Regarding "The Spread"...

I've been asked more than a few times over this excruciatingly-long off-season what I think about "the spread" coming to Auburn. I really haven't been able to answer that question (certainly not well) in a few words, so here are more than a few:

I still think the world of Al Borges. Anybody who doesn't appreciate what he did for Auburn has completely forgotten the night-and-day difference between the AU offense in 2003 as compared to 2004 and 2005. Everybody forgets today that Auburn didn't just light up the league in the undefeated '04 season, but also led the SEC in offense the following year--and that was with Brandon Cox under center. I still don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with Borges' offense--at least nothing that three or four NFL-caliber wide receivers wouldn't have fixed. And that, of course, was the rub.

Obviously, things changed dramatically in 2006, when Auburn fell way back in the offensive standings, and again in 2007, when the Tigers darn near hit rock bottom on that side of the ball. While it's reasonable to think some of the difference was due to the natural progression of defensive coaches on the other teams getting more familiar with Borges's schemes, I think it's clear that losing Anthony Mix, Devin Aromashodu and Ben Obiwankenobi after '05 and Courtney Taylor after '06 was what really spelled doom for the Gulf Coast Offense.

All four of those guys are on NFL rosters today, and with all due respect to the wideouts on the current AU roster, we have not seen their like since. And it's showed. The Tigers lost nearly a thousand yards of total offense from '05 to '06. Once defenses knew there wasn't much of a deep threat, they could close down to a 30-yard box from the line of scrimmage, and Cox was turned into a punching bag as a result (and although nobody ever talks about it on the record, I think it's safe to assume that Cox's health problems were at the very least not helped by the poundings he took on the field).

Why did AU get in such a hole at receiver? The easy answer is that wideout recruiting fell off, but why that happened is a little more complicated. In an age of high school kids putting a premium on early playing time, it had to be hard to recruit new receivers as long as the "big four" still had eligibility. It wouldn't surprise me if the luxury of having those four guys around also made the staff somewhat complacent (there it is again, the one great flaw of the Tuberville era) when it came to signing newcomers at the position: "Hell, we'll get some next year."

Making things worse, once the positions did open up, prospects watching Auburn games no longer saw an offense they wanted to play in. WIthout a dependable passing game, Auburn fell back out of necessity to a power running attack, and I've yet to meet a top receiver who relishes the idea of spending most of his games as a blocker. That feedback loop continued to the point where the Tigers rarely cracked three touchdowns against SEC competition.

As good as Borges is when he has the right tools, continuing to use an offense built around players you don't have is a losing proposition. We'd already seen what happened to Auburn when Terry Bowden decided to insert the 1990's Florida State offense in a team that didn't have 1990's Florida State players at the "skill positions."

So, something had to change. If the players weren't going to change (and they weren't, certainly not in the short term), the offense had to, and making things harder, it had to change in a way that enticed more players of the kind Auburn didn't have to sign up. Whether the shift from Borges' pro-style attack to Tony Franklin's much-lauded "spread" was the right change or not... well, like they say, that's why they play the games. We'll see.

I'll be the first to confess that I have never been an fan of "the spread," at least not "the spread" as lazy sportswriters tend to use the term. I didn't like it when Bowden went five-wide and threw on most downs in 1995-98. These days we'd recognize that offense as a close relative to Texas Tech or Hawaii. That kind of imbalance is a recipe for two or three disasters a year in the SEC. I also still don't care for Urban Meyer's offense, which is just a gussied-up version of the Single Wing with more receivers; ditto for Rich Rodriguez's version at West Virginia. In the end, both are really just the option run out of the shotgun.

That said, I am comforted by Franklin's insistence that he intends to run a balanced attack out of his shotgun formations. I'm as dedicated a fan of the running game as any SEC fan anywhere, but history tells us that while you can't win if you can't run, you also can't win big unless you have balance.

There hasn't been a great Auburn team since the Bo Jackson-led Wishbone squad of 1983 that was not also a balanced offensive team. Indeed, the great strength of Borges' great run in 2004-05 (and Bowden's in 1993-94, for that matter) was the unpredictability of an offense that could either run or pass in almost any situation.

If Auburn can get back to that, things on the Plains will be just fine. If not... but there it is again: that's why they play the games.

Tony^2

Tony Barnhart interviews Auburn's Tony Franklin today. A highlight:

The spread is a formation, not an offense: "Some people spread the field to run it, like West Virginia. Others spread the field to pass it, like Texas Tech. It’s what you do after you spread the field that defines your offense. We spread it to figure out what is going to work in any particular game and then we just do that. At Troy we basically ran it half the time and threw it half the time. We just always took what the defense was giving us. (Note: Troy rolled up 488 yards in a 44-34 loss to Georgia last November). Our plan at Auburn is to throw first and run second but if we find a running play that works, we’re going to do that. I’m not hung up on who gets the ball and how we do it. I just want to score points."

Read the whole thing.

Exodus

Daily newspapers used to be important things. Before television, they were the primary way most sports fans found out who won or lost games, who was in contention, who was on the outs. Even in the TV age, the daily paper was your connection to your team(s), and the only means of reading up on box scores, or standings, or the real mainstay of sports writing, opinion columns. For most of my soon-to-be-forty years, whether you liked it or not, you had to buy the paper if you wanted to know what was going on.

All that started to change, of course, something over a decade ago. The internet unleashed news and sports writing from the grasp of printing press and TV station owners, and put the ability to reach hundreds, thousands, or even millions of other people in the hands of just about anybody with a computer. While the blogging revolution was going on, the web also revealed who the most important employees of a given newspaper really were: not the columnists with lifetime sinecures, not the beat reporters with one eye on the AP wire, but rather the little old ladies downstairs who took the orders for want-ads. While online news and sports sites thrive and grow more profitable by the year, newspapers are in a fiscal nosedive as advertisers and subscribers alike take their attention and business elsewhere.

All of which brings us to 2008, and a fascinating exodus that's occurring just under the radar in the sportswriting world. As print newspapers become less and less relevant (and far less profitable), more and more top talents are jumping off the sinking ship to ply their trades online. In blog parlance, it's called "taking the Boeing," a phrase coined by uber-blogger Glenn Reynolds when ace political writer Mickey Kaus agreed to bring his hugely-popular Kausfiles blog under the Slate.com umbrella (Slate being owned by Microsoft, which shares its home city of Seattle with aircraft behemoth Boeing--it's a stretch as a joke, but it works).

