A hot and muggy Friday on the campus of Auburn University saw the Auburn Tigers take the field at Jordan-Hare Stadium for a scrimmage in the ripe middle of preseason camp.
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It was seemingly a solid opportunity for the Tigers to get some experience in a game day routine, but walking out of today’s run, Coach Alex Golesh said the team has a long way to go after a round of simple mistakes and reps that need fixing.
“If we don’t humble ourselves to get coached here the next 24 hours,” Golesh said. “I told the entire team, coaches, everybody, humble the heck out of yourselves here… I would walk out and say, overall, a sloppy day on both sides.”
The scrimmage overall allowed the first and second rotations of the team to go for 115 plays total, which Golesh equated to a little more than one half of football.
Throughout the morning, the Tigers worked through a number of situations with their backs against the wall in enemy territory, through crowd noise, short yardage, overtime scenarios. All of the situations included plays on third downs and in the red zone.Special teams also played out some scenarios in the punt return game.
However, the performance was not up to the standard that Golesh wanted at this point in camp.
“There were some bright spots, but there was also some pre-snap stuff that is not how you can function offensively,” Golesh said. “There was some bright spots on defense, and then there was some tackling stuff that it looked like our second time tackling. We need a bunch of work tackling. We need a bunch of work blocking. We need a bunch of work pre-snap, need a bunch of crowd noise work.”
Despite being the beginning of the fall period for the team with a long season ahead, it’s a time that Golesh got to realize a lot about the team he has.
While realistically there is still another batch of days still to go in this preseason camp period, what he noticed was that the way the group operated was on the other end of what the expectation is.
“I can make an excuse and say, man, first scrimmage,” Golesh said. “We didn’t look like a veteran team. We looked like a team that has highs and lows and is emotional and rides with that, which is the opposite of what we want.”
In a brighter spot though, Golesh said it gave the team a much-needed opportunity to simulate what the operations of a true Saturday would be like.
Auburn will have another chance to play in team scrimmage at the end of next week, which will give Golesh a chance to compare and reevaluate as the season gets ever closer.
“We’ve worked a lot of scrimmage-type situations through the first nine days of camp,” Golesh said. “This was incredible for us to get everybody off the field, coaches up in the box, game day operation, did TV timeouts, started with our full warmup, tried to simulate what it would be to be a game day. We’re 22 days out, we’ll get another opportunity at that here this coming week.”
Auburn Undercover is an independent Auburn sports media company covering Auburn athletics, recruiting and insider news.
