We Can't Repel Mockery Of That Magnitude

Chaste Chaddd got wind of Ole Miss's drive for a new mascot, and decided the rest of the SEC should probably get their own Star Wars characters as well. One of my faves on Chaddd's list:

MISSISSIPPI STATE UNIVERSITY (Ewoks)



I remember some purists were upset that George Lucas used a bunch of three-foot furballs to help defeat the Empire in Return of the Jedi. Their reasoning was those little guys, cute as they were, wouldn’t stand a chance against a legion of battle-hardened Stormtroopers. But folks didn’t think Mississippi State had much of a chance against Ole Miss this year either, and how’d that turn out? That being said, State fans hate it when you pet them and try to take them home.

Personally, as much as I approve of the drive to replace Colonel Rebel with Admiral Ackbar (hey, Mississippi does have a coastline--just a really small one), if we were going for verisimilitude in mascots here, Ole Miss football would be accurately represented by one of these:

Da Noorlinzaints!

Under most circumstances, I couldn't possibly care less about the NFL. When I read Stewart Mandel's by-the-numbers recitation of the college football media's conventional wisdom a couple of years back, the only sections that stuck in my mind were Mandel's sharp-tongued rejection of the No Fun League and all its works. In those particulars, I agreed with everything Mandel wrote, right down to the punctuation (which I would quote here, if I hadn't misplaced my copy).

I've never had anything like a favorite NFL team. Like most Southerners, having to choose between the Falcons and the Saints was, for most of either franchise's history, kind of like choosing between Cholera or Bubonic Plague. With the exception of one giddy night in Buckhead eleven years ago, I can honestly say that I've never given a for rip my now-hometown team, and even after having lived in Atlanta for nearly a decade, you still couldn't get me to cross the street to watch the Falcons.

The story isn't all that different regarding the New Orleans Saints. Other than being selected as the "designated Saints fan" among a crowd of Americans when we all went to see New Orleans play Oakland in a London exhibition game twenty years ago (I drew the short straw thanks to my living closer to NOLA than anybody else at that time--but the Saints did win), I can't say I've ever followed the Saints, either.

All that said, I loved this piece by my old bud Lein Shory about the Saints, New Orleans, and the late "Buddy D," more formally known as Bernard Diliberto:

It was at LSU, probably while making the drive to New Orleans or back and forth from Birmingham, that I discovered the Buddy "Buddy D" Dilberto radio show. The Saints were terrible at the time, which always makes for better sports radio, and Buddy was leading the charge for the hiring of Mike Ditka. Ditka didn't work out so well, which continued to make for fun listening. I still vividly remember one caller, in absolute agony after another Saints debacle:

"I don't know what to do, Buddy, I don't know what to do," the fan said.

"There's not much you can do," Buddy said, "except go into the bathroom, lift up the lid, and throw up."

My wife and I moved to Kentucky after finishing at LSU, and it wasn't until we moved to Chicago that I found sports radio just as amusing as Buddy D's show. Every once in a while I could somehow pick up AM 870 (I think that was the channel) to get another taste of Buddy, and I was saddened to hear of his death in 2005.

I mourned Buddy D as well. In the days before internet streaming, before satellite radio, and before college football was something other than a one-day affair for ESPN, there were WWL out of New Orleans and WLAC out of Nashville. After dark, those high-powered AM stations were a college football fan's best friend. You could hear LSU or Tennessee games live on Saturday nights, and on the weekdays there were the call-in shows bursting with news and opinion about SEC football.

Buddy D's show, while usually geared more towards the Saints than LSU and the SEC, was still as entertaining as all get out--much more entertaining to me than the Saints games themselves. Buddy's roux-thick NOLA accent cut through the static, and virtually every sentence was punctuated with Buddy's two favorite words--"Da Noorinzaints!"

Sure, for anybody else that would be four words, but from Buddy, and from all the other lunatics down there in the curve of I-10, they were and ever shall be DA NOORLINZAINTS! The first thing I thought when I heard the Saints had won the last playoff game a couple of weeks ago was, "I wish I could hear Buddy D tomorrow."

So for you, Buddy, and for all the long-suffering fans of DA NOORLINZAINTS, my hat is off, and if I were ever to have a rooting interest in a Super Bore--uh, I mean, Bowl, this'll be the time.

Go Saints.

Small Blog World

By now, chances are you've seen this fascinating clip of the "negotiations" between associate athletic director Bud Ford (as far as I can tell, Ford is what we used to call a Sports Information Director) and the press regarding how ex-Tennessee head coach Lane Kiffin's "Screw you guys, I'm goin' home!" statement would be covered by the media:



For reasons I don't pretend to understand--as somebody in the clip notes, Kiffin was no longer an employee of Tennessee, so why exactly the UT athletic department was helping to enforce his wishes at that point is a very open question--Ford was trying to mandate an off-camera statement followed by an on-camera statement.