Around these parts, Neal McCready left the Mobile Press-Register to become the feature writer for Rivals.com's Ole Miss site around the beginning of 2008. I'd said for years that McCready pretty obviously would be a lot happier if he were covering Mississippi instead of Auburn and Alabama, and by all indications (including an acidic and very funny kiss-off email that was widely forwarded around), Neal finally agreed. He's clearly having a ball in his new job, and good for him.

That said, I was stunned when Phillip Marshall "took the Boeing," or rather the SI ESPN Shuttle a month or so ago. Marshall has newspaper ink running in his veins; his father Benny was a legendary sports editor at the Birmingham News, and Marshall himself has been a major figure in the Alabama media for most of my own lifetime. He was easily the best sports editor, reporter and writer the Montgomery Advertiser has had in the last 30 years, and in his more recent gig as the Auburn beat writer for the Huntsville Times, he won the state's top award for sports writing in both of the last two years. But Marshall walked away from the Times in June to set up shop in a brand-new Sports Illustrated ESPN-affiliated AU news and blog site, Auburn Undercover (which I must say has a dumb name, but great content).

The exodus is not limited to Alabama's papers. Fort Worth Star-Telegram living legend Wendell Barnhouse recently hung up his newspaper spurs to become the Big 12 Conference's online reporter. Under less voluntary circumstances, Jay Christensen (who wrote the blurb about Barnhouse linked just above), was recently axed thanks to the floundering LA Times' efforts at cost cutting. Christensen's previously-anonymous blog The Wizard of Odds was (and is) among the very best college football sites out there, and I'm betting that Jay will go a lot farther online than he would have in the stratified world of big-newspaper sportswriting.

Even when people don't leave their big-media home bases, they're finding more readers by going online. For my money, the best two college football writers in the country are Tony Barnhart of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Ivan Maisel of ESPN. Barnhart's online-only AJC blog is far more timely and interesting than almost anything that gets printed in the actual paper, and Maisel's work scarcely ever sees physical print at all these days; the vast majority of his stuff is online-only at ESPN.com.

All of which makes one wonder how far all this is going to go. The market is proving that small outfits concentrating on a single team or school or sport can do quite well; there are three full-time all-Auburn news and message board sites running right now (full disclosure, with several friends of mine working in various jobs), and they're all making money. Sports sites with broader appeal are also doing fine, and all the proof you need of that is Orson Spencer Mellencamp's recent taking-of-the-Boeing to become a feature writer with the Sporting News.

Readers are leaving newspapers far faster than the better writers. I remember hearing my dad gripe about the state of the Montgomery Advertiser about a decade ago. Gannett had bought out what was up until that point the best paper in the state, and their low salaries and Mickey Mouse editorial template quickly ran off everybody with any smidgen of talent. "What can you do?" he asked me rhetorically. "You have to get a paper, and even this garbage is the best one around here."

Now Dad has an iBook with a wireless hookup, and every newspaper in the world is as close as his end table. He used to get three daily papers while I was growing up; now he gets one, and I'll bet you he won't renew it the next time a bill arrives.

As a lot of people who worked for secure local monopolies pre-web are learning, my dad is hardly unique.

"Home Of The Linebacker Bullies"

I wasn't planning to post about the arrest of Alabama running-back-turned-linebacker Jimmy Johns today. Johns is charged with multiple felony counts of cocaine distribution and narcotics posession, and had apparently been dealing coke on the UAT campus for quite a while.

One could make the point that Johns' pharmaceutical operation was not exactly a state secret--there has been chatter about it on message boards for quite a while now--but, I do make it a point not to blog unless I have a point to bring up that hasn't been covered elsewhere. Since I didn't have much to add that hasn't been in the Big Media stories already (and the arrest has already been lampooned by Orson Spencer Mellencamp better than I would have managed), I didn't see the point.

And then I heard about Jimmy Johns Pitbulls, the Home of the Linebacker Bullies. Go ahead, have a look for yourself, it's at the carefully-disguised URL of jimmyjohnspitbulls.com (I'll post up saved screen shots later in case it suddenly disappears).

The page is not very old, at least in its current form. According to WHOIS, the URL was created on March 6, 2008 (incidentally just before Alabama's spring practice sessions began), and it only has a few hundred hits as of this afternoon.

Even if we set aside the multiple unsavory connections one might draw regarding an accused cocaine dealer who raises pit bulls on the side, the website itself raises questions about Johns' activities as a breeder, and especially as a breeder who used pictures of himself in an Alabama uniform as well as specific references to his status as an Alabama player in his advertising.

While college atheletes are allowed to have jobs (under highly-regulated circumstances) and are also allowed to be self-employed, NCAA Bylaw 12.4.4 states,

A student-athlete may establish his or her own business, provided the student-athlete's name, photograph, appearance or athletics reputation are not used to promote the business.

In addition, Bylaw 12.5.2.1 states,

After becoming a student-athlete, an individual shall not be eligible for participation in intercollegiate athletics if the individual:

(a) Accepts any remuneration for or permits the use of his or her name or picture to advertise, recommend or promote directly the sale or use of a commercial product or service of any kind; or

(b) Receives remuneration for endorsing a commercial product or service through the individual's use of such product or service.

If it's correct that the website ("Home Of The Linebacker Bullies") is only a few months old, eligibility is not really an issue here. The site was created last March, and Johns hasn't participated in a football game between then and today, when he was kicked off the Alabama team. However, it's worth asking how long Johns had been acting as a pitbull breeder, and whether he actually did the breeding himself, or simply hired out his name and (relative) fame to somebody else in return for renumeration. Between playing football, going to college, and allegedly being a one-man pharmaceutical entrepreneur on Alabama's famously coke-laden campus, I do have to wonder where the guy found the time to "take care of [dogs] better than most do their children."

It's also worth asking what the Alabama compliance and coaching staffs knew about Johns' numerous extracurricular activities. As I said earlier, it was not exactly a surprise to hear that Johns had been arrested on drug charges. If Joe Fan, based on nothing more than internet chatter, had a pretty good idea what Johns was up to in his spare time, what about his coaches and teammates, and the support staff in Tuscaloosa?

