The Tiger In Winter

In November of 1993, maybe 90 minutes after Auburn beat Alabama 22-14 to finish that season undefeated, a small crowd had gathered in the old Plainsman Park parking lot, surrounding a single animated figure.

It was an ebullient Pat Dye, holding forth among the tailgaters.  I had just finished my education, and had just started writing my first book.  In both, Dye was a pivotal figure.

One guy in the crowd (at the time I thought of him as "an old dude," but I am very likely older today than he was then), who obviously knew Dye, remarked that he’d been scared to death at the half, when Auburn had gone into the locker room trailing by a touchdown.

Dye fixed him with a baleful glare. “That’s cause you ain’t a coach.” He paused for a bare moment and went on: “Any coach would’a looked at that first half, saw we had the ball for damn near 20 minutes, and knew we was gonna win.”

For some unknowable reason, Dye’s gaze shifted, and he looked me straight in the eye. Pat Dye did not then (and never did) know me from a mud-encrusted pair of plaid pants, but he fixed me with that coach stare and demanded, “What did we beat them by, six, seven?”

I managed to stammer, “Uh, I think it was eight, coach.”

Immediately:  “Well that ain’t no indication of how bad we whipped their ass!”

The rest was lost in the whoops of the surrounding crowd, and the mile-wide grin of Patrick Fain Dye, living in the moment and entirely in his element, one last time.

Dye wasn't able to coach that game for a multitude of reasons, most of which are not worth recalling today.  But the most important was one that only he and a handful of his family members knew: in late 1992 his doctors had told Dye that if he didn't get out of coaching, he'd be dead in a year.

And so he got out, and lived for another 27, along the way becoming an elder statesman of the game and the college that he was forever bound to in love and glory and (yes) loss. 

Pat Dye was a man who knew more than a little about how to beat long odds.

Patrick Fain Dye, 1939-2020

Now on the day that John Wayne died
I found myself on the continental divide
Tell me where do we go from here?
Think I'll ride into Leadville and have a few beers
Think of "Red River", "Liberty Valence" 
Can't believe the old man's gone 

But now he's incommunicado
Leaving such a hole in a world that believed
That a life with such bravado
Was taking the right way home

--Jimmy Buffett

On Auburn Tickets and the WSJ

Hmm, is this thing still on?

For anybody who's been checking back here over the last year-plus, my apologies. I haven't had a world of time to write about Auburn (or really anything) outside of my weekly Rivals columns. I didn't see any point in maintaining this blog as as a series of "Hey, go read what I wrote somewhere else" notices, and Twitter has served me well for making contemporaneous observations.

But today, I've got a few things to note that aren't going to fit in 140 characters. Last night, a long-rumored story about allocations of Auburn football tickets was published by the Wall Street Journal. It's an interesting piece, and I recommend you read it.

While the nominal premise of the story is the difficulty of turning a profit in big-time college football, the underlying notion, that there are dozens (or hundreds!) of unsold prime seats in Jordan-Hare Stadium for any game, forget the biggest games of the year, stinks to high heaven. Everything in the lower bowl has been officially sold out to season ticket holders or visitor allotments for decades.

Even in "bad" years, the only unsold seats in that stadium should be in the upper corners of the decks, or from unsold visitor seats (the latter of which doesn't exist for any UGA or Alabama game). If somebody between the 30's dropped their tickets because of a bad year (or any other reason), all that should have caused is a ripple of people with lower priority than them moving over to take those seats. Under no circumstances should they be showing up as "unsold," especially after the season starts.

The only way there are that many tickets available between the 30's is if those seats have been removed at some point from the priority pool. That could happen when a long-time season ticket holder either stops buying, or dies and his/her priority is wiped out (that was a policy change about 10-15 years ago, up until then priority could be handed down to children). In those cases, the following year there's nobody there to say, "Hey, what happened to my seats?" and it would be possible for somebody in the ticket administration to route them elsewhere without anyone on the outside noticing.

The question becomes, who removed those tickets from the pool, and why didn't the next person in line (and the person behind them, and the person behind them, etc. to the end of the priority list) get bumped up to better seats? I feel safe in guessing that an awful lot of people who've been in the end zones or nosebleeds for decades would like that have that question answered.

And that doesn't even touch on the Athletic Director's lake-house buddy getting the option to buy 60 face-value tickets to the Oregon BCS game in 2010 (market value well into the six figures) or 118 extra Georgia and 62 extra Alabama tickets in 2013... that's way beyond the pale. A lot of people who read this jumped through a great many hoops and paid a great many dollars just to get one or two tickets to those games.