The reporter on the right of the screen, often mis-identified in blogs and message boards as ESPN's Chris Low, was actually WBIR-Knoxville news director Bill Shory. Bill is also the brother of my old friend and Auburn classmate Lein Shory (yes, that's right, UT fans, Bill is originally from... Alabama. Sorry, Bill, hope that revelation doesn't make your life more difficult).

As you'll see if you watch the whole thing, Bill won the argument, as he should have. Knox (and Kiffin, for that matter) had no business putting restrictions on the media in that situation.

(Cross-posted to WillCollier.com.)

The First Part Is Not A Joke.

ESPN is reporting that Lane Kiffen has accepted Pete Carroll's old job at USC.

Just wow. Can you say, "panic hire," kids? I thought you could!

In completely unrelated news, Houston Nutt and Bobby Petrino were both arrested after getting into slapfight over who got to call their agent first...

UPDATE: Tennessee center Josh McNeil absolutely unloads on Kiffykins here. A must-read.

Pete Carroll Pulls A Calipari

Per multiple media outlets, Pete Carroll has resigned from Southern Cal, and will be returning to the No Fun League as Seattle's new head coach.

Carroll is almost certainly getting out while the getting is good. USC recently tried sanctioning its own basketball team in a transparent attempt to "plea bargain" the NCAA away from leveling stiff penalties on the cash-cow of football. Not being stupid, Carroll knows there here's no particular reason to think that tactic is going to work, and thus is skipping town ahead of the sheriff.

Check out this long notebook-dump story (and I don't mean that as a perjorative in this case) from Yahoo Sports investigative reporter Dan Wetzl, who along with Josh Peter absolutely busted USC for serial NCAA violations while the rest of the media was busy giving the Trojans a group tongue-bath. Here's an exerpt from the particularly interesting last section:

The Trojans represent a must-get for the NCAA, a case that is so over-the-top, so well-publicized and so blatantly against the most obvious of rules that it can’t allow the Trojans to escape without losing all credibility and dealing with an avalanche of national criticism. Many in college athletics wonder that if the NCAA can’t get USC, what’s the point of the operation?

Part of it is jealousy of the juggernaut Carroll built. Part of it is because of the huge financial numbers, the documents, taped conversations and a tell-all book. Part of it is because Bush hasn’t helped his cause. That includes paying a reported $300,000 to Michael Michaels, the man who owned the rent-free home, in a settlement that included an unusual clause that prohibited Michaels from speaking with the NCAA.

All of this is why the NCAA has been so slow and cautious. Here’s how the system works: The NCAA enforcement staff (the cops) get one chance to present their findings to the infractions committee (the jury). That jury has built a recent reputation for turning a blind eye on even obvious violations, in part because it’s mostly made up of sympathetic athletic directors.

In the Bush case, the enforcement staff patiently has waited for all the possible facts to come out. This includes Bush’s potential under oath testimony in a lawsuit filed by Lake. If the NCAA acted swiftly, it would’ve missed out on speaking with Bush (or getting sworn testimony) and thus presented a weaker case to the jury.

You Can't Spell "Tuberville" Without An "Arrrr"

From ESPN:

Former Auburn coach Tommy Tuberville has been named the next football coach at Texas Tech, the school announced Saturday.

His deal is for five years and in the range of $2 million a year, a source told ESPN.com's Chris Low.

"It's great to be back in the game again," Tuberville told ESPN.com's Ivan Maisel when reached on his cell phone in Auburn, Ala.

Texas Tech made the offer, and Tuberville accepted, a little before 2 p.m., EST.

A news conference was set for Sunday at 3 p.m. ET in Lubbock. Tuberville and his family were to fly in Saturday night.

Having lived in Texas for a couple of years and knowing a few Tech graduates, I think Tuberville will be a good fit out there. Texas Tech had the only fan base that was worth a damn in the old Southwest Conference (i.e., they actually travel to away games, and they get loud more than once or twice a game), and I suspect Tubs' laid-back personality with be something of a relief after ten years of Mike Leach's general weirdness.

I did find this bit from the ESPN article more than a bit ironic, given his history at Auburn:

Tuberville, 55, became a strong candidate when it was determined he would not insist on hiring his own staff, a source told ESPN.com's Maisel. Tuberville also will not cost Tech a contract buyout.

Nothing Changes On New Year's Day

By your thirteenth game, you are what you are. There are very rare counter-examples (notably including the only successful outing of Tony Franklin as an Auburn coach, just two years ago), but almost all of the time the team you field a bowl game with is not substantially different than the one you had in the preceding season. Even with a month of extra practice, you're not going to get a night-and-day change from what you already were.