I doubt anybody in the Alabama media is going to go around asking those questions; the purpose of most of the sports departments in the state is to blow smoke up the collective hindquarters of the "Tide Nation." Other than the obligatory editorial tut-tutting over the tenth player arrest in Nick Saban's 18 months in Tuscaloosa, this story will be over by Saturday as far as the in-state press is concerned.

But there's clearly more to the Johns story than just a 'kid who went wrong.' It'll be interesting to see who else chooses to dig deeper after today's big headlines die down.

UPDATE: Ian Rapoport of the Birmingham News reports on Wednesday that the Jimmy Johns Pitbulls website is for real, and that Johns does indeed have a side business selling dogs.

Gameday For Smart People

While we all slog through the long doldrums between spring practice and the now-far-away next season, this is as good a time as any to post another unabashed plug for ESPN's outstanding College Football Insider podcasts. During the off-season, the podcasts are updated biweekly (they run every weekday during the season itself), and are hosted by ESPN print luminary Ivan Maisel, who's usually joined by the now-iconic Beano Cook.

The podcasts are, without a doubt, the best single piece of college football programming coming out of Bristol these days. They're everything the network's televised coverage should be, but isn't: pithy, information-packed, intelligent, funny, and still thoroughly entertaining. Better yet, there are no coaching failures, bitter has-beens, and hype-mongering homers to gum up the works with corporate-approved nonsense. Best of all, they're free, and available either from ESPN's website or iTunes (just search "ESPN college football podcast" at the iTunes store; a subscription is free). I can't think of a better place to get a quick fix of football during these dreary months of waiting for the first kickoff.

A few weeks back Maisel petitioned listeners to come up with a slogan for the podcasts. I've got the perfect one, but somehow I doubt he'll be able to use it: "Get the College Football Insider Podcast. It's 'Gameday' for smart people."

You Haff My Gwatitude

I somehow missed this when it first came out, but From The Bleachers was named an AJC Staff Pick for "Best Auburn Sites" by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about a month ago. Very nice, and I thank whomever thanks are due to for the recognition.

In addition, some of you may have noticed that FTB was picked up a while back as one of ten sites recommended by SportsIllustrated.com on their Auburn team page. FTB and AUNews.net are the only blogs so honored, and also the only sites out of the ten not run by large organizations.

So, to the ladies and gents at SI.com, like the man said in "The Kentucky Fried Movie," you haff my gwatitude.

Randy Kennedy: Nick Sucker

Last weekend, Gentry Estes of the Mobile Press-Register posted a short article about a recent Alabama scrimmage to the Register's "Bama Beat" blog. As you might guess from the title, Estes is the Register's Alabama beat writer, and in the post he discussed the frustration of being assigned to write about a scrimmage that he hadn't actually been allowed to watch, and about players and coaches he isn't able to interview:

For the second time in eight days, Alabama simulated game action at Bryant-Denny Stadium without the media (and general public) there to witness it. For the second time, Alabama issued statistics (Yeah, I've got 'em listed below) as to what supposedly transpired. For the second time, Crimson Tide coach Nick Saban was the only one made available to offer his take (Tide players do not address reporters after scrimmages and Saban's assistant coaches, of course, never do).

It can be frustrating. Those of us who cover this team would love to offer the kind of detailed assessments available at basically every other major program. Is that currently an option at Alabama?

No.

It's not that I'm complaining. This operation is Saban's baby. He has had success with his approach in the past. He can (and does) do as he pleases. I'm OK with that, and knew it when I signed on last August.

But in the interest of fairness ... I would like to point out a few things before fans delve too far into statistics and stories about any of Alabama's spring or preseason scrimmages. ...

Without the media present, there is no objective vantage point to the coverage. First off, the information you're receiving is only what Alabama wants you to know. This is not an ideal situation for a journalist who values a balanced account, and it's worth disclosure and a warning to readers: Take it for what it's worth.

Also know that in-house scrimmages are often molded into whatever the coaches want them to be. As I predicted last week on Scott Griffin's radio show, Alabama's offense would fare much better the second time. Lo and behold, they did.

How did I know that? Because I've seen coaches tweak the format to help a struggling unit. The first-team offense is doing poorly? Put them against the third-string defense for a while and see how those numbers turn out. Did that happen here? I don't know. Since I didn't watch the scrimmage, I can't tell you the circumstances behind John Parker Wilson's apparent 200-yard performance or Roy Upchurch's supposed rushing resurgence.

At the end of the day, it all boils down to this: Scrimmages are glorified practices. Fans should digest them that way. They do not tell you much about an upcoming season. They are a hint, but far from the entire picture.

That's not a bad piece, as such things go. As somebody who writes about college football, I think that's pretty interesting stuff, but obviously others may not agree.

Well, scratch that. "Others," allegedly including the highest-paid employee of the state of Alabama, emphatically did not agree. You may have noticed that I didn't link to Estes's post. I didn't because I can't (or rather I couldn't; keep reading). The post inexplicably vanished from the al.com site the Register shares with several other newspapers, and only reappeared yesterday when Register columnist and all-around gadfly Paul Finebaum posted it to his own website.

Finebaum interviewed Register sports editor Randy Kennedy on Wednesday, and among other things asked why the rather mild criticism of Alabama Coach Nick "I am not going to be the Alabama coach" Saban had vanished from Estes's blog. Per a quote at the Capstone Report blog, Kennedy replied,

"We just decided it was more trouble than it was worth…this was not necessarily the battle he wanted to pick with the people who were supposed to be our customers."

Now, that's lame.

Take it from me, you've got to have thick skin if you're going to write about either Alabama or Auburn, and the Estes post didn't even register on the invective scale in that state. If anything, it was a pretty toned-down look at the growing undercurrent of dislike among state sportswriters who have to deal with Saban's trademark petulance.

Pulling such a milquetoast post over alleged public reaction would be bad enough, but according to Montgomery sports radio personality Doug Amos, as quoted from Finebaum's radio show today, the demand to spike Estes's post came from none other than "Flipper" himself. According to Amos, who is also an associate athletic director at Faulkner University (and if my memory serves, a big Alabama fan), a source has told him that the article was yanked after Saban personally called Estes to complain (for the record, Estes is a Georgia graduate who, in his student days, wrote of being "Born and raised a die-hard Crimson Tide fan in Birmingham").

