Presser: Alex Golesh talks to the media after the loss to Florida

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

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Michael Giddens (0:34)

All right, we'll let coach make the comment, and we'll take some questions.

Alex Golesh (0:39)

All right, first of all, thanks for being here.

Grateful to our fans, our students, the band, like man, it was awesome. The environment, incredible.

We obviously didn't play well enough to go win that game.

You start off, obviously, offensively, you go the first three drives were abysmal, three and out, three and out, three and out, about as abysmal as you can get, and then just leave the defense out there for as long as we do. Obviously, we got to answer. And then the story of the game, tie it at 17, and then we give up 17 unanswered between the middle of the second quarter or the end of the second quarter there and then into halfway through the, more than halfway into the third quarter. Three offensive plays and 17 points later, now you're in a dogfight to try to claw back and you can't run offense the way you want to run it. Story of the game is that middle part of it. Then defensively, the explosives, obviously the double pass was a dagger.

The explosives, giving up, I don't know how many that was, but it felt like it's some inopportune times, and then you're fighting back and clawing back, and we take the sacks, and then obviously the big touchdown, 45 yards on fourth down, and that's the dagger.

I could give you some coach talk on fighting and all that.

The expectation, I understand, is to win that game here, and we didn't. So this is really the first bit of adversity, real adversity that we got to face as a team. We just challenged our guys to handle it the right way. There's a certain way winners handle it. There's a certain way losers handle it. And we got to go handle it the right way. And that will be growth for us as a program. Again, I understand the expectation, the expectations to win. We got to run the ball better. We got to be more efficient starting off the game. We got to eliminate the explosives. We got to take advantage of the penalty despair, the discrepancy. We didn't.

We got to be better across the board, and really in all three phases, we're not explosive enough in the return game. Got two shots and onside kicks. We don't get either. There's a lot to clean up in that phase as well. So we got to go back to work. We're right in the middle of it. And like I said, I understand the assignment. It wasn't good enough in all three sides. It wasn't good enough from a coaching side. It wasn't good enough by me. And I think in every imaginable way, we lost composure in the first quarter on both sides of it. I thought we were ready. I thought we were emotionally in the right spot. We had a hard time communicating. We didn't execute offensively. And you get in the hole, you fight back. And that's where we ended up. And then you end up in a hole in the third quarter again. Can't put our defense out there as much as we did early in the game. And you kind of saw the ramifications of that there in the beginning of the third quarter. So we got to be way better. We will be. I believe in these dudes. I think we got the right guys. I know we've got the right people in that locker room. I believe we're going to go fight back. But we'll find out. So questions.

Justin Ferguson (4:44)

Justin Ferguson, Auburn Reserve. Alex, you were talking about the explosives on defense, especially in the running game that's kind of seemed out of character for what this defense has been doing. Just what did you think was kind of the big difference there from maybe the first couple of games?

Alex Golesh (4:58)

Yeah, I thought, you know, the short yardages were disappointing early. I thought, for the most part, up until the big explosive run, you know, obviously, the key to the game was controlling Jaden Baugh, who is as special as he is. I thought, for the most part, we did a decent job. There was a lot of missed tackles. There was some misalignments. They did a good job with some unbalanced stuff that we didn't adjust as well as we need to. Some of the look stuff, we didn't adjust as well as we needed to. That's what I mean by composure and emotions of being able to go from play to play to play. It was like when you give up a third and short or a fourth and short, and now you got to go reset and you got to go play, and I didn't think we emotionally handled that well.