I’m not speaking to all of you, but I am speaking to some of you.
“You,” in this case, is the underwhelmed Auburn fan who has an eyebrow raised with this ongoing USF migration to The Plains. Even though one could’ve anticipated this would happen the second that Alex Golesh signed on the dotted line, reality hit once these daily announcements of USF-to-Auburn transfers kept pouring in. Some scoffed, others have seemingly embraced it with open arms.
How should you feel, Auburn fans? Feel however you want, but if “annoyed,” or “bummed” is your first thought upon seeing double-digit USF transfers locked into Year 1 of the Golesh era on The Plains, well, I’m entitled to feel a specific way about you — “obtuse.”
Those who act like USF transfers aren’t good enough to wear an Auburn uniform haven’t been paying attention to a couple of things.
Let’s start with the obvious.
Fans of a team with 5 consecutive losing seasons for the first time since the Harry Truman administration shouldn’t scoff
They’re the only SEC program who doesn’t have multiple winning seasons in the 2020s, and the lone winning season was a 6-5 mark during the COVID season that got Gus Malzahn fired.
The last time Auburn could be considered respectable at football was an entirely different era of the sport. NIL wasn’t even legal yet. We’re talking about a team that just moved on to its 4th different coach of the 2020s who has an overall record of 33-40 in that stretch. The only SEC teams with fewer wins in the 2020s decade are Arkansas, Mississippi State and Vanderbilt, who still beat Auburn each of the last 2 years. During this 5-year stretch of losing seasons, Auburn’s lone 3-game winning streak vs. Power Conference opponents came in 2023 … when it faced those exact 3 SEC teams in a row.
It’s probably even more embarrassing that Auburn struggled so much despite having one of the best home-field advantages in the sport. Remember Jordan-Hare magic? In the last 5 years, Auburn is 5-17 vs. Power Conference competition at home. Since the start of 2021, Auburn has 6 wins vs. FBS teams who finished with a winning record, though since Nov. 2021, the Tigers have just 3 such victories … and 2 of them came vs. San Jose State and Western Kentucky.
You get it. Auburn fans who want to act high and mighty haven’t exactly earned the right to do so. Lord knows that crowd sold itself on plenty of those 5 teams that all finished with 7-plus losses.
It’s a new world, wherein roster construction comes in a variety of forms. I don’t need to preach to Auburn fans about the importance of the transfer portal, because for all of Hugh Freeze’s struggles, he at least understood the significance of plug-and-play guys. He just didn’t know how to evaluate the quarterback position, nor did he have any clue how to close games. When Freeze banked on continuity with Payton Thorne, it left everyone scratching their head that he doubled down on someone who had been benched repeatedly both at Auburn and at his previous stop, Michigan State.
It’s a bit different than Golesh banking on continuity with Byrum Brown, AKA the guy who just became the 12th player in FBS history to register 3,000 passing yards and 1,000 rushing yards in a season.
Mind you, Brown joined that exclusive club in just 12 games. What about the competition, you ask? The American isn’t the SEC, though one could forget that after Golesh was 1 of 3 coaches from the conference who filled SEC vacancies. Brown started his 2025 season with nonconference statement victories against last year’s Playoff participant, Boise State, as well as a historic win at Florida, wherein he racked up 329 yards of offense.
Sure, Brown didn’t ultimately play for a conference title. He suffered 3 losses in his starts. One of which was at Miami, who had a nice little season. The 2 others were 3-point losses in games in which he racked up 390 yards of offense. USF finished No. 5 in FBS with 40.5 points per game, which is why 9 of those first 10 USF-to-Auburn players came from the offensive side of the ball.
Picture the alternative. Like, Golesh looked at his top-5 offense in America and he said, “nah, I don’t want to bring any of that over with me to Auburn.” Or even worse, what if a 3-year starter like Brown and all of those skill-players didn’t want to follow Golesh? It’d be even more alarming than when Auburn didn’t sign a single transfer from Bryan Harsin’s Boise State squad because unlike when that transition took place post-2020, undergraduates can now transfer without penalty. Lord knows they’ve also got plenty of financial incentive to do so.
When Freeze came to Auburn from Liberty in 2023, some wondered if he’d bring over an established quarterback like Kaidon Salter. That never happened. Not a single player followed Freeze from Liberty, which could’ve been seen as a red flag, but it was somewhat overlooked because of how quickly he rebuilt Auburn’s high school recruiting pipeline after Harsin left it in shambles. And to Freeze’s credit, he at least got enough talent back in the door to make Auburn look like an SEC team, both at the high school and college level. Auburn was still too reliant on underclassmen, which is something that doesn’t figure to be the case in Year 1 with Golesh.
Yes, seeing decorated players like Cam Coleman and Deuce Knight leave as that USF migration took shape added to that angst
That’s at the root of some of this. If we found out that those guys never even got pitched from Golesh to stay, that’d be one thing. As far as we know, though, that wasn’t the case.
It’s not as if Golesh is entirely cleaning house and trying to copy and paste USF into Auburn. After all, he kept DJ Durkin on board to run that defense, which has already retained several key contributors from the “better-than-the-record-showed” 2025 group. This isn’t like when Scott Frost brought his entire UCF staff to Nebraska in 2018 and then questioned why a mediocre Group of 5 defensive staff didn’t translate in the Big Ten.
In an ideal world, what Golesh is doing is a whole lot closer to what Curt Cignetti did at Indiana.
No, that’s not my way of saying that the best version of this yields instantly a historic 2-year run. But when Cignetti got to IU, he brought 13 James Madison players with him in Year 1. Even at Indiana, who then had more losses of any FBS program in the history of the sport, some scoffed at the Sun Belt incomers. What many quickly saw was that they were there to lay the foundation and play immediately. Guys like Elijah Sarratt, Mikail Kamara, Aiden Fisher and D’Angelo Ponds weren’t just there so that Cignetti had some familiar faces to look at. They were there to provide the proof of concept from an 11-win James Madison program in 2023. All 4 of them then became All-Big Ten players for an 11-win Indiana program in Year 1.
Time will tell how many of the USF transfers emerge for Golesh’s Year 1 squad, whose ceiling will be determined by much more than how close Brown gets to another 3,000-1,000 season. It’s weird to be living in a world in which you can now pluck guys from a top-5 offense easier than retaining former 5-star recruits. Perhaps that’s backwards logic.
What’s clear is that this new era is taking shape at Auburn. It felt imminent that Golesh would try to bring some of the best elements of USF with him to Auburn, and so far, he’s done that. If fans want to wait and see what that looks like before assuming a turnaround is imminent, that’s fine. They’ve earned the right to temper expectations after a disastrous start to the decade.
But they haven’t earned the right to say the USF pipeline is destined for disappointment.
Connor O'Gara is the senior national columnist for Saturday Down South. He's a member of the Football Writers Association of America. After spending his entire life living in B1G country, he moved to the South in 2015.
