The back half of the 2026 season has arrived for the Auburn Tigers and Head Coach Alex Golesh, who have a 3-2 record going into the third weekend in October.
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The Tigers are coming off of a bye week after they fell 24-14 to the Tennessee Volunteers in Neyland Stadium, a game in which they led 7-3 at the half, but gave up 220 yards on the ground to DeSean Bishop.
Auburn now turns its attention to a rivalry game with the Georgia Bulldogs on Saturday in Athens, Georgia, a place it has lost the last nine games. It also has not beaten Georgia at all since 2017.
Tigers Head Coach Alex Golesh held his weekly press conference on Monday, recapping the bye week while also giving a look ahead to the game against the Bulldogs.
Here are some of his most notable quotes from the session.
On Xavier Atkins’ status for the game:
“We will be without Xavier Atkins this week. We'll revisit it next week or we'll meet again on Monday here, keep it in-house in terms of anything beyond that. And really, that'll be the only piece of it that I'll be addressing. But he won't be with us this week for the game on Saturday and won;t be available, and then we'll revisit early next week when we meet again here.”
On what the performance against Georgia will say about the team:
“I think it gives you a gauge of where you are against obviously one of the better teams in the country, if not the best team in the country. You'll leave it and you'll know how you stack up. I think college football so much has become a week-to-week deal in the sense of can you get your team focused, ready, urgent, locked in week-to-week, and I think the biggest thing it will tell you is where you stack up. But I also think it'll tell you where you stack up for the week.”
On where the team was mentally during the bye week:
“I thought the intent was really real. I thought the intent was really, really positive. I think there's enough maturity to say, ‘Man, when we are at our best, we can play at the highest level of football. When we're not, we're just good enough to get embarrassed.' So it's continuing to drive the fact that we've got to be at our best every single day.”
On getting pre-snap penalty work in an executing it:
“At the end of the day, we got to do a really good job coaching it. The players starting up front, have got to do a really good job of trusting it in the fact that they're ready to rock and roll.”
On the offensive line rotation:
“We're going to continue to work through it. And that's not like a coach's answer that is true. Those guys are competing every single day and we're going to continue to compete every single day to get to essentially Friday and say these are the dudes that we feel like are giving us the best chance to go in. It's been a relatively similar rotation here for the last couple of weeks and we’re continuing to let those guys compete.”
On the performance of Cody Sigler:
“Man, gritty, tough, smart. His leadership ability has come out really, honestly, since the spring, but certainly even more so this summer, in a room that's relatively young, where him and Dallas are the old grizzled vets in there. And the attitude that he shows up with every day, like that's a young man that's grateful to be at Auburn.”
Auburn Undercover is an independent Auburn sports media company covering Auburn athletics, recruiting and insider news.
