How long will it take to beat Alabama? The question was designed to test Auburn's new head coach, Alex Golesh, and perhaps catch him off guard.
But he didn't blink.
"I think 60 minutes. Maybe overtime," he told CBS Sports.
His staff had prepped him. Legendary Auburn coach Pat Dye said it first, in 1981, before he coached a game at Auburn, a program that had lost eight straight to the Tide. It became one of the enduring lines in the Iron Bowl rivalry, the measuring stick for every coach at Auburn.
Golesh had the answer memorized before spring practice. That's a start.
The Tigers haven't finished a season with a winning record since Gus Malzahn's final year in 2020, the worst stretch for the program since the late 1940s. Two coaches have been hired and fired, hundreds of players have come and gone, and the losses have piled up on the Plains -- including six straight in the Iron Bowl, the worst stretch since a nine-game skid that ended in Dye's second year leading the program.
A blue blood that reached the SEC Championship Game three times and won it twice between 2010 and 2017 -- the peak of Nick Saban's Alabama dynasty -- has, in the years since, watched Vanderbilt beat the Crimson Tide, seen Ole Miss and Tennessee reach the College Football Playoff and fallen out of the conversation entirely as conference newcomers Oklahoma and Texas also appeared in the CFP.
Offensive DNA
Now the job belongs to Golesh, 42, plucked from South Florida after three seasons of turning a program with one FBS win in 2022 into one that flirted with 10 last fall. Auburn athletic director John Cohen made the hire in December, betting on a coach whose offensive lineage runs through the Art Briles tree of the Air Raid and whose scheme DNA, before the USF head job, ran through Josh Heupel at Tennessee and UCF.
"There's a lot of high energy," Cohen said. "One of the anthems for Alex has been, 'Be who you say you are.' And I can feel a push. I can feel a feeling in the building."
Auburn's last four coaches, dating back to 2013, had offensive backgrounds. Only one has worked out so far -- Malzahn -- before Harsin's blue-collar approach crashed and burned during a 21-game stint, and Freeze failed to replicate his previous success at Ole Miss. Cohen studied Golesh's schemes and was convinced it could work in a league where his last two coaches could not get out of their own way while compiling an 11-29 combined SEC record.
"He can get people open," Cohen said. "In the passing game, he just has a history of getting people open. And quite frankly, that isn't our recent history here."
Golesh didn't completely remake Auburn's roster when he arrived on the Plains, but the flavor is entirely new. Thirteen USF players followed him from Tampa, including veteran quarterback Byrum Brown, one of only 12 FBS players to ever throw for 3,000 yards and rush for 1,000 in a single season. Behind the scenes, Auburn looks completely different. There are 42 new staff members, Golesh said, and only one motto: Be who you say you are.
Golesh does not talk about wins, though he believes success is entirely possible in his first season. He talks in identity.
"The worst thing that can happen when you leave Year 1 is you have no identity," Golesh said. "No identity schematically, offensively, defensively. No identity culturally. No identity in recruiting. That's what I fight daily for — to make sure that the identity is established, but then you're protected with everything you've got."
The identity he inherited was a wreck. The offense finished among the SEC's worst in nearly every meaningful category over three years under Freeze. The receivers were immensely talented, but could not get separation in defensive coverages. The offensive line could not hold up in pass protection and the quarterback carousel spun wildly out of control.
Good bones
He kept D.J. Durkin from Freeze's staff to run the defense, valuing scheme continuity after his unit finished in the top 35 last season. He hired Jacob Bronowski off Pat Narduzzi's Pittsburgh staff to run special teams.
And he brought Kodi Burns home.
Burns played quarterback and receiver at Auburn from 2007 through 2010, winning the national championship alongside Cam Newton, and now returns to Auburn for his second stint as an assistant. He is, as they like to say on the Plains, an Auburn man. He worked alongside Golesh at USF and Tennessee.
"We have the right head coach. I believe in Golesh," Burns said. "He's an incredible offensive mind, an incredible leader, an incredible person. I'm so excited to be back. I think it'll happen sooner than later. We're building something special here. Auburn is one of those jobs where you can accomplish everything you want."
Golesh tells players, donors, reporters and anyone else who will listen that Auburn does not have to be rebuilt from the studs. The bones are healthy, the money is flowing through the NIL system and the fans, exhausted or not, still show up.
"How many other places can say that there's still 88,000 in the stadium every week through that?" Golesh said. "How many places can say there's 40,000 for a spring game after all of that? Are the fans tired? Yeah, they're tired. I have met with every big money donor in the last six months, and man, they're tired. They're sick of it. But they're still willing to help. They're still willing to be involved, which is why I took this job — because I felt like you genuinely can do it."
He believes Auburn is one of maybe nine or 10 places in the country where you can, in his phrasing, actually chase a national championship. He counts the Tigers' 2010 title. He counts the 2013 team that lost the BCS Championship Game to Florida State on a Jameis Winston touchdown with 13 seconds left. He counts 2004, an unbeaten team locked out of the title game by the vagaries of that era's BCS computer rankings.
"Man, I don't think I would have taken the job if I didn't think you can get back to competing for national championships," Golesh said. "I took this job because it felt like it was one of the very few that could."
The 13 transfers from USF have not yet played a snap at Auburn, but they are winning over the locker room by communicating and reiterating Golesh's philosophy to establish his culture. Spring practices and offseason workouts were among the most grueling in his coaching career, Golesh said.
"A guy can say, 'man, that A.G.'s crazy, huh?'" Golesh said. "Or 'man, that A.G.'s lost his mind.' And then those guys are able to say, 'Man, it's just part of the plan. Man, just trust him.' Or, 'man, I just got my ass ripped by A.G. The guy's an asshole.' And they can go, 'Hey, the dude loves you, man. It's just part of the growth. It's part of the process.'"
Golesh terms that experience "priceless" when taking over a program that lost 37 transfers and gained 60 new players via the transfer portal and the high school ranks. The combined class ranked 21st nationally, according to 247Sports. Among those departures were 10 blue-chip transfers, including five-star receiver Cam Coleman (Texas) and four-star Eric Singleton (Florida), both primary targets for the Tigers last season.
The Tigers added 176 combined starts via the portal, the most of any SEC team this offseason, according to ESPN's Bill Connelly. Three new offensive linemen from the portal are on campus to address pass protection issues, and five receivers followed Golesh from USF to counter the blue-chip departures.
The experience, along with the familiarity among the 11 USF players on offense, breeds confidence that the Tigers can record their first winning record since 2020.
"I'm really guarded on what success looks like," Golesh said. "I get evaluated on wins and losses — I understand that, and I'm comfortable with that — but what does it look like internally to where you're laying a foundation for a long-term successful program? Can you have success in Year 1? Absolutely.
"What that looks like, I have no clue. I know that we have to establish an identity before anything else."
Golesh said he's not one to actively participate in a football world filled with "tacky, corny" mottos, acronyms and motivational quotes, but he reiterates only one.
"It's not made-up mottos, quotes," he said. "Real, genuine confidence. The only way you build genuine confidence is through preparation."
The goal is moving beyond the misery of the recent past while chasing the titles Auburn once won.
"You can't mire yourself in what has happened in the past," Cohen said. "But, again, I love the momentum that I believe coach Golesh has created."
That new era opens Sept. 5 in Atlanta against Baylor. Golesh knows what it will require to win.
Sixty minutes.
Maybe overtime.