They deserve a much better explanation than, "Well shucks, this was just a good way to keep opposing fans from getting them."

A Benediction

This is from an old column by Geoffery Norman, who also wrote Alabama Showdown back in the '80's. It's one of my favorite pieces. I usually bring it out this time of year, and I wish I'd written it. Norman is recalling meeting with an old writer friend in Montgomery, many years back:

We were supposed to be talking politics but we couldn't help ourselves. It was hot. It is always hot in the black belt of Alabama in the middle of August, and it feels like it will be hot for all eternity. So we talked about sports for some relief.

"You know," the man said wearily, "I just can't wait until they kick it off again. I mean, I feel like if I can just make it for another two or three weeks, then they'll be playing football again and then everything will be okay."

Hallelujah, amen.

New at Rivals: Time Loves A Hero

Here's my last Monday-morning column for the 2012 season, just posted at Rivals' AuburnSports.com. Long-time FTB readers will recognize the opening theme; I really didn't figure on returning to it this soon, but it still applies. Here's a preview, the rest is on the subscription side this week.

Coaching is a very odd profession that, like politics or entertainment, tends to attract personalities who tend to do things that are inexplicable to, well, normal people.

Success is rewarded with big money and, more insidiously, adulation wildly out of proportion to the actual importance of a coach's place in the real world. Only a few can handle it. Many can't. Gene Chizik wasn't the first coach to decide, wrongly, that his own brilliance was the primary reason for his early success only to wind up alienating both the people who helped get him there and fans who briefly (and foolishly) viewed him as infallible.

He also won't be the last, although many would do well to learn from his example.

His last game was pretty much what everyone expected. Auburn played reasonably tough, if not particularly well, for about a quarter and a half before reverting to 2012 form. The rest was what tends to happen when really bad teams play really good teams.

New at Rivals: A Win Is Good, But Cronyism Isn't

My Monday-morning column for the Alabama A&M game (at least partly; most of the column looks at Auburn's near-future personnel decisions) is up at Rivals' AuburnSports.com. This one is also on the free side, and you can read the whole thing here. A preview:

The number of people associated with Auburn who still support [athletic director Jay] Jacobs is vanishingly small, and those who support Gene Chizik smaller still. If anyone actually supports Tim Jackson, those individuals are doing a remarkable job of hiding from public view. All you need to do to get a rise out of pretty much any Auburn season ticket holder or donor is to mention Jackson's name in passing.

Chizik's support at this point consists of Jacobs and Jackson, but hardly anyone else. The mere suggestion that he might return in 2013 at this point is enough to generate genuine rage among Auburn fans of all ages and backgrounds. I don't even care to think about the real-world reaction (forget what the internet would look like) if Chizik were inexplicably retained for more than a few days beyond this coming weekend.

Support for Jacobs comes mostly from his former teammates and other personal friends. Fortunately for Jacobs, those friends have the ear of Jay Gogue, and their influence far outweighs their numbers. While it's hard to fault anybody for sticking up for a friend, Jacobs' defenders ought to be asking themselves some tough questions as they consider whether or not they're doing the right thing in backing his continued tenure.

New at Rivals: Dismal and Dysfunctional

My column on the Georgia game and what Auburn ought to be doing to rectify the current sorry situation is up at Rivals' AuburnSports.com. This one is on the free side, you can read the whole thing here. A preview:

It's not worth arguing any longer if Gene Chizik's tenure will end this year. No Auburn coach could -- or should -- survive going winless in the SEC, mostly by blowouts, young players or not, change in coordinators or not.

To put it bluntly, Chizik has been forgotten but not gone for over a month now. The last two epic SEC debacles only served to display just what a terrible job he's done during the past two years.

But Auburn will fail badly if head coach is the only position that gets a new occupant. Plenty has to change off the field before anything substantial is going to change on it.

Auburn is suffering from a failure of leadership at every level. President Jay Gogue continues to dither, offering only an anodyne press release and acting as if he'd rather just muddle through until his own retirement with as little actual effort as possible. Gogue's well-known dislike for firing subordinates and unwillingness to make difficult decisions is harming both the athletic department and the university as a whole.

Gogue and his predecessors failed to reform the athletic department when they had the opportunity. Too many people in power at Auburn still wish the department could be what it was in the 1970's: A sleepy office that prints tickets, books travel and provides cushy sinecures for old buddies and former teammates.

