The pads came on Wednesday at Auburn, and if it wasn’t already clear the whiny days of Hugh Freeze are long gone, it is now.
Alex Golesh is in charge, everyone — right down to the third period of the first practice in full pads: 11-on-11, full contact, no excuses.
Players didn’t know it was coming. The assistant coaches didn’t know, either.
But the beautiful maniac running this show did.
The same coach who when I asked last month if Auburn had become a program of excuses prior to his arrival, replied without hesitation, “I don’t know what happened before, but I guarantee there’s no misunderstanding what this is now.”
And for those keeping score, the third play of that 11-on-11 impromptu scrimmage period was a perfectly-thrown deep ball thrown by transfer quarterback Byrum Brown into the waiting hands of wideout Jeremiah Koger.
Yeah, that Alex Golesh.
RIDING HIGH AGAIN: Forget about Brendan Sorsby. Will Hammond got the last laugh after all
CLAW IT BACK: New Purdue AD had the guts to rip Indiana. Then he folded
I don’t know how this new edition of Auburn plays out in a transition season with a difficult schedule, but it won’t include the head coach blaming players — like the dolt before Golesh.
Nor will it include the head coach publicly placing the preseason bar for his third season at bowl eligibility — like Freeze proudly, and incredulously trumpeted prior to last season’s full scale meltdown that ended with his firing in the first week of November.
It won’t include a dysfunctional offense that had problems completing a forward pass, much less getting the ball to the best wide receiver combo in the SEC.
It won’t include a coach hired because of his track record of prolific offenses used a decade ago, an offense that hadn’t moved the needle since it twice beat Nick Saban’s Alabama teams in what now seems like 30 years ago.
It won’t include a coach who ran out of time (Gus Malzahn) or wasn’t a fit (Bryan Harsin).
It won’t include any of the typical off-field influential nonsense that infiltrates most football seasons at Auburn, because those in power at Auburn (hello, Daddy Warbucks) were so desperate after the Freeze Fiasco, they finally, mercifully, agreed to get out of the way and let Golesh run the show.
That was Golesh earlier this week, dropping to the deck at the Woltosz Performance Center, pumping out 10 pushups and letting out a primal scream. Why, you ask?
Because there was a dropped pass. And dropped passes, Golesh made clear prior to camp, means everyone ― coaches and players ― owe pushups.
There’s nothing phony about Golesh, who was born in Moscow and is the son of Russian immigrants who moved their family to the United States in 1991 during the collapse of the Soviet Union. He was 7 years old then, didn’t know a lick of English and his parents barely had two nickels to rub together.
But they made it work, and Golesh found his way to American sports before falling in love with football. He and Josh Heupel built the wildly successful offense used at UCF and Tennessee, before Golesh left to take the USF job.
The offense has been a problem for SEC defenses since Heupel arrived in 2021, and Golesh has a quarterback (Brown) who could do the same at Auburn.
"The identity is one thing for me to talk about, one thing for me to preach, one thing for me to hold a standard in every aspect of our program," Golesh said. "But it's another for our kids to embrace it and live it."
This is a serious football coach, not the hope of something from the past — like Freeze, who once caught lightning in a bottle at Ole Miss, and broke NCAA rules on his way to a Top 10 team. So Auburn hired Freeze in the hope of him doing the same.
But hope, everyone, is not a plan. Smart, tough football is.
It’s Golesh’s offense, he coaches quarterbacks, he calls plays. It’s all on him, and he wants the responsibility.
You know, the very confidence and swagger players feed off when executed properly. Not some dog and pony show of who does what and why — and then complaining about it.
Never, in the history of football, has a coach come up with a plan where one assistant coach called first-down plays, the head coach called second down, and yet another assistant called third down. While the head coach retained ultimate veto power.
And Freeze, everyone, was proud to roll out that idea prior to last season. Somehow, Auburn’s hands-on administration didn’t fire him on the spot.
Golesh will have a plan. It may not hum like a finely-tuned engine in Year 1, but it will cause problems for SEC defenses — and Auburn will have a winning season for the first time since 2020.
Because smart, tough football wins.
Not whiny excuses.
Matt Hayes is the senior national college football writer for USA TODAY Sports Network. Follow him on X at @MattHayesCFB. Listen to him daily, from 12-2 p.m., on 1010XL-Jacksonville.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: At Auburn, the excuses are gone. Alex Golesh made sure of that | Opinion