Despite 'Playing Catch-Up', Alex Golesh Has Auburn Recruiting on Fire

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Auburn Tigers head coach Alex Golesh took his new job at the end of November; he had to make up for the time he missed in the months before it. He called it "playing catch-up."

Now, he has the program with a top 20 recruiting class, and he doesn't plan on stopping anytime soon.

Not only does he have to start later than every other SEC coach, unless you're a school like Florida who had a head coaching hire as well, but you have a different experience in your first offseason with recruiting.

Golesh thinks he's handling it well.

"I think it's been such an interesting experience in the sense that you get here in late November, early December, and you really feel like you're behind in a lot of ways," he said this week at the 33rd Annual First Light Community of Mobile football preview.

Keeping a strong mentality about this process, Golesh isn't making excuses that he is late to the recruiting party across the Southeast. Rather, he is using it as motivation.

Getting commitments from recruits, while being looked at by other schools since they stepped foot in high school, makes it even sweeter for Auburn at this time.

"Most of these guys at this caliber are getting recruited for the last two years," Golesh said. "So, you're playing catch-up, and you can use that as an excuse or you could go work really hard and try to make up ground."

And the Tigers are making up plenty of ground.

247Sports ranks Auburn's 2027 recruiting class as 14th in the entire country. That includes 19 hard commits and eight four-stars. What could be most impressive from this list is that Golesh has received 13 of them since the middle of May.

He's doing this without describing his coaching mentality or culture; rather, he is looking to build Auburn on the culture of previous successful programs.

"You're not rebuilding a brand, but rebuilding an identity of a football program with every single kid, one at a time," Golesh said, "and so it's been fascinating."

The next focus that he will have is getting in-state recruits, which he's been able to get linebacker Isaac McNeil and lineman Donivan Moore, but that will look to grow for commitments from the state of Alabama. He's hoping that his momentum from other parts of the country are able to trickle into his new home state.

"It's been interesting, but it's also as we've started to kind of get some momentum," Golesh said. "It's gone really well, and the emphasis is always going to be the state."

That doesn't mean it's over, though.

Decommitments come around if a program underachieves, and Golesh will need to make sure that his 2026 season is one to remember for these recruits. Perhaps an overachieivng year could bring even more to the Plains in months will come.

The football on the field must do the talking, though.

"I know we've worked extremely hard at it," Golesh said."So now, you need proof of concept this fall because signing day is six months away."

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This article was originally published on www.si.com/college/auburn as Despite 'Playing Catch-Up', Alex Golesh Has Auburn Recruiting on Fire.

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