⚡ CFB Dashboard

If there's one thing Auburn doesn't have early this season, as compared to so many of the program's recent teams, it's a short leash at quarterback. Byrum Brown has more than 10,000 total yards of offense and 93 touchdowns in his career as Alex Golesh's QB. So no, one poor performance throwing the football isn't going to make Golesh and his coaches gun shy about the leader of their offense. But they do know it's one of the biggest areas to improve heading from Week 1 to Week 2. "Byrum owned every bit of it and I owned every bit of it," Golesh said at his Monday press conference. "And that's what I love about him is he'll own it. It'll eat at him for a little while. He'll never let anybody see it — and he's moved on, too." As Golesh said in his postgame press conference in Atlanta, he takes as much blame for the three interceptions as Brown does. He extended that throughout his offensive staff and said the game plan just wasn't very clean. "We took turns of who was going to jack it up worse," Golesh said. "I don't know that I would take back just a ton of what we felt like we could do (calling plays), but in terms of execution, it was really, really poor. It was somebody different, something different on what felt like, certainly, play to play. That's on us as coaches more than anything else to put ourselves in positions to be successful. I thought we settled in. Slowly but surely, the fourth quarter, it looked like what you wanted it to look like."   Golesh said, particularly in the first half, there were a lot of checkdowns that Brown did not take when Baylor was bringing pressure. Brown was 11-of-14 passing in the second half. Baylor did a good job keeping the lid on Auburn's receivers down the field, as a large portion of Auburn's yardage came after the catch. Brown never lacks for confidence, but Golesh said he didn't do a good job of timing up when to take shots. "We've got to do a better job of just making sure all the things that can happen on those shot plays and he's aware of those," offensive coordinator Joel Gordon said. "The backside corner made a great play. We threw it down the middle of the field. We've got to learn from it. At the same point, you've got to be able to call shot plays like that. When you get the right look, it should be a big play. When they're not there, you've got to be willing to check the football down. We talk about that all the time. It just wasn't executed." Brown's first pick was a deep heave toward the end zone toward Chas Nimrod, who had a step on his defender, but the safety came over and tracked down the ball. Auburn then drove down the field and got into field-goal range before halftime, but Brown threw into coverage on third down, and it was intercepted. Jeremiah Koger fell down on the play, and the ball was tipped, but it probably wouldn't have mattered anyway, considering four Baylor players were in the area. Auburn looked like it was ready to add to its 10-7 lead early in the fourth quarter, after stopping Baylor on downs, but Brown ripped a throw into coverage over the middle, giving the ball immediately back to the Bears. "All of them are correctable, without a doubt," Gordon said of Brown's interceptions. "We all take responsibility for it. At the end of the day, we've got to be better. You can't win that way. … At the end of the day, we forced the ball."