If accurate, that goes beyond lame. If that's true, Kennedy hung a young employee of his out to dry to mollify the hurt feelings of a spoiled-brat football coach who makes more in a month than he and Estes combined make in a year (heck, it's probably more than the entire Register sports staff makes in a year).

Even if it isn't--but given Saban's history of trying to intimidate the media, I wouldn't be at all surprised if it is--Kennedy should still be ashamed of himself. What kind of self-respecting journalist spikes an accurate article because his "customers" are complaining? That's the action of a corporate flack, not a reporter. If Kennedy disagreed with Estes, he should have said so, either in a column or a blog post of his own, but going out and trying (unsuccessfully, as it turned out) to flush the column down the memory hole was an act of abject cowardice, and one that goes a long way towards discrediting the Register sports section as being anything resembling responsible journalism.

So, Randy Kennedy, this is your big day. You are now the latest recipient of the FTB Nick Sucker Award.

Wear it in shame.

UPDATE: Estes re-posted the original piece Thursday evening, with the following note:

Two days later, after feeling compelled to respond to numerous comments from readers, the blog was threatening to become a time-consuming distraction to my work as Alabama beat writer for the Press-Register. This was a battle I began to feel would do no good for my newspaper or myself. I wish to be known for objectivity and reporting skills rather than a mere blog that made myself the story. This was heading in an opposite direction from those goals. So I deleted the post. Never at any time did anyone from the University of Alabama request or suggest that I remove the blog entry.

As noted earlier, that's pretty lame stuff. Either you--and if you work for a newspaper, your employer--stand behind what you write or you don't. Since when does any self-respecting reporter or paper care about criticism over an accurate story?

I should note that Estes does not say that nobody at UAT contacted him to complain about the blog entry. Continuing:

After hearing some of what has been said in public forums the past few days and insinuations that have no merit or truth, I now regret the decision to remove the blog post, but not my decision to write it in the first place. So hopefully to clear the air completely, I am now posting the original blog in its entirety.

Better late than never, I suppose.

Postmortem

One more post on l'affaire Muschamp:

First, I am satisfied at this point that "Story Two" as outlined in this post is essentially Muschamp's side of his brief job search, as related by the coach to his own friends. I'm sorry to contradict Phillip Marshall, whose work I hold in the highest regard, but from talking to people inside and outside of the AU athletic department, I now believe the portion of Story Two concerning bowl tickets is essentially accurate. Whether any conflict or misunderstanding or what have you regarding those tickets did or should have contributed to Muschamp's decision is beyond my pay grade (which, considering I don't get paid for this, isn't saying very much).

One thing that is clear to me is that almost nobody has come out of this mess looking good, with the sole and somewhat ironic exception of Tommy Tuberville. If Muschamp really let his emotions get away from him over words he didn't like in his contract and/or a few bowl tickets badly enough to yank up his family and move halfway across the country to take a pay cut, quite frankly he needs to grow up. If, conversely, he simply thought Texas presented a better opportunity and he's using the contract-and-tickets story to semi-privately justify himself, he also needs to grow up. Neither option puts him in a good light, and although I think the guy is a superb young football coach, everybody involved is probably better off with him working somewhere else after all of this.

Auburn athletic director Jay Jacobs also moves on with a considerable black eye. At the very least, Jacobs did not shine in displaying managerial skills over the past few days. Even if you accept Jacobs' version of events--namely that Muschamp was upset over language that had been in his contract for over a year--that doesn't excuse Jacobs' failure to defuse the situation when it occurred. If you are the CEO of a multi-million-dollar business who values a key employee enough to make him the highest-paid individual in his job in your market, you damn well ought to do a better job of managing that individual to keep him from leaving for a competitor, albeit a distant one.

Auburn has now lost three very highly-regarded coaches under Jacobs' watch, and while I don't see how he could bear any responsibility for Gene Chizik's departure in early 2005, the same can't be said for either Muschamp or, worse, David Marsh, an alumnus and the most successful college coach in the history of the state of Alabama. Jacobs came into his current job with a widely-held perception that he got it based on who he knew rather than what he had done to earn it. Three years in, he's done little to change that perception.

As noted earlier, about the only person at Auburn who's come out looking better for the experience is Tuberville, who by most accounts put his foot down and told Muschamp to, er, spit or step away from the spittoon after his now-ex-assistant returned to Auburn on Friday, and who appears poised to name a replacement within the next few days. I've heard from a number of observers that Tuberville was not a bit happy to find himself caught in the middle of one of his own agent's infamous coaching shuffles; one can only hope that the head coach will remember how that feels the next time Jimmy Sexton starts floating Tuberville's own name for other jobs--again.

Cause And Effect

"2008 is shaping up to be a pretty interesting year."
--FTB, January 2, 2008

That might be the most inadvertently-accurate prediction I've ever made. Sometimes I hate it when I'm right.

As everybody reading this likely knows by now, Will Muschamp, Auburn's highly-regarded defensive coordinator, resigned from AU yesterday to take basically the same position at the University of Texas (full disclosure: I attended and earned degrees from both Auburn and UT). Thus far, media reports have been more-or-less limited to straight accounts of the story itself, due in no small part to the speed of Muschamp's job change, as well as the official silence coming out of both Auburn and Austin regarding how and why that changed occurred.

The only point everybody agrees on right now is that this all happened very quickly, and it came as a surprise to just about everyone involved. Beyond that, things devolve quickly into the realm of "chatter." The two leading tales right now (and they are not necessarily mutually exclusive) go like this:

Story One: Back in December, Muschamp interviewed for and by most accounts was offered the head coaching job at Southern Miss. At that point, he went to Tommy Tuberville and basically said that while he'd like to stay at Auburn, a head job was something he'd have a hard time turning down. When asked what it would take to get him to stay at AU, Muschamp allegedly asked for a salary over $400,000 and a two-year guaranteed contract. Auburn agreed, proffering a $850,000 two-year deal, and Mushchamp declined USM's offer.

A few weeks later, Larry MacDuff resigned from Texas, and the ever-active Jimmy Sexton started calling Austin to sell Muschamp as a replacement. According to Story One aficionados, Tuberville thought his staff was settled for the year and was not happy when he found out Sexton had made overtures to Texas, either with or without Muschamp's urging. When Muschamp arrived back in Auburn yesterday after interviewing with Texas, he was told bluntly by Tuberville to either honor his agreement with Auburn or hit the road. At that point Muschamp resigned from AU and accepted the job at UT.

