AUBURN, AL – Do you want the censored version of this story, or do you want the unfiltered truth?
That's the question you must consider before asking Auburn coach Alex Golesh why a framed print that reads "Fe," the symbol for iron on the periodic table of elements, sits on a shelf behind his desk.
The uninitiated would think the symbol might have something to do with Golesh coaching a team that plays in the Iron Bowl , or that it's a play on the "iron sharpens iron" cliché.
But, no, that's not the case.
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Here's the G-rated version of the story. Golesh received the print a few years ago as a gift from Jeff Jones, his high school chemistry teacher and an instrumental mentor in Golesh's early rise in coaching. Jones is now Golesh's director of player development at Auburn .
Jones likes the element iron.
That doesn't explain, though, why he gave Golesh the "Fe" print or why it sits behind Golesh's desk.
Earmuffs, kiddos. Here comes the truth.
It's not about the element. It's about the letters.
"Fe."
Seeing it yet? No?
Fine, let's spell this out.
"F*** everybody," Golesh says, as he surrenders the truth.
That's what "Fe" means.
Golesh embraced that "Fe" mentality five years ago, after becoming Tennessee's offensive coordinator. Those Vols faced a cavalcade of doubters, operating amid the stench of an NCAA scandal left behind by ex-coach Jeremy Pruitt.
Fed up with the outside noise and negativity, Golesh one day wrote F-everybody, with the four-letter word spelled out, on the board in Tennessee's offensive staff room.
Vols coach Josh Heupel put the kibosh on that. Too profane.
"Heup said we can't put it on the board," Golesh told me, as we sat inside his Auburn office in February, "because everyone would see it. So, I just wrote, 'Fe.'"
A two-letter mantra was born. It followed Golesh from Tennessee to South Florida to the loveliest village on the Plains .
It's here where you begin to understand the personality of Auburn's personable but passionate coach.
"He's fiery," said Cole Best, Auburn's veteran center who followed Golesh from USF to the SEC. "To play for him, there's kind of a chip on your shoulder."
Auburn would benefit from some fire, some "Fe" swagger, some attitude that it's done with being a doormat, and it's coming to break down the door, to reclaim a place of prominence.
On a night in February, the TVs inside Auburn's Melton Student Center showed the 2013 Iron Bowl. That says it all. Auburn's heyday resides on VHS.
It's been five long seasons since Auburn last tasted a winning record in 2020.
Auburn's first attempt at replacing Gus Malzahn soured from the start. Calling Bryan Harsin a total-system failure would be to understate it. Its second hire after Malzahn? Another whiff.
Hugh Freeze, Golesh's predecessor, had some "Fe" in him, too.
It stood for friggin' excuses. Freeze was full of them .
Unlike Freeze, Golesh is a coach still on his way up, but Auburn needed more than new leadership to elevate. The Tigers needed a quarterback. Not just a game manager, either. It ached for an elite quarterback. Its program drought coincides with underwhelming quarterback play.
"The teams in our league that are highly successful have — and Alex uses this word a lot — an elite quarterback," Auburn athletic director John Cohen said.
Spend any amount of time in Auburn's football facility, and you'll hear that word on repeat.
Elite.
Golesh says it constantly.
In one 50-second assessment of his seasoned coaching staff, which includes three former head coaches, Golesh says the word six times.
"I do think there's a difference between being good, great, and elite," Golesh says.
It's around this time Golesh reveals "Fe" actually has another meaning. There's the version he wrote on the board back at Tennessee, and then there's another play on "Fe" that started after he became a head coach.
"Every time somebody would ask me how I'm doing, I'm like, 'I'm (expletive) elite right now,'" Golesh said.
Now, to make Auburn's offense "Fe."
That starts at quarterback, the position Freeze and Harsin couldn't solve.
Byrum Brown took the window seat, 1B, with Best next to him on the aisle on flights home after South Florida road games, an illustration of the bond between a quarterback and his center.
As they flew home after a game at Memphis, in which Brown rushed 21 times for 121 yards, Best expressed concern for his quarterback. Brown delivers and also absorbs punishment while running fearlessly into the defense.
"He trucked a couple of people and hurdled a couple people," in that Memphis game, Best recalls.
And, so, he asked Brown: Man, do you ever worry? You never worry about dropping your shoulder and taking hits that hard?
If Brown worries, he didn't let on. He tried to be reassuring, telling Best: You know, I like doing it . I feel like it lets the guys know, I'm here. I'm present.
That's Auburn's new quarterback.
He's here. He's present. He's Auburn's most tantalizing quarterback in several years. He's also got a good grip on Golesh's up-tempo offense.
This illustrates the beauty of modern hiring. A quarterback (and his center) can hop in the portal and follow a coach, accelerating the timeline in which a new system looks smooth.
For Auburn, this is a new look.
For Brown and Best and other former USF players who played for a team that went 9-4 and beat Florida in The Swamp , it's familiar. Thirteen Bulls transferred to Auburn.
How to describe this offense? Take it from someone who's played in it for multiple seasons.
"We'll run the ball, run the ball, run the ball, and as soon as you see a D-lineman sucking wind and barely wanting to get down in his stance, then you're going to throw up a deep shot," Best said. "It's going to be fast, explosive, it's hard to keep up with, and it's a lot of fun."
It's not much fun for opposing defenses, particularly when Brown gets a head of steam. In USF's season opener against Boise State, he broke five tackles on one scoring run that got called back for a penalty.
Later, he lowered his shoulder to flatten a Broncos cornerback.