Accordingly, Auburn's Outback Bowl team in the opening hours of 2010 was what Auburn had been in the 2009 season: inconsistent. Transition years are almost always like that. Players and coaches haven't had years together to develop rapport; the majority of the team was recruited by entirely different coaches for two or three entirely different schemes. Making things worse, it's a very unusual first year when the new head coach isn't there precisely because the team is coming off at least one really bad season.

In the bowl, the Tigers ranged from explosively good to can't-stand-to-look bad, with heaping helpings of merely mediocre in between--all in the same game. Just about everything we'd seen over the course of the season was repeated, from the dazzling effectiveness of Gus Malzahn's offense when it's clicking to the infuriating rash of self-defeating penalties. Bowl games in general, given the month-long break between games, are notorious for being sloppy, but both Auburn and Northwestern seemed determined to set new records for on-field buffoonery in Tampa.

In a way, the only thing really consistent about this team was its inconsistency. For the third straight game, Auburn roared out to a two-touchdown lead, but still had to fight down to the last second (and beyond, in this case). Malzahn's play calling continued on the path of alternately blazing down the field and then stuttering badly for long stretches. For the life of me, I can't figure out why Malzahn is still inserting Kodi Burns at inappropriate times, or why he didn't let Ben Tate continue to punish the Northwestern defense late in the first half. The long, painful third quarter was as frustrating to watch as any of this season's second-half stalls--but then you look at the blitzkrieg of Auburn offense in the fourth quarter and remember what this offense is capable of when it's working.

Certainly the next time we see this offense, it will be very different. You can quote me multi-starred recruits all day long, but losing Tate is going to hurt. You can't replace his combination of size and speed and bone-crushing power with a freshman, no matter how heralded, and there's not a back on the current roster with anything like Tate's track record. Chris Todd certainly had his limitations at quarterback, including Brandon Cox-like immobility, but nobody at this point can deny that Todd is a gamer. His successor will certainly lack experience; Auburn can only hope that whomever that player is, he'll have a Todd-like portion of resilience and command. A couple more dependable receivers and some better pass protection wouldn't hurt things any, either.

Auburn struggled against the pass all year, and got worse against it as injuries attritted the defensive two-deep to more like a one-and-a-quarter-deep. Northwestern rarely even tried to run the ball Friday, which in and of itself made Ted Roof's decision to stick with a nickel package for most of the game look sensible--but if the Tigers' defense in the nickel was considered optimal for covering the pass, I'd have hated to have seen what the 4-3 would have looked like. Roof was certainly right when he implied in his postgame comments that the Big-12 officiating crew weren't going to call holding on Northwestern under any circumstances (just check the game's last play, which featured at least two Wildcats clutching Auburn jerseys from behind), and I'm as aware as anybody of Auburn's numbers woes at linebacker... but good grief, 47 completions for 539 yards? Just ugly.

But then you look at the game again, and remember the five interceptions that led to three touchdowns, and see the defense just shutting down Northwestern in overtime. If not for a gift penalty, the Wildcats would have been buried around the 20 for most of that crucial stretch--and Auburn still managed to hold them out of the end zone to win the game, even after the penalty. It's not that the defense (or the team) was awful for the whole game... they were just awful at some very inopportune times.

They were also wonderful at some entirely opportune times. Walt McFadden had the game of his career, clocking in with eight solo tackles, the two huge interceptions, and fighting through an injury for most of the game. He couldn't come out; there's just nobody left to replace him. Neiko Thorpe was beaten up a lot on the boards and in the media over the last month, but he saved the day Friday, never falling for the goofy fumblerooskie play and making the game-ending tackle despite being held from behind. The front four were left isolated for almost all the game with very little blitz support, but they still wore down the hold-happy Northwestern linemen, and dominated them in overtime. The Wildcats' Mike Kafka must have been seeing Jake Ricks and Antonio Coleman in his sleep all this weekend.

There's plenty more that ought to be said, but it'd take almost as long as the four-hour-plus bowl game itself. The penalties were obviously awful, although it didn't help much that the Big-12 crew seemed intent on only throwing flags in one direction. Ditto for the turnovers, which were nobody's fault but Auburn's. We all got a lesson in the value of a solid placekicker (or the lack therof), and with a year left to play, Wes Byrum is already in the record books as one of AU's all-time greats.

It was a wild, frustrating, exhilarating game, one that lived both up to and down to the season that preceded it. You wouldn't want to live through it twice, but you can't deny that it was a hell of a ride.

I'll be back later in the week with some overall thoughts on 2009.