A prime example is Jay Jacobs, who never had any business being athletic director.

Last week's column on the Homecoming game (sorry for not posting an update, but I was on business travel all last week) can be found here, on the pay side. Rivals is offering a free first month to new subscribers coming over from FTB.

New (and Not-So-New) At Rivals: The Walking Dead

My post-game column for the Texas A&M game is up at Rivals' AuburnSports.com.  I neglected to post a notice here for the previous week's column about the Vanderbilt game... but let's face it, they really aren't all that different at this point.

Anyway, here's a preview of the A&M column:

I didn't think I'd ever say this again after surviving the 1970's, but this is probably the worst Auburn team I've ever seen. They can't tackle. They can't block. They can't cover. They can't line up properly, and they don't follow their assignments. Of the three quarterbacks, the only one who's shown any fire or consistency is Jonathan Wallace, an unheralded true freshman, and he only did so against Texas A&M's backups.

This is a team that has a knack for penalties and turnovers at the worst possible moments. There is no fire on this team, very little toughness, and to cap it all off, its coaches are seemingly determined to put the players in bad situations as often as possible. The one and only bright spot is the kicking game, which is, a few shanked punts excepted, as good as anybody's.

Remember when we used to solemnly note that Vanderbilt always has a great kicking game?

The rest is on the subscription side, but Rivals is offering a free first month to new subscribers coming over from FTB.

New at Rivals: Column for Ole Miss

My postgame column for this season's most recent disaster, at Ole Miss, is up at Rivals' AuburnSports.com. A preview:

Everything that hasn't worked for weeks popped right back up: short-side sweeps, predictable formations, poor pass protection, "Wildcat" runs from Jonathan Wallace at inexplicable times (here's a hint, Scot: everybody knows what you're doing there), and of course, no Jay Prosch leading the way for Tre Mason. Both backs virtually disappeared from the field in the second half, after running roughshod over the Rebels in the first.

The defense hardly did any better, giving up over 450 yards and 34 points to Ole Miss.

Let me simply repeat that: Auburn's defense gave up over 450 yards and 34 points to Ole Miss, a team that hadn't won an SEC game in over two years. It was a pitiful display.

After slumping to a 1-5 start and a six-game SEC losing streak, there's no point in pretending that the job security of the current coaching staff isn't in question. While nobody expects Gene Chizik to up and quit this Thursday (or to fire Loeffler tomorrow), this season is resembling the shambling disasters of 1998 and 2008 more and more every week.

For those still arguing that a coach two years removed from winning the BCS can't be in danger of losing his job, I'll remind you that a similar lopsided loss in Oxford in 1992 marked the beginning of the end for Pat Dye. Dye was a living legend by then, with four SEC championships and over a decade's tenure.

The rest is on the subscription side, but Rivals is offering a free first month to new subscribers coming over from FTB.

New at Rivals: TURRIBLE

My Monday morning column for the disaster against Arkansas is up at Rivals' AuburnSports.com.  A preview:

Workaday adjectives like "bad" or "awful" or even "terrible" aren't sufficient today. It's time to call on the Living Legend From Leeds and pronounce this result nothing short of TURRIBLE.

How TURRIBLE was Saturday? This TURRIBLE:

- The offensive line was demolished, owned, dominated by the 120th-ranked defense in the country. Both quarterbacks had bad interceptions and Kiehl Frazier once again held on to the ball for too long, but the sad fact is that neither QB had a chance most of the game. Auburn just didn't block anybody when it mattered, and rarely blocked anybody even when it didn't. At least we know now the answer to what happens when a movable object (Arkansas' pre-Auburn defense) is met by a resistible force (Auburn's 2012 offense).

...

This was a debacle. This was a disgrace.

This was TURRIBLE.

And with six more teams on the schedule whose defenses are ranked higher than #120, I see no reason to believe things are going to get any better.

The rest is on the subscription side, but Rivals is offering a free first month to new subscribers coming over from FTB.

New at Rivals: Auburn-LSU Column

My Monday-morning column for the near-miss against LSU is up at Rivals' AuburnSports.com.  A preview:

If you wanted improvement from Auburn, you got it Saturday night, at least on defense. This was certainly the strongest defensive performance of the year, and the best Auburn has played on that side of the ball since last year's Florida game.

