Most coaches will spin a bad loss to make it sound better, but Alex Golesh did the exact opposite after Saturday’s game. He told reporters there was no silver lining and no anything to make the 38-17 defeat to LSU look good. The Auburn Tigers gave up 552 total yards while only managing 271 on offense in a game that felt like a disaster.
Golesh did not try to blame the referees or the weather or bad luck. He stood up in front of the media and said the game plan simply did not work. “I’ll own 100% of the plan wasn’t good enough,” Golesh said, according to Yahoo Sports. It is rare to hear a coach take that much heat for his own team’s failure, but that is exactly what happened.
The Run Game Disappeared Completely
A week ago, Auburn was rolling against Georgia and running the ball with ease. Saturday was a different story entirely as the Tigers could not move the ball on the ground at all. After previously defeating the Bulldogs so effectively, they ended up with only 67 rushing yards. The offense looked stuck and the players could not find a way to get moving forward.
Golesh admitted they could not come up with new ideas to help the runners. “We didn’t find enough creative ways to be able to generate run game,” Golesh said. He knows they need to change their approach if they want to win again. “And kind of goes back to we’ve got to be really, really, really strategic in how we generate run game,” he added.
This kind of honesty is hard to hear when you are a fan who wants to see a win. But it shows the coach knows where the problem lies. If the plan was better, the numbers would have looked different too. The team needs to get creative fast or they will keep getting stopped.
Missed Tacks Turned Small Plays Into Big Ones
LSU quarterback Sam Leavitt passed for 387 yards and three touchdowns, giving the defense a day they likely wish to erase. The biggest issue was not the coverage but the fact that defenders just could not get the ball carrier down. Missed tackles let small gains turn into solid plays that changed the whole game.
Golesh pointed out how these little mistakes add up to big problems for the team. “And so now those fours and fives turn into nines and tens,” Golesh said. When a player should get tackled for four yards but runs for nine instead, the defense has to work much harder to stop them. LSU used this to their advantage all afternoon.
The Tigers also gave up a 70-yard touchdown reception to Jackson Harris which made the score look even worse. It is hard to get off the field when the other team keeps getting extra yards. The team has to fix their tackling if they want to stop the bleeding in the SEC.
Golesh knows the team cannot spend the whole week feeling sorry for themselves. “We’ve had the highs of highs so far, and that would be the low of lows,” Golesh said. The Tigers sit at 4-3 overall and 2-3 in the conference with Ole Miss coming up next. They have to bounce back fast or the season could slip away.
This loss was bad in every way and the coach said so himself. “There’s no silver lining. There’s no anything. That was bad in every imaginable way,” Golesh said. It is a tough pill to swallow but at least the team knows the truth. Now they have to go out and prove they can do better.
