The Auburn football defense will focus on this before next scrimmage

The Auburn football program is nearing the end of their fall practice stint. After rounds of practices and workouts throughout the offseason, the team’s roster is finally complete and the players are all on campus prepping for the first season under head coach Hugh Freeze.

After the first scrimmage of the fall last weekend, the headlines were all about the quarterback battle, of course. Each of the three quarterbacks had good days, resulting in Freeze declaring he needed to go back to the film before he could name a frontrunner in the competition.

Auburn football’s run game was lauded as unstoppable, and the offensive line saw a lot of improvement from the last season. While the offense dominated early on in the scrimmage, the defense struggled a little, but the two sides reversed roles in the latter part of the day.

The performance in the scrimmage left the defense with some key things to work on according to Jalen McLeod, per Auburn Undercover:

"“Being assigned,” McLeod said. “We know where we need to line up at. The biggest negative for the defense as a whole, I think, was tackling. We’re just missing too many tackles. But we’re getting that fixed. We’re making sure we do a lot of drills. Today, we did a lot of drills, made sure we tackled better, rolled up, wrapped up, whatever we’ve got to do to get them down. That’s the main thing we’ve got to do as a defense — just tackle. Too many missed tackles.”"

Defensive lineman Jayson Jones said that everyone has things to work on, but they’re getting it taken care of and he has full trust in his position group this year. In the Tigers’ next Saturday scrimmage, Jones expects to see effort and strain from his teammates as they solidify their group ahead of the season opener on September 2.