Alex Golesh: "Close games are for losers"

After Alex Golesh's South Florida team gave Alabama all they could handle for a second straight year, battling to a 14-6 score at half a few weeks back before ultimately giving up 28 fourth quarter points to the Tide as Kalen DeBoer's squad pulled away for a 42-16 win, Golesh could have found a way to find a silver lining in the locker room with his guys afterwards.

A lot of coaches would have talked about how proud they were of their team's effort, or the way they battled a top four program, but not Alex Golesh.

Golesh was very intentional in making sure that his post game message could not be mistaken for legitimizing a loss, as he explained on the Jim Rome Show yesterday.

"You can look at it a bunch of different ways, but the way that I look at it, and the way that I want our guys to look at it is that if you try to legitimize a loss, or if you try to find a silver lining in a loss, and I'm not naive to the fact that you have to be able to coach through losses, and you've got to be able to coach through wins, but the easy thing to do is to say 'Man, we played these guys tough and our kids played really hard, and man we are so close.'"

"I think that is very much a loser's mentality. I think it's an excuse and I think you find reasons why it was good enough internally."

"The truth of it is, it's not good enough. I got hired to win games. We recruited guys here to win games, and as much as we don't talk internally about winning and losing games, we talk so much about our build up and our process daily throughout an entire year to help us actually win the game."

"But when you talk about the actual game and what happened and how it happened, if you try to rationalize failure, you are going to accept failure your whole life. And that is my biggest fear is to fail. So the truth of it is we didn't win, and there are a lot of reasons we didn't win, and I'm not taking back, or taking away the fact that maybe we played hard or we schematically were really good."

Golesh goes on to share a sign that should be in every staff room in the country.

"We have a sign in our offensive staff room that says 'Good plays executed poorly are bad plays,' and it is so true. I think as a coach you can rationalize it a million different ways but the truth is you could have called a good play but if it wasn't executed, it's a bad play."

"Just like we could have played really hard and played a really good game and lost, but we still lost, and I refuse to rationalize losses to anybody, let alone our own team."

Hear Golesh's full thoughts in the clip.