By Last fall, after the USF football season ended, head football coach Alex Golesh decided it was time to move on to pursue winning a national championship. He took the head coaching job at Auburn before the USF bowl game and left the team and the university hanging.
Recently, Alex Golesh made some comments in an interview with USA Today about the football program at USF that did not sit well with many folks and should not sit well with USF fans and alums.
Here is what Golesh said when asked why he left USF to take the Auburn job. “I felt like you could win a national title here, where, at South Florida, I think you and everybody else know you never were going to get there.”
Coach, you couldn’t even win a conference championship at USF with the talent you assembled. How about focusing on winning a conference championship before focusing on the National Championship?
In early November, USF was on a roll, just having won a nationally televised game against FAU 48-13.
The Bulls were on a roll. There was talk of USF making the college football playoffs as the representative from the group of five.
Then Golesh began focusing on other opportunities, which distracted him from his primary duties as USF’s head football coach.
As the season wound down, he was asked repeatedly each week about his name surfacing as a candidate for the head coach position at other programs, and each time he reiterated that USF was his only focus and that he was doing everything in his power to prepare his team to win.
The results speak more loudly than anything that coach Golesh could ever say.
The Bulls would go 3-2 down the stretch, losing at Memphis and Navy, two games they needed to win to play in the conference championship game and keep their national championship hopes alive.
The Bulls would end the regular season 9-3 after starting the season 6-1.
Coach, the players you recruited to USF were players you believed in and thought could win the conference title and gain a berth in the College Football Playoffs.
Let’s go back to the early days of Alex Golesh at USF. Golesh was very optimistic about the program’s long-term ceiling. He talked about building something that could compete nationally:
“I truly believe this place can win a national championship…” Golesh said.
He also emphasized that there was “no ceiling” at USF and that, over time, the program could grow into a contender with the right resources and development.
After taking the Auburn job, Golesh did a complete 360. Either Golesh was lying three years earlier when he took the USF job, or the millions of dollars that Auburn threw out at him forced him to change his opinion.
In the State of Alabama, Auburn will always be the little brother to big brother Alabama.
Good luck coach, you’re going to need it.
