Auburn DBs hope same meeting room creates different results

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AUBURN -- Will Muschamp's first change to the Auburn defense was to identify the problem and basically do his best impression of The Captain from Cool Hand Luke.

Muschamp's impression of Auburn's problem during the 2014 season and this spring was the secondary had a failure to communicate.

Muschamp and his staff of coaches he brought after he was hired on Dec. 12 immediately found a simple solution to this confusion: put them all in the same room.

"I really think the two closest knit groups on your team need to be the offensive line and your secondary, because if they break down there, the other band's playing," Muschamp said.

Before Muschamp's arrival, the Auburn secondary meetings had been split up between Melvin Smith's cornerbacks and Charlie Harbison's safeties. This is no longer the case in 2015. The message is the same because it is coming from the same voice and the players are noticing the difference.

"In previous years we were never in one room together and now we're in meetings every day with each other, we work out with each other every day (and) it's kind of brought us together as a unit," Auburn defensive back Josh Horsley said.

Horsley is the physical embodiment of the difference of all the defensive backs in one meeting room. In previous years, the senior has been pulled back and forth from the safeties to the cornerbacks room.

"(The defensive backs) talk every day (and) it's pretty much that trust factor," Horsley said. "You want to get the trust, and to know the person next to you, to know he knows what's going on outside of football. I feel like being in the same room every day really brought us together than in previous years."

For Horsley, the message has been different in most of his college career and now it makes little to no difference where Muschamp and defensive backs coach Travaris Robinson decide to play him or how much they play him. Now, it knows the answer to possibly the most important basic question: why?

"I don't know what's been done before but it's the only way I know how to do it," Robinson said.

"Because I know this -- if the safety doesn't know what the corner is doing and the corner doesn't know what the safety is doing and the nickel doesn't know what any of them are doing it, we got a problem."

The trust among the secondary is crucial to Auburn's success and turnaround for the 2015 season. The strange element to Auburn now having the secondary in one meeting room is it wasn't a choice. Picture senior Blake Countess, who after transferring from Michigan, now has to just lean over and ask his starting safety teammate Tray Matthews a question while they evaluate film.

"Nobody can bail out on what they're supposed to do or what they're seeing," Robinson said. "When we watch film, it's like 'no, we all saw you blow that coverage and it wasn't anybody else'. I'll tell you what else it does, it eliminates locker room lawyers that claim 'oh I should be playing more'. No. None of that."

For an Auburn secondary that figures to incorporate as many as three first-year defensive backs (Tim Irvin, Javaris Davis and Carlton Davis) into their scheme from the opening week on, veterans in same meeting room are being asked to guide this youthful talent.

"How are they able to handle the multiple of things that are going to happen, the motions from the offense, the shifts, the personnel changes, the speed of the game, all of that stuff is a huge evaluation piece," Muschamp said. "That's a huge part of the evaluation on top of the athleticism and the physicality you got to play the game with."

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