"Poor No. 4 on Boise State had a long day with him," said Best, a nod to the aforementioned cornerback. "It got to point where, by like the third quarter, we were all looking at each other like, 'He's got to stop. He's got to stop. Like, just slide, dude.'"
Sliding doesn't top Brown's priority list, but Auburn will need him healthy to engineer a resurrection.
As Cohen considers how an elite quarterback can elevate a program, his mind goes to Dak Prescott , who quarterbacked Mississippi State to a No. 1 midseason ranking while Cohen was the baseball coach there.
"There were times in Dak Prescott's career at Mississippi State where there was an absolute jailbreak at the line of scrimmage, and Dak Prescott still found a way on 3rd-and-2 to pull two defenders for a 2½-yard gain to get a first down," Cohen said.
Brown definitely isn't sliding on 3rd-and-2.
"He is as tough as they come, as strong as they come," Best said.
Golesh almost stayed at USF. His words. In a furiously active coaching carousel, his name surfaced for multiple Power Four jobs, including Arkansas prior to Auburn.
Golesh, 41, agonized over whether to move his family — he and his wife have two kids — again. He considered his parents. In 1991, as turmoil bubbled up inside a collapsing Soviet Union, Golesh's parents traded a middle-class lifestyle in Russia for a hardscrabble restart in the United States , so that their two sons could live in the land of opportunity.
"Isn't that our job, to provide for (your children)?" Golesh said. "Like, ultimately, my parents provided for" Golesh and his brother.
Golesh knew he could provide plenty for his family in Tampa. USF was prepared to give him a significant raise to retain him. He genuinely enjoyed the job, and his family was settled.
"Fifteen minutes before I took this one, and turned down some other ones, it was, '(Expletive) it, we're just staying here. I'm good. We're good. We're great,'" Golesh said.
Good. Great. So, why leave?
Because, Auburn once proved it can be elite.
There's that word again.
"I felt like you could win a national title here," Golesh said, "where, at South Florida, I think you and everybody else knows you never were going to get there."
When programs lose too frequently, explanations rush into the void. As Auburn's losses mounted under Freeze and recruiting stalled, the question surfaced of whether Auburn perhaps didn't have its ducks in a row to meet this pay-for-play moment of revenue-sharing and NIL. Freeze, before last season, described Auburn's approach as "not really to our advantage."
Auburn has not had a winning season since the NIL switch flipped. Coincidence, or not?
Can Auburn tussle with top spenders? Put it this way: Auburn spends enough that it shouldn't be a perennial loser, like it has been the past several years.
"I can't with certainty tell you where we are in that (roster payroll) pecking order," Cohen said, "but I would, with a lot of confidence, tell you we're extremely competitive."
If the money is there, then some of this centers on generating better quarterback production. If you've got a quarterback, you've got a chance. If you don't, well, you get Auburn the past several seasons. Auburn possessed the defense to contend last season, but the Tigers couldn't score. That's one reason why Cohen liked Golesh for this job.
"Alex is one of those elite offensive minds," Cohen said, "but somebody who also has learned how to run a complete program, as well."
Golesh admits he's no Auburn history buff. Born in Russia, he immigrated with his family at age 7 and grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and later Ohio. Although he made an SEC pitstop at Tennessee, he's never coached a game in Jordan-Hare Stadium.
Before his introductory news conference, media relations staffers gave Golesh a crash course to avoid any preventable flubs. They made sure he knew the stadium is pronounced JER-den Hare — "I'm like, 'It's what ?'" Golesh said — and he brushed up on the significance of the War Eagle.
Golesh knows enough about Auburn to know this: The Tigers have a rich history of defense and running backs, but their best seasons this century came with special quarterbacks.
Jason Campbell (2004). Cam Newton (2010). Nick Marshall (2013). Jarrett Stidham (2017). Bo Nix (2019).
In each of those seasons, Auburn won the Iron Bowl. In three of those seasons, it won the SEC. In 2004 and 2010, it finished undefeated.
"It's easy to point to," Golesh said. "Every really good team in the last 20 years, high-end team, there's a quarterback that matches up."
When it comes to Golesh's quarterback development skills, he'll give it to you straight.
"To tell you I can develop a quarterback mechanically would be a lie," he says.
He's got people for that.
Golesh played defense in high school. He switched to coaching offense early in his career, but he mostly worked with tight ends, not quarterbacks, as a position coach. And yet his career accelerated because of what quarterbacks do under Golesh. They light it up.
The Heupel-Golesh tandem produced turbo points. When Heupel coached UCF, he tapped Golesh as his co-offensive coordinator for the 2020 season. The Knights ranked No. 2 nationally for offense, with Dillon Gabriel at quarterback.
Tennessee led the nation in offense in 2022 with Golesh as its coordinator and Hendon Hooker breaking records.
Then, Brown flourished after Golesh came to USF. The Bulls ranked third nationally in offense last season.
If, by Golesh's own admission, he doesn't consider himself a quarterback guru, what's his secret sauce? He's great at identifying what quarterbacks do well, putting them in position to do it repeatedly, and simplifying everything to where they can do it really fast.
On second thought, great isn't the right word.
"I'm elite at" that, Golesh said.
No, he's "Fe" at that.
Blake Toppmeyer is the USA TODAY Network's senior national college football columnist. Email him at BToppmeyer@gannett.com and follow him on X @btoppme
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: At Auburn, Alex Golesh's intensity comes with clear priority: an elite QB
