Before taking over at Auburn on a $44.25 million deal, Alex Golesh was not even sure he was ready to run his own program. The turning point came at Tennessee, where SEC head coach Josh Heupel, a $9M-level hiring in his own right, kept telling Golesh one thing: “I trust you.” That trust, Golesh now says, is what made him believe he could lead a major job like Auburn.

“I thought he [Josh Heupel] did a really good job of being very meticulous and detailed, really, in everything. Offensively, certainly,” said Golesh during his recent appearance on See Ball Get Ball with David Pollack when asked what lesson he carried from Tennessee to Auburn. “As a head coach, I thought [Heupel was] very meticulous in certain things that need to get done, detailed from a football side but also from a recruiting side. It was awesome to be able to be there at the beginning part of that.”

When Auburn started its search, Golesh did not promise a perfect scheme. He promised the belief Heupel had built in him: that he could run a big program, call bold plays, and handle SEC pressure.

Tennessee was a big jump for Golesh, though. He had been a co-offensive coordinator at UCF, but now he was calling plays in the SEC. The good news: he already knew Heupel’s system from 2020 at UCF, when Heupel was the head coach. That shared language made the transition faster.

“We had a really good relationship. There was a lot of trust, and he trusted me to do a lot of things. I don’t know if we walked into a normal situation in December; if it would have been that way. But he certainly trusted me with a lot, and I don’t know if without that experience I would have been ready to go run it myself so quickly,” said the new Auburn head coach.

Under Golesh, Tennessee’s 2022 offense led the nation with 538.1 yards per game. The unit also set program records in scoring and total offense. Heupel pushed an attack-first mindset, and Golesh built the play sheet around it: push tempo, attack every down, and force defenses to react.

“It was good to learn and grow. I think the best thing from an offensive standpoint with Josh [Heupel] was just the way that his mentality was in terms of we’re going to be the ones that attack them and not wait for a defense to attack us and essentially force the defense to play a certain way,” added Golesh.

“It was the first time [for Alex Golesh at Tennessee] I really saw offensive football in that light consistently: if we are going to put pressure on the defense to do what we want them to do rather than what they want to do.”

At Auburn, the stakes are clear. The Tigers finished around 83rd nationally in total offense last season, averaging about 358.2 yards per game, not what fans expect on the Plains. In the SEC, that kind of ranking keeps good teams out of big games. Golesh’s first real test comes in October, when he faces Heupel and Tennessee in a matchup that will show how fast Auburn can change under his lead.