Again, this is not a confirmed account. This is Story One, based on underground chatter over the last 18 hours or so.

The other half of the tales making the rounds comprise Story Two: Prior to the Chick-Fil-A Bowl in Atlanta, Georgia native Muschamp went to Auburn's ticket manger, Tim Jackson, and asked about extra bowl tickets for his friends and family, only to be told that no extra tickets were available. According to the chatter, Muschamp learned after the bowl that a number of extra tickets had in fact been held back by the ticket office and given to others in the athletic department, but Jackson never mentioned them to Muschamp.

According to Story Two, things got worse when athletic director Jay Jacobs handed Muschamp his new contract, which was supposed to meet the agreement (two years guaranteed at $425,000 per year) outlined in Story One. Either Muschamp or Sexton read through the contract and discovered fine print that gave AU the ability to back out of the term and remaining salary at any time, basically negating the "guaranteed" portion of the agreement. Per the chatter, Muschamp went back to Jacobs to have that clause removed, but Jacobs refused, saying basically, "You're going to leave after next season anyway, so what difference does it make?"

It's no particular secret that Muschamp is something of a hothead, and according to Story Two, the alleged administrative shenanigans with the new contract combined with the ticket incident pushed him over the edge. Per the chatter, he called Sexton on Wednesday with the instructions to "get me out of here." By Thursday he was on a plane to Austin, and on Friday he had a new job.

Once again: this is all based on chatter. It is not confirmed fact.

I will say this: Story Two has a lot of adherents, and a lot of them are in positions to know what they're talking about. There are indications--again, unconfirmed--that Story Two is actually Muschamp's own account of what happened in the last week, as told to his friends.

A few notes:

Tim Jackson is, to say the least, not the most popular figure in the Auburn athletic department. In his defense, Jackson is a guy who has to say "no" to an awful lot of people, and that kind of job just doesn't win you a lot of friends, often through no fault of your own. On the other hand, under Jackson the ticket office has developed a reputation for incompetence, and it has a customer service attitude that might as well have been lifted from the old Lily Tomlin routines about the Phone Company, whose motto was, "We don't care. We don't have to."

There are plenty of Auburn people who've encountered Jackson's often high-handed attitude who can easily sympathize with Muschamp's alleged anger. As an aside, Jay Jacobs was promoted to AD in 2005 after working alongside Jackson in Auburn's ticket priority fundraising office for a number of years.

The one thing I'm sure of is that Tuberville certainly had a "short list" of possible replacements in hand long before all this went down. Muschamp had interviewed for at least three head coaching jobs during December, and very likely would be settling into a big office in Fayetteville right now if Bobby Petrino hadn't made his own snap decision to bolt from the NFL. Auburn should have a new defensive coordinator within a few days, and given Tuberville's track record, he'll probably be a very good coach.

The other fallout from Muschamp's sudden departure, either on the field or within the confines of the Auburn athletic department, is yet to be seen.

News Flash From OU

PHOENIX, AZ-- In a long-anticipated move, University of Oklahoma president David L. Boren announced early today that OU has officially changed its name to Overrated University. The name change came immediately after OU lost its fourth consecutive BCS bowl game, in this case the Fiesta Bowl, in embarrassing fashion.

During brief remarks to the media following the heavily favored Sooners' 48-28 loss at the hands of a coachless West Virginia, Boren said, "We felt it was time for the University's name to more accurately describe the true nature and proclivities of our football team, and hopefully to remind the national pollsters just what they're getting in for when they rank us highly in the future."

Boren did deny reports that "Overrated University" had been selected in a close vote over the alternate suggestion of "Chokelahoma." When asked about the name change, OU head coach Bob Stoops ducked out of the interview room without comment. However, University of Arizona head coach Mike Stoops said in a written statement that he will continue to over-rate his brother's team in the USA Today Coaches' Poll, and encouraged all other voters to follow suit.

Just Peachy

Hey, happy new year. Quite a month, eh?

Okay, okay, sorry for being away for so long, but so long as blogging remains a hobby, I reserve the right for life (including down time) to intrude. That said, with due deference to the current drought, an awful lot of water has passed under Auburn's bridges since Thanksgiving weekend, and I'll try to hit on everything eventually. Might as well start with the most recent events, namely the Peach Bowl (oh, go stuff your corporate name; I intentionally had a burger today just because I'm completely sick of seeing "EAT MORE CHIKIN").

Obviously, this was not your average mid-level bowl game for Auburn. I doubt we're going to see too many games period when any team--particularly Auburn--is going to put in an entirely new offense after nine practices, but there it was.

It's no secret that I'm not a particularly big fan of "the spread," but then again, "the spread" has become more lazy sportswriter shorthand than an actual descriptive term these days. Picking a few teams at random, Florida, West Virginia, Texas Tech and Missouri are all regularly identified in the press as being "spread teams," even though the four of them don't have much in common other than the base formations. Still, the Tony Franklin offense is seriously far removed from the Pro-I variants that have dominated college football for the last generation. No huddle for a whole game, never lining up under center, no lead blockers? It's gonna take some getting used to.

I won't deny it's exciting, though. Even with AU's limitations at wide receiver, there were guys open all over the field Monday night. Given a couple of months of extra practice, and the quarterback protection ought to get a lot better--or at least you have to hope so if you're a Tiger fan. And what the heck, it worked. Clemson has a very good defense for an ACC team, and they gave up several long drives; Auburn's problems in scoring had more to do with AU screwing things up than Cousin Clem shutting things down.

As much as Brandon Cox deserved to lead his team one last time (and all things considered he did that well once again) I liked seeing Kodi Burns getting all those snaps. I've been waiting all season for Burns to fake a run and then drop back for a long pass, even if either Burns or Rod Smith had his wires crossed when they actually tried it in the bowl game. It killed me when that play never appeared during the regular season. Of course, Burns handled the pressure just fine, all the way down to putting the thing away in overtime.

You certainly have to give Franklin credit for one call that nobody in the stadium expected, namely running Cox on a third-and-long quarterback draw during AU's game-tying drive in the fourth quarter. That one was the very definition of "unpredictable," and it worked like a charm. I've never been a fan of platooning quarterbacks, but once again: it worked. Auburn moved the ball at least as consistently as in any big game this season, and the offense was far, far less predictable than it's been since November of 2005.