Holding LSU to 10 points on offense really should have been more than good enough to land what would have been a monumental upset and a fine benchmark to build on.  

Unfortunately, the previously-immaculate kicking game gave up a critical turnover, and the offense couldn't hold up its end of the bargain. Auburn gave up essentially two drives, LSU's opening touchdown and their next drive that ended with a fumble near the goal line (and provided the two-point margin of victory one botched Auburn play later). After that, the Bengals were held to eight punts and two field goal attempts for the rest of the game, one of those aided by the aforementioned fumble.

The rest is on the subscription side, but AuburnSports.com is offering a free first months' subscription to anybody coming over from FTB.

New at Rivals: Column for Louisiana-Monroe

My Monday-morning column for the Louisiana-Monroe game is up at Rivals' AuburnSports.com. A preview:

In an old episode of "The Simpsons," Homer accompanies convenience-store owner Apu on a pilgrimage to the original location and home office of the Quikee-Mart Corporation. When Homer observes that the store, situated on top of a remote mountain in India, is not actually all that convenient, an exasperated Apu retorts, "Must you dump on everything we do?"

That's a little what it feels like today when you have to write about Auburn's 31-28 overtime win over Louisiana Monroe. Considering the Tigers came in 0-2 with nowhere to go but up, and actually looked like a functioning SEC team for several stretches on Saturday, the notion of "a win is a win" is tempting to embrace.

And if Auburn had finished out the way it played most of the first three quarters, there would be more reason for optimism going forward. As it is, almost everybody left the stadium thinking, "this team is fortunate not to be 0-3."

The rest is on the subscription side, but Rivals is offering a free first month to new subscribers coming over from FTB.

New at Rivals: Postgame for Mississippi State

My Monday-morning column for the Mississippi State game is up at Rivals' AuburnSports.com. A preview:

Almost nothing went right on offense. Auburn's statistics are grossly padded by the last, failed drive in garbage time. The few times the running game got going, State just piled more guys up front to stop it, and Auburn had no way to take advantage. The passing game went nowhere meaningful at any point. 

Put bluntly, Kiehl Frazier looks tentative, and he looks scared, and to be fair to the kid, there are good reasons for both, as he's not getting much help from anybody. Not from a line that can't pass protect, not from receivers who can't get open or block, not from a coordinator who's in the booth apparently calling plays for a team that's not on the field. But even so, Frazier was nothing short of dreadful Saturday, tallying all of Auburn's five turnovers on his own.

...

To no one's surprise, after such a debacle, talk almost immediately turned to the future duration of Gene Chizik's tenure at Auburn. Talk of spoiled fans or unrealistic expectations all you want, but nobody should be surprised by that reaction. As noted here a week ago, the AU football team is beset with a number of problems, many of them not of Chizik's making... but not so many that his squad had any business getting destroyed by Mississippi State.

The rest is on the subscription side, but Rivals is offering a free first month to new subscribers coming over from FTB.

New At Rivals: Clemson Postgame Column

Here's a preview of my column for AuburnSports.com on Auburn's opener against Clemson:

Stated bluntly, for the second year in a row Cousin Clem brought more to the fight. Taj Boyd is an outstanding player at quarterback: strong, fast, experienced and accurate. Clemson has a ton of team speed on offense, particularly including Andre Ellington, who's obviously something special at running back. A rebuilt Clemson defense had a lot of bend but very little break, holding Auburn to field goals on three trips to the red zone and closing with a ferocious shutdown of the new AU offense on its last few possessions.

Defensively, Auburn played respectable football for the first 45 minutes, but ran out of gas in the final period. Clemson converted nearly 50% of their third downs (which while still bad, was from Auburn's perspective an improvement on 2011's 78% conversion rate) and had the horses to put the game away after trailing early in the fourth quarter. The real killer was in the play totals: Clemson snapped the ball a remarkable 87 times to Auburn's 64, in a textbook example of how the hurry-up game can wear out an opponent through sheer repetitive attacks.

The rest is on the subscription side, but Rivals is offering a free first month to new subscribers coming over from FTB.

Carl Stephens, RIP

Carl Stephens passed away last night.

Carl had been my friend since I was a little boy.  My parents' seats in Jordan-Hare Stadium were near the edge of the press box where Carl, the public address announcer for nearly 30 years, had his post.  In the days before the internet (and for that matter, before ESPN), I would run him score updates from my dad's portable radio.

If you've never been about eight years old and had 72,000 people cheer wildly over a couple of names and numbers you just passed on to a PA man, you really missed out on something.

