Auburn’s season has been hard to watch, but Cole Best says there’s still one thing holding the group together: nobody is splintering under pressure.
That showed up again in the Tigers’ 24-14 loss to Tennessee on Rocky Top, a defeat that pushed Auburn deeper into a rough 2026 stretch. The results are ugly. The mood inside the locker room, though, hasn’t cracked.
Best, Auburn’s center, said the team kept fighting through the entire game and never turned on one another.
“ One thing I was proud of, just really the whole game, was that no one wavered. I thought that everyone in all three phases of the ball just continued playing, sticking together.
There was no finger-pointing. And that’s one thing that I never doubt on this team or in this entire program, is that guys are gonna keep swinging, keep fighting," Best said.
He also pointed to a small offensive bright spot: the run game finally found some rhythm once the interior and left tackle Jo Simmons started handling the mid-zone work better in the second half.
“And I thought one of the positives, I guess, in this game was that we finally got some run game in the mid zone going. I thought there was some really, really good there,” Best said.
That’s where Auburn is right now. The performance against Tennessee, like the loss to Florida, was split in two: the offense was flat early and better later, while the defense did the opposite. Against SEC competition, the product on the field hasn’t been pretty.
Still, Alex Golesh’s locker room does not sound fractured. The head coach has been taking responsibility after losses instead of tossing blame around, and there’s been no sign of a revolt from inside the program.
That matters, especially when the on-field issues start to resemble the Hugh Freeze era in the box score and the final score. But the attitude around this team is different. Auburn is competing together, even if the learning curve has been steep.
The bigger concern, as many around the sport have started to point out, is whether the talent Golesh and his staff brought in from the Group of Six ranks was ready for this jump. If that gap is going to be overcome, the Tigers will need cohesion more than anything else.
For now, that’s the one thing Auburn can carry into the bye week. Best laid it out plainly: the team hasn’t quit on itself. With no games in Week 6, that’s the lone source of hope left on the Plains.
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