The thing that bothers me about this set is, you can talk all day about spreading out the defense and creating gaps, but there are still going to be times when you need to line up tight and pound the ball for two or three yards. Not all "spread" teams can; when Missouri had a first and goal on the one against Oklahoma in the Big 12 Championship, they lined up in the shotgun and couldn't get that yard, settling for a field goal and really conceding the game to OU. Auburn could still do that in the Peach Bowl; Brandon Cox effectively won the game by gutting out a first down on fourth and short during overtime. We're going to need to keep that capability in the future.

And yeah, the manic signal-calling on the sidelines is a hoot. I'm reasonably sure Neil Caudle was just making up stuff by the middle of the second quarter. Seeing the front line stand up and look to the sidelines for a signal was, to say the least, different. I've seen this picture on a few message boards today, and credit where it's due, it's really funny and more than a little accurate:


The most important thing about the new offense showed up in the fourth quarter. Clemson was just flat-out gassed by then, and Auburn was able to blow the Other Tigers off the line repeatedly (and as an aside, that would have been a perfect time to revert to a standard formation and run right at them, but who am I to argue with success?). I like the idea of wearing teams out and beating them in the fourth quarter (or, er, overtime), no matter how you get there.

Defensively it was just another ho-hum shutdown of a good team. I'll be honest, Clemson's offense scared me to death: a balanced attack with lots of playmakers and a very smart guy calling the plays. They reminded me a lot of this year's Georgia team. It was very heartening to see AU handle them for the majority of the game. Clemson didn't have an extended drive, and without that really impressive (to say the least) C.J. Spiller touchdown run and Auburn's fourth-quarter interception, they never would have been in the game. Pat Sims and Antonio Coleman had a fantastic game up front, and Patrick Lee finished his last game in style.

Nobody starts off a season hoping they'll play in the Peach Bowl (well, okay, maybe Ole Miss), but it was still a good win, a good way to send out a remarkable senior class, and a whale of a football game. The atmosphere in the Dome was great, and both teams were clearly up for the game and fighting hard for the win; you don't get that in every bowl these days.

And of course, where Auburn was concerned, it also included a very big change. 2008 is shaping up to be a pretty interesting year.

Flip Out?

According to West By God Virginia, the SEC's real evil genius--Jimmy Sexton--is at it again:

Sources close to University President Mike Garrison have informed WBGV that Nick Saban’s agent has contacted WVU regarding our vacant head-coaching position.

These sources tell us that Saban is extremely unhappy in Tuscaloosa and has failed to recapture the situation he had in Baton Rouge with LSU. The purpose of the agent’s call was to express initial interest in the position and to have WVU athletics put together a compensation package enough to lure Saban from Alabama. This package would not need to be as much as Saban is currently making at Alabama, but enough to not result in a 50% paycut.

In an update, WBGV adds that WVSports.com (Rivals.com's West Virginia affiliate) has confirmed the story on the premium ($$) side of their site.

For what it's worth, I'd personally score this one in the "extremely unlikely at best" category, but then again, there's this:

Interestingly, while working the story last year, a source in West Virginia told me that the governor would essentially be the one who would hire the new Mountaineer coach when Rodriguez left for Alabama.

Of course, I didn't know at the time that the governor was Joe Manchin -- who is a close friend of Nick Saban and godfather to Saban's son Nicholas.

(No, not starting the Saban-to-West Virginia rumors. Just pointing out an interesting sidebar).

Manchin was a quarterback for the Mountaineers and now, as governor, has his own parking spot outside the West Virginia stadium.

Interesting. Here's quite a bit more background on Saban's relationship with Manchin.

Lame Excuses at the Alex City Outlook

As promised in emails from publisher Tim Reeves and editor Kevin Taylor, the Alexander City (AL) Outlook published an apology, of sorts, for the Bruce Meyers column noted here. The Sunday column, written by sports editor Matt Dischinger, opens with,

Dozens of readers responded to the mistakes made in the commentary section of Friday's sports page.

Some found significant mistakes on the part of a guest columnist Bruce Meyers, with the most noteworthy one being a section of the column that was inadvertently plagiarized from a column by Pat Forde appearing on ESPN.com. The mistakes were not caught by The Outlook's editorial staff, and we apologize for the mistake on our part and Bruce's part. It was certainly not intentional.
...

We appreciate the many responses from readers calling attention the problems with Friday's column. Those mistakes have been addressed with the author. The Outlook staff will always try to minimize mistakes when they are found in any guest column.

That's it. The piece also contains several column-inches of scolding, but the scolding is directed at readers who complained about the content of Meyers' column, rather than at Meyers himself for blatantly (and really stupidly) plagiarizing one of the most widely-read national columns on Bobby Petrino from last week.

For whatever it's worth, I have no problem with Bruce Meyers writing whatever opinions he wants to write, and no problem with the AC Outlook publishing them--no matter how dumb, irrelevant, or badly-written those opinions happen to be. As a commenter to my previous post noted, it's not worth getting worked up over an unknown columnist for a paper with a miniscule readership.

But I do have a problem when Meyers or anybody else goes out and steals somebody else's words and claims them as his own. I have a big problem when his section editor blithely writes off outright plagiarism as "a mistake," and the paper's editor and publisher sign off on a lame whitewash.

What Meyers did Friday is not "a mistake," Mr. Reeves. It's not "inadvertent," Mr. Taylor.

It's plagiarism. It's theft. And you ought to be ashamed of yourselves for excusing it.

Plagiarism at the Alex City Outlook

From Pat Forde's column at ESPN.com on December 11, 2007:

[T]hose Arkansas fans ready to embrace their new hotshot coach and his pretty ball plays need to understand one thing:

The disingenuous drifter doesn't love you or any other fan base. He doesn't love any school or any NFL franchise. He loves himself, his playbook and his bank account.

That's it. Don't expect it to change.

Bobby Petrino will return your embrace, Hog fans. But while he's hugging you he'll be looking over your shoulder, scanning the terrain for his next hook-up.

Even in a profession rife with dishonest posturing, Petrino is singularly mercenary. Loyalty, allegiance, commitment and honesty are foreign concepts to him. It must be a sad existence.