As Phillip Marshall wrote yesterday, Carl was one of the kindest people you could ever hope to meet.  He was always happy to chat in between calling out the game in that magisterial voice.  For most of my life, stopping in to speak with him before or after or during a game was one of the highlights of any trip to Auburn.  He never failed to ask what I'd been up to, or to tell me about how his own children were making their way through grade school and college and life.

It got harder to check in with Carl after I moved over to the student section, and then out to Texas for graduate school, but we still managed to stay in touch.  Email eventually made that much easier; Carl kept up with my work on- and off-line, and went out of his way to encourage me as a writer.  When I stopped in to WSFA (where Carl was the program manager for a large portion of its history) to promote "The Uncivil War" in the mid-90's, he showed me around the station like a proud parent.

Everyone has a favorite Carl Stephens moment.  For many people of a certain age, it's the famous 1983 announcement at Legion Field, in the third quarter of the Auburn-Alabama game, that a tornado had touched down in Jefferson County (as Pat Dye later wrote in his autobiography, "I don't think three people left").  I remember a basketball game against Alabama when I was a student.  After the presentation of the Governor's Trophy for Auburn's 1987 shutout win, Carl noted for the benefit of the crowd, "To remind everyone, the score of that game was... Auburn, 10."

And of course, there was the ridiculous scene after the 1997 Alabama game when a group of players handed the goalposts up to a crowd of students in the end zone.  I was standing next to Carl, watching those kids carry it up to the top of the bowl, and if I live to be a hundred, I'll never forget the look on his face when he picked up the microphone and sternly advised them to not throw it over the side.

After retiring from WSFA and his announcer duties, Carl joined the rest of us in the stands for a few years.  He sat with his old friend David Housel, by then both fans emeritus (what we all would have given to be able to listen in on those in-game conversations).  But eventually, poor health stopped him from attending games altogether.  I don't think I'll ever get over Carl not being able to be there in person two seasons ago.  How he must have loved seeing it anyway, from afar.

There's more to say, and I wish I could say it, but I am overdrawn at the grief bank these days.

Right now, I just miss my friend.

Tagged

Since many have asked, here's the photo (originally taken by a poster on "The Bunker," an AuburnSports.com message board) I put up on my Twitter feed yesterday.  Dang thing went viral and got picked up by CBS.  It's not a Photoshop or a vanity tag, just a standard-issue Alabama license plate.  The picture was taken at the Shelby County tag office:

Also see this shot, of one of the tags "in the wild" (and yes, I believe that is a Toyota CAMry--H/T to The Auburner).

New at Rivals: Good Win, Fun Night

My Monday (er, Tuesday--hey, sue me) morning column for the It Should Still Be Called The Peach Bowl is up at Rivals' AuburnSports.com. Here's a preview:

Given the fact that Auburn and UVA share the same team colors (thanks to Virginia alum George Petrie having founded the AU football program back in 1892), it was often hard to tell who was Hoo in the crowd, but the scene and the game both wound up being a lot of fun, at least if you were wearing the SEC's correct versions of burnt orange and navy blue.

Whatever you thought about Gus Malzahn's Auburn tenure and/or departure to become a head coach, you'd have to like his last game calling plays for the Tigers. The only thing we didn't see in the Georgia Dome was Malzahn's Ludicrous Speed hurry-up game; pretty much everything else in the playbook came out against Virginia, resulting in more points than the Tigers had tallied against any other opponent (yes, including Ole Miss).

I must confess, Saturday night was the first time I'd seen the Cavaliers play this season, and I've read a bit of "ah, it's just Virginia" commentary since the bowl game, particularly regarding the UVA defense. Maybe so, but that defense was still good enough to finish third in total "D" for their conference (yeah, I know, it's the ACC, but still) and in the top four of most of the ACC's defensive categories.

Their defensive line looked pretty good to me early on, as the "O" in Auburn's O-line appeared more like it stood for "Ole!" than "offensive" (again). Clint Moseley didn't have much of a chance to do anything in his brief start before being injured, and Barrett Trotter spent an awful lot of time having to make something out of nothing in a bravura return to the field after six games on the bench.

The rest is on the subscription side. Rivals is offering a free first month to new subscribers coming over from FTB.

