“Humble yourselves.” That was the message Auburn head football head coach Alex Golesh gave to his team following Friday morning’s scrimmage inside Jordan-Hare Stadium. Golesh said the scrimmage consisted of 115 plays. He added that the coaching staff wanted to simulate a scrimmage as close to an actual game day as possible.
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“We’re 22 days out. We’ll get another opportunity at that here this coming week. Overall I told the guys if we don’t humble ourselves to get coached here the next 24 hours… There were some bright spots. This is going to sound like coach talk. There were some bright spots.”
Golesh identified three specific areas he feels his team needs to improve upon next week. He said the team needs to get better at tackling, perimeter blocking, and pre-snap situations. Golesh felt there were too many pre-snap infractions during the scrimmage.
On the defensive side, Golesh said, “I thought today we tackled just okay at best. My thought is you have to tackle as much you have to make sure, one, the offensive guys feel it and are able to work through getting through tackles. Going plus two pad under pad. I think defensively we work tackling daily. We have all summer. The hardest thing to do in football is tackle in open space.”
One position group Golesh was pleased with was the defensive line. He said they brought good energy and rotated 10 guys with the ones and 10 guys with the twos. Golesh specifically highlighted Cody Sigler and the effort he brought on Friday. He highlighted a key moment during the scrimmage that he hopes the d-line group can build upon next week.
“I know there were some short yardage situations that Vontell wasn’t real happy with. I will say there was a goal line stand after an explosive play with the ones. The ball was at the five. They went four downs, went for it on 4th and 2 from the two and got a defensive stop. So that was big.”
In the back end of the defense, Golesh hopes his secondary room will be at 100% when Auburn practices on Sunday. Senior Sylvester Smith-Reed is still in an orange non-contact jersey and Newboy Fegans was held out of the Friday scrimmage. Golesh hopes by week one they will have 20 guys in a set rotation. He feels this will give them the best chance to play a variety of packages and mix and match personnel.
Players will get tomorrow off and then return to the practice field on Sunday. It will be the last practice before classes begin on Monday. The next media availability will be on Tuesday. Stay tuned to auburnundercover.com and @AUUndercover on Twitter for all of he coverage and latest intel.
Auburn Undercover is an independent Auburn sports media company covering Auburn athletics, recruiting and insider news.
