies everywhere in terms of six up, seven-up guys coming from depth, the coverage variation stuff. I mean, he was going to have to slow it down to protect himself, and that was, again, the key to the whole thing was you can’t, for lack of a better term, you can’t lose the game on third down. And that doesn’t mean that you’re super conservative, but you have to be really intelligent. You can’t be reckless, if that makes sense, and I thought he slowed it down himself to make sure he was in the right protection, to make sure he protected himself to give him a change, and I thought we were just a hair off.
There was the one for Koger where Koger kind of slipped out of his break. Obviously, the interception off of a tip, like hair off, and it’s what we talked about all week, and really since we started league play two weeks ago, like the margins are tiny. Everybody’s got really good players, everybody’s got really good coaches, like the margins are tiny. They are absolutely tiny. We got to go win in the margins, and third down is a huge piece of that.”
“Yeah, I mean, obviously huge. It was a point in the game where, offensively, we couldn’t quite get it going. We need a spark, and I mean, absolutely huge, and we’ve been aggressive on punt block. We’ve been like, don’t underscore the stop of the fake as well, like that was absolutely huge. You get the ball at midfield. I think both of those plays are absolutely huge. To score points on a punt, like, if you can block a punt, I don’t know what the percentage analytically is, but it’s somewhere like over 80% that you got a chance to go win the game, and that was absolutely huge. Momentum-wise, it was huge. Obviously, for us to seven points, it becomes a six-point game. It plays out very differently in the end.”
“It’d be kind of wild if I told you I wasn’t super confident going into our opening drive and our sequence there. Obviously, got to figure it out, and that’s 100% on me. I felt really good. We felt really good. We didn’t execute, but I got to figure it out. Like, we got to find a solution there. Tried a lot of different things; I’m going to keep trying to figure it out, and we’ll figure it out. We don’t have a choice at this point, right? Like, the gauntlet you’re going into, you can’t start the first three drives the way we did.”
“I don’t know if I look at it quite big picture like that. It was really good to beat a good football team. It was really good to win in the SEC. It was really good to win at home. It’s why I said what I said in the beginning: I’m grateful for these people to continue to show up, continue to spend their hard-earned money, and continue to support us. I can’t control what happened before I got here. I can only control what we do here. Right now, right here, right now. That’s all I have control over. I understand the frustration and hopefully, they can go roll Toomer’s and have a blast, and grateful for them being here.”
“You got to go find a way to win, and those are the margins I keep talking about. Like, there’s a formula to winning. Sometimes, you got to go outside the formula and ultimately, for us, as we build our identity here in year one, as big as anything else is the ability to go finish and find ways to finish. I said it earlier in the week, talking about Vandy, like, here’s a team for two years that’s found ways to finish games. . .we hold him there and the game plays out different. We talked about that a week ago that we hold them rather than giving up a two-minute drive. Game plays out different, and then we get the ball back and we’re playing from in front, which lets you take some more chances, let you go be aggressive. But, ultimately, really good teams find a way to go finish, and we were able to go finish the game in Atlanta. We were able to go finish today.
“Where I’m guarded is that the end result dictates how we work or how we approach our daily process, or the ability to coach these young guys. We have so much to clean up, and so much to get better at, and I know that sounds like coach talk, but the wind can’t hide, and that’s what I told these guys. LIke, it can’t hide some of the stuff that needs to get cleaned up, like it just can’t hide it, and that’s the biggest coaching point to all of it is we’re about to go into a gauntlet. You’re going to have a hard time winning games the way we did tongiht, but you won the game. So, you found a way to finish.”
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Griffin is a communications major who was the Sports Editor for The Tiger at Clemson University. He led a team of 20+ reporters after working his way up through the ranks as a staff writer, sideline reporter, and assistant sports editor.
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