The Auburn Tigers are a team with bold new expectations under newly hired head coach Alex Golesh. CBS Sports' John Talty set the standard higher than anyone has yet on AU, predicting the program to win seven games and become bowl-eligible in 2026.
Talty took it a step further, though, predicting that the Tigers could be talented enough to win as many as nine games under Golesh, given his roster management that saw several key defenders and running back Jeremiah Cobb retained, plus several USF Bulls transfers, including star quarterback Byrum Brown, making way to the Plains.
"Perhaps this feels like too easy a bar to surpass in Year 1, and in many ways, it is. But you must remember this program has been to two bowl games in five seasons and last won more than six games in 2019. There is enough incoming and returning talent that Golesh could win eight or even nine games in Year 1, but as long as he can get Auburn back on track with a bowl game and seven wins or so, he'll be in good shape," Talty wrote.
Auburn is starving for a winning season. With as little to lose as possible in year one, and coming in with a bigger offensive imagination than Hugh Freeze or Bryan Harsin ever had, Golesh and Brown, the latter of which will have just one year in East Central Alabama to prove he has an NFL future, have the chance to stun the College Football world.
Why not the Tigers? Someone is going to make a rise that no one saw coming. At least some, like Talty, see Golesh's vision.
Alex Golesh expected to raise Auburn's expectations in the locker room
On3's Jake Crain guaranteed to me in early January, after the first week the transfer portal was opened, that Golesh's culture-building process would be different than his two predecessors, even bringing up Nick Saban's name to drive the point home.
"I think you're going to get the opposite of what we just had at Auburn. Golesh wants to mold great people, but he molds great people a different way, not through appeasement. He is going to mold them through putting them through the rigor together, having a super high standard, understanding that you're not going to reach your goals by just being talented," Crain said.
"They're going to have to earn it every single day, and you hear the term process-driven, and that's 100% true. That's why Nick Saban was the best in the world at making every Monday the same, every Tuesday the same, every Wednesday the same, every Thursday and Friday the same, and on Saturday, a lot of it was the same. You're going to go out there and rip somebody's a**, because that's just what you do on this day."
It seems Talty believes that enough to think that suffering only three losses with a difficult schedule that includes the Alabama Crimson Tide, Georgia Bulldogs, LSU Tigers, Ole Miss Rebels, Tennessee Volunteers, and Vanderbilt Commodores is on the table.