Mailbag: How can Auburn get back to winning the games it should?

This week: Recruiting territory, the north end zone, the basketball roster, Jackson Koivun, changes in Auburn and the first-place Braves

(Payton Smith/The Auburn Observer)

AUBURN — And we’re back.

Like I said earlier this week, I didn’t mean to take nearly two months off from the mailbag. But my schedule was absolutely loaded during the stretch run of basketball and the first spring practices in football, so we had plenty of stuff to write about without having to go back to the mailbag well.

It’s the offseason, though, and that’s prime ‘bag season.

For those of you who are new to The Observer, we try to do a mailbag almost every Friday. Feel free to ask your questions about Auburn football or basketball — or other topics, as you’ll see toward the end — throughout the week, and we’ll answer them here. (Sometimes, we’ll do this as a podcast instead of a written newsletter.)

A lot has changed for both sports since the last time I took questions, and there’s a lot in here about a new-look basketball roster. But I wanted to start with an intriguing question on the football side that really stood out to me, especially in light of something I heard earlier this week.

Thanks for hanging in here with us. We’re still doing mailbags. We’re just not numbering them anymore. I’m not even sure why I was doing that in the first place.

While I know that beating Auburn’s biggest rival has to be a top priority, the real issue has been taking care of business against teams they should beat. How does Golesh address getting the program back to beating the teams they should?

Brent

There are several different ways to define “taking care of business” against teams you “should beat.” The easiest and most straightforward one, to me, is looking at a team’s win-loss record as a betting favorite. Lines aren’t perfect, but they set expectations.

In the three seasons under Hugh Freeze, Auburn went 12-7 outright as a favorite. That’s a winning percentage of just 63.2%, and it ranks in the bottom 25 of all FBS teams over the last three seasons. The only power-conference teams behind Auburn in winning percentage as a favorite are UCLA, Kansas, Oregon State, Pittsburgh, Arkansas, UCF and Purdue. That’s not the company you want to keep.

That winning percentage falls to 60% in games as a home favorite. That’s in the bottom 20 of all FBS teams. What’s even worse is that Auburn lost five straight games to power-conference opponents as a home favorite under Freeze: Cal 2024, Arkansas 2024, Oklahoma 2024, Vanderbilt 2024 and Kentucky 2025. And right before that skid was New Mexico State 2023.

This isn’t about not having the roster to compete with the best of the best in the SEC. This is about doing your job in games when you’re expected to win. Auburn’s only win over a power-conference team as a favorite over the last two seasons was at Baylor — and that game was nearly a pick-’em at kickoff. And Freeze’s last game in charge was a 10-3 loss to Kentucky as a double-digit home favorite. It was a fitting farewell.

Meanwhile, during those same three seasons, Alex Golesh and USF were 15-6 as favorites. That was a solid winning percentage compared to the rest of the country. At home, the Bulls were 11-1 as favorites under Golesh. That winning percentage of 91.7% ranked in the top 20 in the FBS. USF’s only loss as a home favorite came in Year 1 under Golesh, so the Bulls took care of business when he got things rolling.

Also, if you look back at Golesh’s time as an offensive coordinator in the SEC, Tennessee was 15-1 as a favorite in 2021 and 2022. That’s taking care of business.

What’s the biggest difference between the Auburn of the last three seasons and the USF of the last three seasons?