Football
Auburn coach Alex Golesh has captured headlines during spring practice with his confident assertions about the Tigers’ potential next season. Golesh was one of the most sought-after coaches in the country during the apex of the coaching carousel that gripped college football late last year.
Football How Alex Golesh’s Move to Auburn Impacted His Family
During Wednesday’s segment of the “Next Up” show with host Adam Breneman, Golesh detailed the difficulty for his family when he chose to leave the South Florida Bulls for the $44 million Auburn job.
“It’s midnight, everybody’s asleep,” Golesh said. “I woke up my daughter and wife and talked at length about the options, including staying. And pros and cons, and a little bit of frustration from my daughter… I got an incredible wife who has as clear thinking as anybody. On the back burner, you knew your family’s lives were gonna change.
“I got a daughter who’s a freshman, like, ‘Dad, I just made varsity flag football as a freshman. I’m on the varsity cheer team.’ Got my son, who’s doing pretty well. Moving a 14-year-old daughter, you talk about pulling on heartstrings. There were several times where I was like, ‘We love it here. Do we just stay?’”
Golesh took over a struggling Bulls team that had gone 4-29 in the three seasons preceding his appointment in 2023. In his first season in charge, he led them to bowl eligibility and a dominant 45-0 win over the Syracuse Orange in the Boca Raton Bowl, the Bulls’ first bowl win in six years.
Over the next two seasons, Golesh led the Bulls to consecutive bowl eligibility and finished his South Florida career with a commendable 23-15 record, including a 9-3 record last year.
The Tigers courted Golesh aggressively after firing Hugh Freeze late in the season, and his appointment as Auburn coach was confirmed on Nov. 30, a day after USF’s 52-3 blowout win against the Rice Owls.
Golesh has had an extensive career that started in 2003 as an assistant coach at Westerville Central High School, Ohio, before he got a student assistant job at Ohio State in 2004. He served as a graduate assistant at Northern Illinois and Oklahoma State before getting his big break as a running backs coach and later tight ends coach at Toledo (2009–2011).
Between 2012 and 2015, Golesh served as the tight ends coach and recruiting coordinator at Illinois before taking the same job at Iowa State until 2019. In 2020, he took the tight ends and co-offensive coordinator jobs at UCF under Josh Heupel before taking the offensive coordinator and tight ends roles at Tennessee before finally landing the USF head coaching job.
Read More Cabral Opiyo