10/28 at 12:56 AM

Offensive line coach Jeff Grimes chooses not to dwell on the past.

Especially when that past includes an exceptionally ghastly performance by Auburn’s offensive line against LSU last Saturday.

“I’m not looking back at last Saturday,” Grimes said with a wry smile.

But, as the saying goes, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

So Grimes and his linemen watched the six sacks LSU recorded, the most given up by Auburn since 2006.

They watched Auburn’s potent run game grind to a halt to the tune of 87 yards and 2.6 yards a carry, with 63 of those yards coming on the final drive, when the game was well out of hand.

Grimes’ linemen saw everything they did wrong against LSU.

Then they put it all behind them.

“We didn’t play very well. I think that’s obvious. In any phase of the game,” Grimes said. “If you sit back and worry about what happened last week too long, you get yourself in trouble.

“For us, literally, that game was done Sunday when we finished looking at that tape.”

Grimes and his linemen have stressed this week that the main problem was communication.

Senior left tackle A.J. Greene said, with the crowd noise, the linemen couldn’t effectively convey assignments to each other, and they didn’t always know who was blocking which LSU blitzers.

Senior right tackle Brandon Mosley said, with the lungs of 93,098 at Tiger Stadium doing their work, he never even heard the snap count. He just had to go off ball movement.

Communication breakdowns, coupled with an aggressive, talented defense, yielded a nightmarish day for the Auburn front.

“When you’re at home and the center makes a call, everybody can hear the call,” Grimes said. “When you’re on the road, that call is probably not going to be heard by the tackles. The guards have to pass that call out to the tackles and the tackles to the tight ends and from all of us to the running backs and fullbacks.

“There’s an added level of communication and an added amount of importance on each guy being able to do that.”

It’s an issue that’s popped up throughout the season for the Tigers’ young line, even when Auburn’s at home.

People aren’t always entirely sure of their assignments.

“It’s a problem. It continues to happen,” Greene said. “But it’s kind of hard to be like it’s not going to happen because at the end of the day it happens. Every offensive line has communication issues.

“It’s showing a lot more now because we’re taking the hits.”

Communication also walks hand in hand with continuity.

Last year’s line — even if it wasn’t entirely sure on all the calls — could fall back on habit because it had played together enough to achieve an impressive level of cohesion.

This year’s line has been through five different lineups in eight games, with somebody like Chad Slade having to play right tackle and right guard before winding up at his new home of left guard due to Jared Cooper’s season-ending injury.

“You adjust to one guy, the way he plays, the way he calls calls, and then somebody else comes in and he might call it a different way,” Greene said. “That’s another thing that can play a factor in communication, but that’s not an excuse not to be able to communicate.”

The lineup, at least has normalized.

Grimes said he’s sticking with the starting five of Greene, Slade, Reese Dismukes, John Sullen and Mosley again this week for the third game in a row.

The LSU game ended for that group on Sunday.

But what’s that thing they say about remembering the past?

“I didn’t expect it to go that way at all, but then what can we necessarily do about it now?” Greene said. “We just have to take that and look at is as motivation to get better.”