Bloomin' Early

AuburnSports.com is reporting that Auburn has accepted a bid to play in the 2010 Outback Bowl in Tampa. The opponent will be either Wisconsin or Northwestern; which one is to be determined after the Badgers play Hawaii this Saturday.

Have to say that I'm quite surprised, although pleasantly so. Getting a New Year's Day bowl in his first year is a pretty darn nice feather in Gene Chizik's cap. And yes, Jay Jacobs deserves a big attaboy for his part in landing the bid. The only bad part is that awful kickoff time--ten in the ay-em.

Not There Yet

When asked over the past two weeks how Auburn might be able to beat Alabama, I replied, "Get a lead early and hold on late." In this case, it's not very comforting to have been right. Auburn was able to do the first, and in spectacular fashion, but as most of us feared, not the second.

Even so, there can be little doubt that this was the best possible effort from the 2009 Auburn defense. I'm still stunned that Auburn was able to completely shut down Mark Ingram while playing the same three linebackers for the entire football game. I completely expected Alabama to man up and wear down the defense with the run in the second half, but that contingency never even threatened to materialize. The Antonio Coleman-led front four utterly shut down the rightly-vaunted Tide running attack, and linebackers Craig Stevens, Josh Bynes and Jonathan Evans all played the games of their lives. The only shame I can find is that Auburn just didn't have anybody to spell them with. I'm not about to get mad at a secondary full of freshman for giving up yardage on the game-winning drive--especially when they had to do so against a team playing rules-optional football.

There was some grousing last week over Pat Dye's observation that Tommy Tuberville's recruiting over his last three years was weak. I can see how you could argue that Dye shouldn't be running down one of his successors in public, but it's very hard to argue that what Dye said wasn't accurate. Fifteen Auburn defenders registered tackles on Friday, compared to 24 for Alabama. Those extra nine guys (and the lack thereof on the Tiger side) made a huge difference in the second half. Lack of depth is not an excuse--you play the Iron Bowl with the players you have--but an excuse is not the same thing as a reason. Thanks in no small part to the previous staff's fall-off in recruiting, Auburn just didn't have enough players this time around, and it cost the Tigers what would have been a monumental win.

There was a moment, midway through the third quarter, when the sense of opportunity was palpable. With a touchdown's lead, Auburn's defense stuffed alleged Heisman frontrunner Ingram on four straight plays to reclaim possession, and you could feel the electricity surging through the stadium all the way down to your marrow. Every instinct shouted that a Tiger touchdown here would put the game away--and those instincts turned out to be correct. But instead, Auburn went three-and-out, and aided by (wait for it) a needless penalty, Alabama then managed a short drive and a field goal to recover a modicum of momentum.

While giving due credit to Alabama's excellent front seven--which does a great deal to mask a pretty pedestrian secondary outside of Javier Arenas--it's hard not to suspect that Gus Malzahn "went Tuberville" after getting that quick lead. Nick Saban's defense has always been susceptible to motion and misdirection. Utah famously ate it alive last year with misdirection and tempo, and all Al Borges had to do to discombobulate it in 2007 was move his tight ends around before the snap. Malzahn took advantage of those tendencies, and exploited the weak UAT secondary--big time--in all of Auburn's scoring drives.

So why, after blazing down the field for two scores, as well as after the second-half bomb to Darvin Adams, did Auburn go into a shell and insist on running Ben Tate into the tackles all those times? Alabama blitzes as well as anybody in the country, and Auburn hasn't handled the blitz well all season--so why insist on having Chris Todd try to throw from the pocket in predictable situations with little or no motion? And where'd the tempo game go? Beyond the Tigers' one long touchdown drive, it scarcely appeared for the rest of the game.

Some of the answer is surely that Alabama played better defense late than they did early, but I suspect those two floated Todd passes in the general direction of Tommy Trott on AU's third possession are the main answer. I'm no mind-reader, but it sure looked like Malzahn decided at that point that he was going to play close to the vest and avoid turnovers from then on out. Getting back to the numbers game, I'm sure it also made a big difference that Auburn essentially only has two wide receivers, making it easier on the defense to cover Terrell Zackery and Adams tight and ignore everybody else most of the time.

* * *

It took a while for the game to sink in. There's no doubt it was a great football game, one of the better AU/UAT scraps in recent history, but losing a great game can feel a lot worse than just getting stomped. It's worse when the outcome is a surprise, as in 2001 (or 2002 for the Tide fans), and worse still when you had it in your hands, but still lost.

