Auburn football coach Alex Golesh left Neyland Stadium with a loss to Tennessee, but he pointed to one part of the Tigers’ performance that finally started to click in the second half.
Golesh, facing his old boss Josh Heupel for the first time since taking the Auburn job, saw his team fall 24-14 on Saturday. Afterward, he spoke with reporters and zeroed in on the offense’s improved flow after a sluggish opening stretch.
“I felt like we were in rhythm, right?,” Golesh said. “The penalties, the pre-snap stuff went away.
We were able to efficiently get going with the drives. We weren’t backed up.
The long, on Byrum’’s run, that drive, we actually were. We started on the six.
I don’t have the exact drive chart in front of me, but it felt like the rest of them weren’t truly backed up, but I felt like we got in rhythm. I thought we ran it efficiently.
You saw us be able to kind of pick up the run game a little bit, and then we pitched and caught the ball well.
“You know, there’s a couple of throws I know Byrum is going to want back, but I thought for the most part, we pitched and caught it well. It felt like there was a rhythm.
I felt like we got tempo going, and we were able to efficiently run it. Stayed ahead of the chains.
At least off top of my head, two third-and-six pluses in that whole second half, if I remember right, maybe three. Where in the first half, there was quite a few, and all of that was because you were first at 15 literally six times.”
Golesh’s comments centered on the same theme: once Auburn cleaned up the penalties and stopped putting itself behind the sticks, the offense settled in.
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