Auburn’s offensive line isn’t pointing fingers after Byrum Brown’s rough debut against Baylor. If anything, the message coming out of the 17-16 win was the opposite: the Tigers are backing their quarterback, and they’re owning their part of the mess.
Brown finished the game with 259 passing yards on 73% completions and added a rushing touchdown in the fourth quarter, but the stat line also came with three interceptions and five sacks. He ran for 27 yards on 21 carries, though that total was padded by the hits he took behind the line, including a long run of 21 yards.
Auburn center Cole Best said the team’s confidence in Brown never cracked.
“Confidence hasn’t wavered at all,” Auburn center Cole Best said postgame. “Like Byrum, that’s a guy that I’ve been around for a long time.
I’ve got nothing but trust in that guy. I know he’s going to go watch the tape, he’s fix what he needs to fix, and we’re going to fix what we need to fix.
You go back and look at a couple of those picks, there’s times when the protection could have been better, the communication could have been better, and we could have kept a lot of hits off of him too. I think it’s a collective team thing, but nothing but full trust in Byrum, and I think I speak for everybody on this team when I say that.”
Left tackle Jo Simmons took the blame on the line’s side while also defending Brown. For him, the standard starts with keeping the quarterback upright.
“One, if the quarterback’s on the ground at all, that’s on us. We’ve got to do better than that,” Simmons said.
“Overall, all five of us, we’ve got to do a better job - passing twists off, holding blocks, keeping the pocket, making him feel comfortable back there. Five sacks are unacceptable.
We can’t have that.”
Brown’s dual-threat background is part of what Auburn signed up for. Last season at South Florida, he became one of 12 quarterbacks in FBS history to top 3,000 passing yards and 1,000 rushing yards in the same season.
Simmons said that kind of mobility comes with tradeoffs, but it also gives the offense a different kind of safety net.
“It may be annoying sometime when he breaks contain. But we also know that’s how it is with a mobile quarterback,” Simmons said.
“We know he might break contain and might mess up one of our spots. But we might mess up.
He might save us from one of our mess-ups. Just knowing that’s what it’s going to be with a quarterback that athletic who can move so much, it’s whatever.”
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Auburns First Real Evaluation Reveals Early Standouts And Concerns
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On the other side of the ball, Elijah Melendez, Chris Murray and Bryce Deas drew the top defensive grades after Auburns front and second level helped create steady disruption. The Tigers logged 19 pressures and two sacks, a reminder that the defense did enough to keep the game within reach even as the offensive evaluation came back with a few more questions than answers. [Read more 🡒]