New at Rivals: Season of Struggle

My Monday-morning column for the Alabama game is up at Rivals' AuburnSports.com.  A preview:

I think a coach at Auburn or Alabama has to lose that game at a point after they've won it at least once to really appreciate the position they're in. Very few coaches win it in their debut seasons, so pretty much all of them (who aren't named Bill Curry) get a pass on that first loss, especially if their team played well in defeat. Nobody at Auburn held the 1981, 1999 or 2009 losses against Pat Dye, Tommy Tuberville or Gene Chizik, and nobody serious at Alabama held the 2007 game against Nick Saban.

But that free pass is only good once. When Dye flubbed consecutive games he should have won in 1984-85 and Tuberville's 2001 team completely imploded against Alabama, the heat came on immediately. Last year, Saban had the cushion of coming off an undefeated season (as does Chizik today), but even so, few failed to note that Auburn's comeback marked the second straight time Saban and his staff had been decidedly outcoached by Chizik and company.

Saturday night, besides the obvious advantages Alabama enjoyed in terms of deep, experienced talent, that shoe was on the other foot. Alabama leveled pinpoint attacks at pretty much all of Auburn's deficiencies, most notably in pass coverage and up front on both sides of the ball, but they also got a lot of help from arguably the worst game Gus Malzahn has ever called.

Time after time, Auburn would come into a convertable down situation only to blow the opportunity with a goofy trick play, the very worst example being the terrible Wildcat call--after a timeout, no less--on fourth-and-a-foot late in the third quarter. It was an inexplicable decision. Alabama has a great defense, but you put Michael Dyer in a standard formation with a blocker in front of him, he's going to get a foot 49 times out of 50. "Getting too cute" is an accusation that's been leveled against Malzahn a lot this season, and it was never more appropriate than Saturday against the Tide.

The rest is on the subscription side. Rivals is offering a free first month to new subscribers coming over from FTB.

New at Rivals: You Are What You Are

My Monday-morning Rivals column for the Samford game is up at AuburnSports.com.  A preview:

Under normal circumstances, Homecoming gives a team a chance to get the starters a decent workout in the first half, then clear the benches all the way down to the waterboys by the fourth quarter, giving every long-suffering walk-on a chance to get at least a few snaps.

This being 2011, things didn't work out that way. Auburn never trailed against Samford, and was never in serious danger of losing the game, but played such lackadaisical and ugly football that the Tigers couldn't really declare victory and pull the starters until well into the fourth quarter. Coming after one of the most awful losses in the modern history of the program, it wasn't the kind of game to give AU fans a great deal of confidence for the season closer next week.

I could spend a few more paragraphs running down the issues in this team's roster, but the reality is, after eleven games, you are what you are. What Auburn is right now is, unfortunately, about what they were in the opener: mediocre and inconsistent. And while you can certainly point to holes at the "skill" positions (particularly at receiver and in the secondary), it still all starts and ends up front.

From the very first game against Utah State, the Tigers have struggled to win in the trenches, and with a few exceptions--the South Carolina game accounting for most of them--those struggles haven't yielded much success. Put bluntly, Auburn still has a lot of trouble blocking on offense, and a lot of trouble getting off of blocks on defense. That's not a great combination.

The rest is on the subscription side. Rivals is offering a free first month to new subscribers coming over from FTB.

I didn't write a column for the Georgia game; my mom passed away that Friday, and football hasn't been much on my mind since.

New at Rivals: Consistency Still Needed

My Monday-morning column on the Ole Miss game is up at Rivals' AuburnSports.com. A preview:

For all the griping about poor tackling or bad play-calling or the lack of this or that factor on either side of the football, Auburn's overarching problem this season is inconsistency. The Ole Miss game marked the third time in 2011 that the Tigers have jumped up to a 14-0 lead, only to see the other guys wipe out that margin while still in the first half.

I thought Auburn improved a good bit against Ole Miss, even given all the aforementioned buffoonery, but the Tigers still couldn't put together a four-quarter game.

The best of Saturday: Auburn's passing game finally reappeared after a four-plus-game absence. Clint Moseley had an excellent second start at quarterback, going 12-for-15 and four touchdowns, and Philip Lutzenkirchen added to his "human highlight reel" reputation with that ridiculous Lawyer-Tillman-flashback catch for Auburn's last score, but the straw that stirred the drink was Emory Blake.

Let's take it as a given that Ole Miss does not have a great defense, but the difference for Auburn with Blake in the game was still blindingly obvious.

The rest is on the subscription side. Rivals is offering a free first month to new subscribers coming over from FTB.