Lutz: People will either give up or continue to fight

With more losing comes tension and several Auburn seniors said avoiding a division in the locker room given the Tigers’ 1-4 record will be important, while also alluding to questionable effort.

“We got certain guys that have to question their effort and it shows on film,” cornerback T’Sharvan Bell said. “We got some guys that are kind of borderline maybe because they’re not playing as much as they would like. We just got to get everybody to be all-in; the guys who aren’t all-in simply just need to get gone.”

Tight end Philip Lutzenkirchen said the senior class is going to fight until the end and will have to lead the younger players.

“That’s the point where we’re at, is people are going to have an attitude and either give up or people are going to continue to fight and I think we have a great group of seniors who are going to continue to fight,” Lutzenkirchen said. “We just got to get the rest of them to come along with us.

“We made it pretty clear today that if you’re not going to fight with us, we don’t want you out there are all with us. We’ll see who continues to buy in and be all-in with us and who doesn’t.”

Bell, who made one tackle and recovered a fumble in very limited playing time Saturday, tried to back pedal from his remark about lack of effort and said Saturday was more about lack of execution. He then further detailed what makes a player “borderline” in his opinion.

“It’s just body language. You can tell when a guy’s borderline; maybe jogging from here to there,” Bell said. “Coach has to keep repeating the littlest things to them you know and they don’t want to fix it as a player. Those are the guys that are borderline and they’re kind of like ‘eh I kind of want to be here, I kind of don’t’

“Right now we’re 1-4 there’s a lot of guys that can’t wait till this is over. We can’t have that because we’re going to continue to lose if we have that mindset. (…) One bad apple can spoil the whole bunch and we don’t want that around here.”

Winning can cure many wrongs and bad feelings though. Bell thinks some ‘W’s’ will change any pessimism in the locker room.

“We definitely need some good things to happen for guys to start believing,” he said.