For weeks, many Arkansas football fans salivated at the prospect of Alex Golesh bringing the same kind of aggressive mindset that helped him succeed at South Florida to Fayetteville.
They knew the emerging lore. They saw how he’d snapped back at the UTSA coach’s accusations about USF’s “payroll.” They’d seen a man walking across the field, wearing a hat emblazoned with the word “EDGE” and mean-mugging poor Jeff Traylor, and they found their pupils suddenly dilating. “I want me some of that,” they breathlessly whispered.
In the end, it appears, Golesh looks like he indeed brought some of that attack-dog mindset to Arkansas.
Just not in the way fans envisioned.
Gut Punch of Choosing Auburn
Golesh opting for the Auburn football program over Razorbacks is a gut punch no matter how you spin it. It’s slightly easier on the psyche to imagine that Golesh had actually signed a memorandum of understanding with Arkansas, which is what a well-placed source told the Buzz 103.7’s Trey Schaap last Wednesday morning, because he wanted to come to Arkansas.
In this version of events, the 41-year-old decided to back out. He got cold feet, or got angry that what he was doing had been leaked in the form of a Tweet that got 5.3 million views before he could coach USF in its regular season finale on Saturday night.
But Schaap’s source says otherwise.
When the long-time sports radio host contacted his source on Sunday to get clarification on what went wrong, the source responded that Alex Golesh had “played Arkansas” in order to force Auburn’s hand on locking him down. The text message continued: Arkansas athletic director Hunter Yurachek “got caught with his pants down.”
Golesh and his inner circle leveraging Arkansas brass to get what they wanted from Auburn is something that On3’s Ari Wasserman and Andy Staples have corroborated. “I think they did get leveraged into the Auburn job,” Staples said on Sunday’s “Andy & Ari” podcast.
This is not a “rookie move,” as Schaap’s source also texted. It’s something that coaches in a competitive market do. It’s not even the first time this kind of thing has played out between Arkansas and Auburn in the last decade.
Just eight years ago, Auburn’s Gus Malzahn converted strong interest from Arkansas into a significant pay bump with the Tigers.
It’s frustrating enough if a coach temporarily wanted to lead the Razorbacks, and then later backed out for personal reasons – a la Dana Altman.