The fact is that the shellacking of 2008 meant a great deal more to Alabama fans and the in-state media (please forgive the redundancy) than it did to Auburn fans. That outcome had been telegraphed for a good two months before the game ever kicked off, and nobody was particularly surprised when Auburn came out on the bad end of a lopsided score. Don't get me wrong, it still sucked (plenty), but the general reaction in Auburndom was more of a wincing shrug than an offended scream. When you know for weeks in advance that you have no particular hope of winning, losing doesn't have as much of a bite. In terms of pain and/or outrage, 2008 didn't even register on the same scale as say, 1985 or 2001. The 2009 game didn't hit those low marks, and certainly not in terms of the play on the field, but it's still one that nobody's going to forget anytime soon.

While I am immensely proud of how well these guys played on Friday, I'm not remotely inclined to declare a "moral victory." While I do believe such things exist, I think they're a bit like Halley's Comet, something that might occur once in a lifetime as opposed to every few years (and certainly not, as the press seemed to assert during Mike Shula's tenure at UAT, every few ball games). The last one I'd hang my hat on at Auburn would be the 1982 Georgia game, and AU would have to fall very far for a very long time before anybody could talk about recovering from a programmatic slump akin to 1975-81. Nothing like that has happened here; AU had a bad year in 2008, followed by a decent rebuilding season in 2009. That's not the stuff of "moral victories," it just means you've got more work to do to get back to where you've been.

It is a small comfort that the 2009 game served, at least for a short time, to smack down the overweening arrogance of the crimson polyester set that had been growing like bacteria in a sewer (although not as attractively) since September of last year. Based on what little I heard from the in-state call-in shows and from friends and family with the misfortune to be living in Alabama during 2008-09, the UAT fan yahoo and media concensus (again, pardon the redundancy) was that Alabama could roll in and whip Auburn by an even greater margin than '08 with just their third team. The rather different reality was enough to short circuit the classless "rammer jammer" cheer (I guess "we just escaped by the skin of our teeth!" doesn't have very much punch), although I doubt it'll matter as much to the can't-spell-college morons populating the Tide bandwagon these days.

But beyond the sidewalk alumni, I suspect this game did put a considerable dent in the smug confidence among the UAT booster set that every season from now on was going to be a replay of 1979. When Auburn collapsed amidst an Alabama surge last year and then hired a lightly-regarded head coach in Gene Chizik, that bunch thought the days of easy wins, cheap media adulation and complete disregard for the rules were back for good.

Having eked out a win, no doubt many of those bozos have already convinced themselves that, "it was just a rivalry game on the road," or other such rationalization… but what they can't say (at least not honestly) is that they expect for Auburn to be nothing more than a bump in their road for decades to come. That particular delusion has been put to rest; like it or not, they know today that the Auburn team that took their best squad in a generation right down to the wire is also the worst Auburn team they'll get to play against for the forseeable future.

That said, it's obviously not an ideal outcome. It's not even close to one. I'd rather have the win.

The Wages of Inconsistency

It's been a very long time since a football game made me as angry as this one did. It shouldn't have; there have been plenty of losses far less explicable over the past five years--Vanderbilt last season, Georgia again in 2006, and practically any game this decade against Arkansas--but this one, for the time being, took the furious cake.

The loss wasn't an utter debacle; Auburn completely dominated the first quarter, and (rather obviously, given Demond Washington's 99-yard return), the special teams had by far their best game of the year. But in a game played by the two most penalty-prone teams in the conference, and against the SEC's most prolific granter of turnovers, AU wound up on the bad side of both counts, giving up 60 penalty yards--often at the worst possible moments--and committing two awful interceptions. Georgia, which had averaged more than two giveaways a game going in, didn't turn the ball over once. This kind of turnabout has become entirely too familiar in the recent losing streak to the Bulldogs: every time they play Auburn lately, Georgia manages to stop doing the bad things they've been doing a lot of, and start doing good things they haven't done well at all.

Then again, Georgia, even while playing well, couldn't do it all themselves. They got entirely too much help from Auburn. After ten games, it was no particular surprise that a one-deep-at-best Auburn defense gave up a lot of yards and points in the second half. The Tigers are playing two true freshmen and a sophomore in the secondary, and after Eltoro Freeman went out with a concussion, the defense had, at best, two SEC-caliber players left at linebacker.

But nobody expected this defense to play lights-out for 60 minutes. What was a lot more troubling was the offense's lapse into foot-shooting and predictability when it needed to keep pouring on the points. That, of course, didn't happen. The running game never got in a groove, and pass protection broke down badly in the second half.

