Auburn head coach and former Vols offensive coordinator Alex Golesh clarifies his viral comments about Tennessee's offense

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Auburn Tigers head coach and former Tennessee Volunteers offensive coordinator Alex Golesh says he doesn’t think of the system he runs as a “veer-n-shoot” offensive system.

Auburn Tigers head coach and former Tennessee Vols offensive coordinator Alex Golesh made some comments about UT’s offense (within a larger discussion of his offensive philosophy) that went viral earlier this month.

Golesh pointed out during an appearance on The Cube Show with Cole Cubelic that Tennessee’s offense looks completely different now than it did when he was calling plays for the Vols in 2021 and 2022.

“Heup’s biggest thing was ‘Hey, everything we’ve just done (at UCF), if we don’t change, we’re gonna get blown up,'” said Golesh. “And I’m like, ‘What do you mean?’ And he’s like, ‘Listen, in this league, one, we don’t have better players than everybody. And two, in this league, they have corners that can play press man every snap.’ Which is like, alright, I get that. So we’ve got to move bodies. We’ve got to stack bodies. We’ve got to create leverages in different ways.

“This league was different and so Heup said, ‘Man, you’ve got to change. We’ve got to change.’ And it forced me, and forced our offensive staff, to take another step and change.”

“I left [the SEC] three and a half years ago, and it was us and Ole Miss [running that style of offense], because (Jeff) Lebby was still at Ole Miss doing a version of it,” added Golesh. “And I come back and there’s – we’ve got six teams on our schedule this year, including Southern Miss, that does a version of what we do from a big picture scheme standpoint. And we’ve all evolved. You look at Tennessee – now is really the first time I’ve had a chance to study them in the spring – and they don’t look anything like they looked when I was there.“

Alex Golesh addresses his comments about offenses evolving in the SEC

Golesh met with reporters on Tuesday at the SEC league meetings in Destin and he was asked about the comments he made to Cubelic.

The first-year Auburn head coach pointed out that everyone, specifically the media, likes to put offenses in a box (veer-n-shoot, air raid, pro-style, etc), even though offenses in college football are constantly evolving.

Interestingly, Golesh noted that he’s never thought of the system that he and Heupel run as the veer-n-shoot, which is how a lot of folks in the media have labeled it.

“I think that maybe got blown up a little bit,” said Golesh. “I just made the comment that this was the first time I got a chance to sit down and study it, and it looks different. Clearly, it looks different. It’s been three years, and there’s somebody else running it.

“I think we all have made it our own. I think, obviously, everybody has evolved. And especially if you’re in this league now, you better evolve. You can’t get here by not being able to evolve. I think people, specifically media, want to compartmentalize what you do offensively and defensively. They want to kind of put you in a box that you’re veer-n-shoot (or some other offensive style). I’ve never once thought of it as veer-n-shoot.”

“I think the core DNA of it was just simply that tempo is a huge part of it,” added Golesh. “And then certainly using the entire width of the field. But people, again, compartmentalize it as we have these wide splits. Well, nobody ever said you had to play in wide splits. It’s just the thought of making people defend the entire width of the field. I think systematically, where I think it hasn’t changed is the core foundation there. Because you make the defense adjust to what you do — rather than adjusting to the defense — and forcing the defense’s hand.”

Football — offensively and defensively — is always evolving. Someone is always going to find the next great offensive system to run, and some defensive coordinator is always going to find a way to stop it. Wash, rinse, repeat.

As Golesh said, you don’t get to the SEC unless you’re able to evolve.

And if you do manage to make it to the SEC without the ability to evolve, you almost certainly won’t last long.

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