I apologize to Alabama's Nick Saban -- last year I named him president of the Liar's Club. He's been impeached and replaced by the disingenuous drifter.

(Emphasis mine above and below.)

From Bruce Meyers' column in the Alexander City (AL) Outlook, December 13, 2007:

Nick Saban should send flowers to Petrino for taking the Arkansas job. Now the media can get off of Saban's back about how he handled the job change. They are calling Petrino the disingenuous drifter.

To the Hog fans: Petrino doesn't love you or any other fan base. He doesn't love any school or NFL franchise. Petrino loves himself, his playbook and his bank account. Petrino is a mercenary at best. Loyalty, allegiance commitment and honesty are foreign concepts to this guy.

Coach Saban, you have been impeached and replaced.

Meyers makes it a point to say twice in the column linked above, "I am not an Alabama fan." Maybe, maybe not, Bruce, but you are a plagiarist.

UPDATE: As of the morning of December 15, the Alex City Outlook has replaced Meyers' column at the link above with an unrelated AP article.

Uh, guys, this is the internet. We can save stuff. And we have. Try again.

UPDATE UPDATE: Per an email response from AC Outlook publisher Tim Reeves, the Meyers column was replaced on the website due to the site's policy of posting items on consecutive days under the same "tagline." I've replaced the link above with the correct link to the Friday Meyers column, and also corrected the date of that column above to December 13.

Dang.

Just dang.

H/T: EDSBS

Shameless Self-Promotion

I've got a post up at VodkaPundit regarding John Feinstein's recent dumb column on Nick Saban's dumb statements. Fair warning (which is more than Feinstein gave his WaPo readers): there's political content.

All Your Nutt Are Belong To Us

Forget Steve Spurrier. The real Evil Genius in college football isn't even a coach. He's uber-agent Jimmy Sexton.

According to published reports, Sexton's just-unemployed-at-Arkansas client Houston Nutt is in the midst of entertaining offers from Ole MIss and Georgia Tech, both of whom fired their own coaches within the last 72 hours.

That's mind-boggling. Here we have a middling, just run off from his own alma mater coach who'd be the biggest clown in the SEC if not for Les Miles and Ed Orgeron (and I guess now I should limit that to Miles)... and Sexton's got two founding members of the conference firing their coaches and upping the ante to hire the guy. Yeah, they're founding members who ain't what they used to be by a long shot, but still.

Even if this is just another example of Sexton spinning to gullible mediots, it's still amazing. Sexton's evil, but he's like, Darth Vader, Hannibal Lecter evil. You can't help but watch in awe.

UPDATE: Ole Miss "wins" the Nuttstakes, per this AP article in the Clarion-Ledger (I like the Department of Redundancy Department notice about Nutt's record: "He is 111-70 in 15 years as a head coach, compiling a 111-70 record at Arkansas, Boise State and Murray State").

It's obvious that Nutt will be a better coach than Ed Orgeron; then again, my sister's dog would be a better head coach than Ed Orgeron. The questions are whether Nutt can (a) recruit in a small state that unlike Arkansas, he doesn't have to himself, (b) manage the unrealistic (to be polite) expectations of the Ole Miss fanbase, and (c) keep his clown act in enough check to placate the "Ole Miss Whiteheads" who bankroll that program.

Fear The Toes

Back on September 22, the ESPN Gameday circus came to Tuscaloosa for the Alabama-Georgia game. UAT was 3-0, and had just watched Auburn slump to 1-2 with a loss to Mississippi State. The crowd behind ESPN's stage was filled with signs sneering at the cross-state archrival, and most of them were personally directed at Auburn's quarterback: "We Love Brandon Cox" and "Cox For Heisman" were prominently featured for the national television cameras.

As in most of the decisions made in Tuscaloosa over the past decade, putting those signs up turned out to be a spectacularly bad call. By the time the Iron Bowl rolled around, UAT had suffered its own ignominious Crooming, and worse. By the time the Iron Bowl was over, Brandon Cox finished his career with a perfect record against Alabama, and had his own sign for the bammies who'd mocked him a few weeks earlier:


It goes without saying that I've enjoyed all of Auburn's wins during the current streak, but with the possible exception of the 2002 upset, I don't think any of them have been quite as satisfying as Saturday's 17-10 triumph.

I'm willing to bet the Auburn team feels the same way. After eleven months of having The Great Saban shoveled down our throats by the in-state press and legions of loudmouth idiots in Alabama's fan base (as ever, please forgive the redundancy), watching the Tide get outplayed and outcoached for the duration went down sweeter than Toomer's lemonade on a hot August day.

For the last several years, you could get a good read on how Auburn was going to finish a game by watching how they started. Against Florida, Arkansas and LSU, the Tigers came out strong, scoring on their first possession and stuffing the opposition. Against Georgia and MSU, early turnovers led quickly to defensive breakdowns, and things tended to go downhill from there. When AU came out of the gate Saturday to slam Alabama for three-and-out and followed up with a solid opening touchdown drive, they set a tone that UAT couldn't answer, even with help from an interception and some awful officiating later in the game.

There were a lot of reasons why Auburn won again in '07, but the most important was this: Auburn is a lot tougher than Alabama, which is just this side of soft. Rather inexplicably, UAT's coaching staff tried to play AU straight up with the running game rather than attacking the Tigers' most glaring weakness, the long ball. Suffice to say, it didn't work, even with a freshly-un-suspended Glenn Coffee running the ball behind also un-suspended linemen. When Minor--whoops, sorry, Major Applewhite did try to go to the air, Will Muschamp showed that with a strong push up front and a steady cover-two, Sarah Jessica Parker Wilson is an exceptionally average passer.

The much-vaunted Tide passing game rarely got anything done, and never hit the big strike that Auburn fans had been fearing all week. Even with "El Matador" Chris Capps confined to the bench for his last Iron Bowl, UAT's linemen were rarely able to do more than hold and pray nobody would notice; Auburn successfully rushed four defenders for most of the game. The only Alabama receiver even close to impressive was Nikita Stover, who was wiling to take a hit to make a big catch. That's a lot more than I can say for D.J. Hall, who appeared to be more concerned about messing up his pretty hairdo than playing physical football. Hall botched UAT's lone chance to take control of the game just before halftime; his end-zone bobble to Jerraud Powers was the biggest nail in the Tide's sixth coffin.