The third quarter simply killed Auburn. The Tigers had only two posessions, yielding a three-and-out and a field goal. By contrast, Georgia held the ball for nearly twelve minutes and tacked on 10 points, with another touchdown coming less than a minute into the final period. After an interception gave UGA an easy drive for their final score, Washingon's kick return heroics and a mammoth but ultimately fruitless fourteen-play AU drive weren't enough. And once again, no really critical Auburn play--even one coming after consecutive time outs--can be considered complete without a false start from three-year starter Lee Ziemba, who still can't manage to stay in position until the ball is snapped.

I can understand Ted Roof wanting to protect a couple of freshman safeties, and it's worth noting that Auburn pretty much controlled A.J. Green, limiting the supposed best player on the field to three catches and 19 yards. But Auburn's pass rush died off somewhere in the second period, and given plenty of time and an effective running game, particularly in the second half, Joe Cox was able to get the ball to Green's teammates often enough to play catch-up and then some.

Why was this game so frustrating? Sure, part of it was losing again to a team that Auburn had been consistently beating two-out-of-three over the last generation or so. Part of it was handing a lifeline--again--to a faltering major rival. But I think what really got to me was seeing this team play so damn well and so damn badly all in the same game.

By the end of last year, there was no expectation of good play from Auburn. The team fell apart in early October, and by November was essentially un-coached. Losing was neither a surprise nor particularly painful. The loss to Georgia in 2008 was almost comforting, in that the Tigers turned in arguably their best effort of that dismal season.

This time around, though, we've seen this team play at a very high level--as well as a very low one, on a couple of occasions, but whatever else it's been, 2009 has definitely not been what Jerry used to call a "season of DEATH." And that, I think, is what made this one so hard to take. It's not the losing so much as knowing that the team is capable of being so much better, to the point of seeing exceptionally high quality play on the field, in this very game, but then also seeing a team that's still unable to maintain any consistency for sixty minutes.

And paying the price for it.

Time Out

Sorry for the radio silence so far this week; I was on the road most of Sunday and Monday, and real life that piled up over the weekend is still interfering with a Georgia recap at the moment. I should have something up by sometime Wednesday.

If you're so inclined, you can click on over to willcollier.com to see what I was up to the last couple of days, including live-from-my-iPhone video of Monday's Space Shuttle launch.

Homecoming

The best thing about Homecoming, 2009: for the first Auburn game in what feels like an eternity, it didn't rain. Blue skies, bright sun, a stadium full of children and a game that was over before it started.

For all the heat Jay Jacobs takes for goofy scheduling (much of it deserved), this one was exquisitely well-timed. Light work against Furman after nine straight weeks of football was just what Auburn needed. The starters did everything they wanted to and then took the second half off, giving everybody this side of the waterboys a chance to get some snaps in a real game.

From a coaching standpoint, it was very nice to see such crisp execution (give or take the defense on Furman's opening field goal drive) and businesslike play against a ferociously outmanned opponent. You can grumble about the Paladins' fourth-quarter scores if you want to, but understand, that was basically against the scout team defense, and guys who might never see an actual game again in their careers. If Gene Chizik had pulled an Urban Meyer and left his starters in for the second half, he'd probably have been able to threaten John Heisman's scoring record.

The worst thing, of course, was losing Travante Stallworth, most likely for the rest of the season, to an ankle injury. Next-to-worst was the continuing horror that is Auburn's punt return game, which gave Furman a gift-wrapped score when Phillip Pierre-Louis fumbled the ball away on the six yard line early in the third quarter. That's awful against anybody, and it'll be fatal against either of the two remaining opponents.

Freshman Anthony Gulley, on the other hand, is what you might call a "good problem." Gulley played just about every position except the interior line and kicker on Saturday, including time at cornerback, receiver, and oh yeah, running back, where he scored two touchdowns and wound up being Auburn's leading rusher for the game. Given the parlous state of depth in the secondary, I'm guessing we'll see him at corner (if anywhere) for the remainder of the season, but he's obviously a kid with a very bright future.

There's really very little else to be said about Homecoming--although one could, if they liked, note the outstanding day from both Auburn quarterbacks, who combined for an eye-popping 27 of 30 and 373 passing yards--but it's well worth comparing this game to last year's 37-20 swan song against Tennessee Martin.

Auburn didn't pull ahead in that one until the middle of the third quarter, and didn't put the game away until early in the fourth--and even with that, the lowly Skyhawks got deep into Auburn territory three times in the second half. There wasn't a lot of scout team participation in that game, and anybody who left with a good feeling was probably still in pre-school.

The comparison is as stark as it is instructive. As Jerry notes, the Furman game was as relaxing for an Auburn fan as a cozy February afternoon in a comfy chair next to a roaring fireplace. The UTM game 360-odd years ago, er, wasn't. Things are a just a tad different this year, and entirely for the better.

