Auburn will head into Saturday’s trip to No. 1 Georgia without one of its top defensive weapons.
Alex Golesh said Monday that star linebacker Xavier Atkins will not play in the Tigers’ Week 7 matchup in Athens, a 3:30 p.m. ET kickoff on ESPN. The suspension removes a major piece from Auburn’s defense before it faces a Georgia offense that has already made life difficult for plenty of teams this season.
Atkins has been all over the stat sheet for Auburn, piling up 37 total tackles, including 26 solo stops, along with 3 sacks, an interception and 7.5 tackles for loss. The junior has been in his second season with the program after spending the 2024 season with LSU, and he came into the year as a first-team All-SEC linebacker.
Golesh did not go into detail about the decision during his Monday press conference, other than making it clear the linebacker would be out this week and that the situation would be revisited next week.
“We will be without Xavier Atkins this week. We’ll revisit it next week when we meet again on Monday in here.
Keep it in house in terms of anything beyond that, and that’ll be the only piece of it that I’ll be addressing,” Alex Golesh told reporters on Monday. “He won’t be with us this week for the game on Saturday.
We’ll revisit early next week when we meet again here.”
The suspension comes after reporting from Justin Hokanson of On3 pointed to ongoing issues off the field. Hokanson wrote Monday, “Internal discipline issues persist with Atkins,” and also reported Friday that Atkins “remained on the team.”
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