Not only was the Auburn defense more than capable of stuffing an anemic Tide offense--which is going to be feeling the bruises dispensed Saturday night by Tray Blackmon until roughly 2010--you could tell by AU's first offensive play that Auburn had come prepared for a physical game and Alabama hadn't. Auburn wide receiver Rod Smith laid a crushing, get-off-the-field block on UAT linebacker Rashad Johnson, setting the tone for the rest of the night. Here's a tip: when their wideouts are out-hitting your linebackers, you're probably going to lose. By the game's last meaningful play, Auburn had established dominance across both lines of scrimmage, making Brad Lester's in-your-face 12-yard run on fourth and one perfectly predictable, if no less satisfying.

Defensively, Alabama was lucky that things weren't much worse. Cox's standard workmanlike performance was good enough to win, but if he hadn't misfired on wide-open routes to Carl Stewart in the first half and Smith and Montez Billings in the second, the fourth quarter would have amounted to little more than a formality. Al Borges was able to take advantage of Saban's habit of setting the defense based on the tight end positions by returning to the shifts that served AU so well during 2004-05 (I should add that they've been sorely missed ever since), and turned in a solid game plan, although I think if he'd stuck to the run in the third quarter, the final margin would have been at least a bit larger. Then again, if Auburn had pulled away, we'd have missed the return of that icon of the Mike Shula era, the late, fruitless onsides kick. That would have been a shame.

Believe it or not, this isn't a criticism, but Nick Saban's defense is not one that's known for sophistication or trickery. Again, not kidding, that's to Saban's credit. When he has the players, he'll try and beat you straight up, and in my mind that's smarter tactics than, say, John Thompson's manic scheming. The weakness, of course, is when he doesn't have the players, and he definitely doesn't have them right now. Alabama's front seven is simply no match for a physical offense, and Auburn proved that again by gashing the Tide up the middle for the duration of the game (and with three true freshmen to boot). The contrast between the two teams was striking; on one side you had a finesse-oriented team trying to play smash-mouth, and on the other a physical team doing all the smashing.

Ah, it was fun, maybe best of all because Tommy Tuberville had coached up Auburn to play the kind of football that Alabama claims to take great pride in, while Nick Saban was unable do the same. Cutting corners on discipline and throwing your own players under the bus in the media will do that to you, Nicky. I can only imagine the grimacing among the UAT beat writers who'd been pushing the phony "Tubs is gone to A&M" story for the last couple of months as they watched the carnage. This is what they wanted to see for their team, but instead they had to watch it happen to their team.

$666,666: The Paycheck of the Beast

So, let's see here. UAT's "savior" just finished 6-6 with loss #6 to Auburn. His $4 million annual salary works out to $666,666 per win (none of which, I hasten to add, was earned against Louisiana-Monroe, much less Auburn).

No wonder the little jerk is widely known as "Nick Satan." Makes perfect sense.

Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.

Oh, and bammies: you could have kept Mike Shula, saved $3 million, and still finished 6-6. Heck, Little Mikey proved in '06 that could beat La-Mo (by a lot), so odds are he'd have probably done even better. Talk about wasted money. But then again, you've provided the rest of us with so much entertainment over the last month, maybe it wasn't entirely wasted after all...

Looking At The Numbers

With a combined twenty-two games in the books over the 2007 season, we might as well do a little statistical evaluation of Auburn and Alabama before this Saturday's closer.

Turning to the SEC's official site, the first thing that jumps out at you is how little separation there is between the two teams in most categories. Given Auburn's much-noted offensive woes, you'd think the Tide would be way ahead in scoring offense, but no, UAT is number 7 in the SEC with a 28.4 average while AU is just over a field goal behind at number 9 and 25.0. Conversely, Auburn's reputation as run-first vs. Alabama's more-heralded passing game would make you think the Tigers are way ahead on the ground, but #8 AU actually trails #7 UAT by an average of a rushing yard per game.

This goes on and on. In 15 of the 29 significant categories tracked by the conference, Auburn and Alabama are either right next to each other in the team standings or separated by just one other team (I didn't count stuff like on-side kick recovery, since that's such a rare occurrence that the stats aren't meaningful). One of the more surprisingly-even stats to me was passing efficiency, where both teams are essentially tied near the bottom of the conference pack (AU is #7 at 117.4, UAT #8 at 115.7). Neither team is very good at either converting on third down or stopping opponents from doing the same.

So let's look at where we do see some separation between these teams. The first item that jumps out at you is scoring defense, where Auburn leads the conference allowing 17.3 points a game; Alabama's defense is a respectable #5 with 22.3 ppg, but still nearly a touchdown behind the Tigers. On the other hand, the Tide's large lead in passing offense (#5 at 231.8 vs. AU's #9 at 178.8) gives Alabama a corresponding lead in total offense, but as noted above, that advantage hasn't translated into a lot of additional points on the scoreboard.

The most eye-popping differentials on the page come in a couple of exceptionally important categories. Alabama has a huge advantage in first downs, second in the conference with an impressive 259 over eleven games; Auburn is nearly bringing up the rear at number 10 with fifty (fifty!) fewer first downs. Then again, that offensive production just hasn't been translated into points for the Tide, and surprisingly to me, it also hasn't translated into an advantage in time of possession, where #7 UAT trails #3 AU 29:36 to 31:27. Two minutes can be a very big deal in a game like this.

The second big difference illustrates Auburn's team strength this year, namely the defense. AU is second in the conference in Red Zone Defense, allowing opponents only 15 touchdowns and 10 field goals in 34 red zone situations. Alabama is dead last in this category, allowing points to opponents in scoring position over 90% of the time (30-33, 8 field goals and--ouch--22 touchdowns). That's pretty lousy, especially for a team coached by a "defensive genius." I'd call it a game-decider--but that would assume the Auburn offense can drive to the red zone enough times. I'm not ready to make that claim just yet.

It's worth noting that two categories with big discrepancies could be turned upside-down Saturday due to injuries. Alabama has a big lead in kick returns, but their star returner, Javier Arenas, has a bad ankle sprain and won't play. On the other side, Auburn is bringing up the SEC rear in kickoff returns this year, but the Tigers will welcome speedster Tristan Davis back this week in the lead return slot after a season-long injury spell. How those changes will play out this weekend, I can safely say nobody knows.