Signs Of Life

When the Ole Miss game started, it was hard not to be swept up in a depressing wave of déjà vu. All the pieces were lined up: early kickoff, a bad three-game losing streak, and playing against a coach who'd made a career out of bedeviling Auburn. The defense promptly did a good impression of a worn-down speed bump, giving up a 96-yard touchdown drive, the offense's response was stopped by--wait for it--a badly-timed penalty, and petered out with a field goal. Not too much later, Chris Todd badly overthrew a wide-open Terrell Zachery on a deep route, the third such miss in four games.

If you'd walked in optimistic--and I confess, I did not--it must have been pretty tough to keep your chin up at that point. When Zac Etheridge was strapped to a back board and rolled out of the stadium with a very scary injury--one that must have been nauseatingly familiar to the Ole Miss fans in particular--it looked like matters had gone from bad to absolutely abysmal.

The best thing that happened afterwards, of course, was the news that Etheridge has regained motion in all of his extremities, and is expected to make a full recovery, although he'll probably have to give up football. The last is terrible for somebody who loves the game as much as Etheridge, but it still beats the hell out of an injury that could have crippled him for the rest of his life.

The next-best treat this Halloween was seeing Etheridge's teammates get up off the deck and start playing like a real football team again. Ted Roof has deserved some of the criticism he's received over the past month. His secondary continues to play with too-soft cushions, for instance, but let's give him some credit today: after that ugly first drive, he was able to adjust to bring more pressure on Jevan Snead, making that first touchdown drive the Rebels' last for the day. Holding any SEC team to one drive and one big play was something I really didn't think Auburn was capable of this year. I cordially despise "bend, don't break" as a defensive philosophy, but I suspect it's all Roof is able to do with the current team. When it works, and it did work Saturday, he deserves the recognition.

One funny thing that struck me was the general pointlessness of running trick plays against these two defenses. Houston Nutt's playbook has more goofy doo-doo plays than anybody's this side of Lubbock, Texas, and Gus Malzahn isn't far behind him. You run trick plays generally because you think you can surprise the other guy's defense and get a big gain or a score, but in this case, the other defense has seen this stuff in every day of practice, making them pretty hard to fool. That didn't stop either coach from pulling out most of his stops on Saturday, but with the exceptions of about two plays (both of them from Auburn), almost none of the doo-doo worked.

What did work for Auburn was the at-long-last return of Todd and the deep passing game. After that early misfire, Todd apparently settled down, and got a ton of help from Zachery, who managed to pull in a couple of astonishing catches in close coverage. The big second quarter reception that set up AU's first touchdown looked like it broke the dam; after that Todd was comfortable putting the ball down the field, and Zachery and Darvin Adams continued to pull it down with one acrobatic reception after another. That finally freed up Gus Malzahn's offense to "do what it does," namely get the defense out of position with misdirection and then go at them faster than they can recover. When the Ole Miss safeties had to step back to defend the long ball, it was Ben Tate time (with some welcome help from Mario Fannin), and Tate, now the #13 rusher in the nation, was more than happy to provide still more punishment in his stellar senior season.

After the first couple of series, I don't think anybody on the planet expected Auburn to rattle off 31 unanswered points. Midway through perhaps the longest and certainly the weirdest third quarter in recorded history, AU was up 31-7, and I think if the Tigers had stopped the Rebs on their next possession or two, the game would have been over right there. Unfortunately for my blood pressure, Auburn proceeded to give up a kickoff return for a touchdown and then a McCluster bolt for another score, but the defense woke up again, grabbed the first two-point runback in Jordan-Hare I can recall since the '96 LSU game (that one went for the other team), and shut down Ole Miss for the duration. Not letting the Rebels get back in the game, even after the slightly-flukey instant two touchdowns, speaks pretty well of all those young guys on the defense.

While any win after three straight losses is a good one, and an upset win over a conference opponent is better still, this was a very long way from a complete victory. It was a win Auburn had to have to rescue this season, but one that still clearly showed long-term problems, not least being the still-dreadful kick coverage and return game. I think we can say now that the offense has found its bearings again, but it's still entirely too inconsistent, and has to get back to making sustained scoring drives. Auburn can't rely on the big play to bail them out every week. The scoreless fourth quarter was a comedy of errors for both AU and UM on offense, and the Tigers wouldn't have survived it against a better team--although I was very heartened to see AU pound out a couple of first downs to seal the game; it's been a long time since they were able to do that.

The thing is though, Ole Miss isn't all that good. Snead is one of those guys with a big arm but no head to match. A few good games and a ton of media adulation apparently went straight to the aforementioned head, and now the kid thinks he's Dan Marino. He's not; like many highly-touted QB's with limited experience, if you can get him in pressure situations it's just a matter of time until he throws the ball to your defense. Dexter McCluster is just an outstanding running back, but besides him and maybe Shay Hodge, the Rebels don't have a lot on offense. The defense is better, no doubt thanks to Ed Orgeron's leftovers, but Houston Nutt's televangelist clown act has apparently already run its course in Oxford. It'll be highly entertaining to watch the reactions of the most delusional fan base in the SEC (at least when results vs. expectations are taken into account) if their formerly-number-four Rebels finish the season with a 1-4 collapse.

But enough about that bunch. The doldrums of October are behind us, and Auburn is back on the winning side, and two very winnable games away from a long-needed open date. Homecoming should provide an opportunity to rest just about everybody who's been worn down to date, and play everybody who hasn't. After that, Gene Chizik will have his opportunity to live up to September's bright promise… or not.

Houston Nutt's Halloween

"I got a rock."

Full Circle

There's a palpable air of disgust among Auburn fans since the team's most recent debacle, this time a never-close-for-a-moment blowout in Baton Rouge. One bad loss--Arkansas--could be shrugged off as a blip. A second--Kentucky--might be rationalized as a young team struggling to reestablish its identity. But three in a row, with the last coming in spectacularly inept fashion, that can't be acknowledged as anything less than a very ugly trend.

From the rash of mental errors on the field to the ubiquitous and ridiculous sight of former ticket office manager (and Jay Jacobs' BFF) Tim Jackson lurking around on the sidelines, an Auburn machine that ran with scarcely a hitch through September has thrown every conceivable rod in October. You didn't have to be a mind reader to hear the thoughts of the dispirited faces of the AU players and fans in Tiger Stadium. They sang out loud and clear: "Here we go again."

For opponents, the recipe for beating Auburn--soundly--is right back to where it was a year ago: stuff the run, get a lead, and cruise. That's all you need to do, because Auburn can't hurt you down the field, and their defense is too thin to stop you.

Chris Todd was either injured against Tennessee (and I strongly suspect that to be the case), or he's simply lost his mojo. Either way, Todd can no longer make the throws he was nailing for the first four and a half games, and by now everybody Auburn plays knows it. With the long threat gone, defenses can just stuff the run early and tee off on Todd late. All the misdirection in the world doesn't do you any good when the defense knows you're limited to the first 20 yards past the line of scrimmage. The safeties can just stay home and the defensive line can pin its ears back and go after you. Under those conditions, the magic of early 2009 has precipitously faded right back to the immobility of 2008. And of course it doesn't help any that the offensive line has gone right back to jumping offsides at the worst possible moments, or that Auburn still doesn't have a punt returner who can be trusted not to fumble a fair catch.

Auburn's defense hasn't had anything resembling a pass rush since late in the West Virginia game, and whether due to lack of players or just poor strategy, defensive coordinator Ted Roof is looking worse and worse as the opposing scores keep running up. And I think it's safe to say that the early season rumormongering about Gus Malzahn leaving in December to take a head coaching job aren't going to be heard again so long as his offense is averaging in the single-digits, as it has over the last two weeks (if you take out the meaningless garbage-time touchdown late Saturday night, it's a shining five point average).

I'd like to come up with something positive here, but the best thing I can say is that LSU wasn't able to run the ball all that much against Auburn. Of course, LSU hasn't been running the ball against much of anybody this year, and since they were able to throw pretty much at will against Auburn, they really didn't have to run if they didn't want to, so the point is rather moot.

Try as I might, I can't see how you don't look at this team and think that the wheels have come off. As to what that says about the young Gene Chizik era, the best thing I can say is that first years are rarely indicative of future performance (here's the canonical example). Recruiting and attrition have been so horrendous recently, Auburn might as well have been on probation for the past three years; the Tigers are playing with at least fifteen fewer scholarships than their opponents, and one glance at the defense tells you that in terms of SEC talent, things are even worse than that.

But even a team with limited numbers can play with discipline, and keep fighting on every play. Auburn's not doing either one right now, and that's a damning indictment of a coaching staff that certainly appears to have lost their team, and their way.

Bad To Worse

It's a sportswriting trope--and a truism--that there's nothing new under the sun (or the lights). Sports and the teams that play them have cycles, and if you watch long enough, you'll see the same things happen again and again to very different people.

Almost exactly eleven years ago, Auburn fandom watched in shock as Terry Bowden up and split halfway through a disastrous season. At that time, the fan base itself was split, divided between those who'd had enough of Bowden's antics and those who thought he'd been unfairly pushed out by the "power brokers." But roughly a year after that, the number of Terry's defenders dropped away precipitously as it became painfully clear just how bare the cupboard had become in the latter years of his tenure. The then-new Tuberville staff wasn't free of blame for the mid-season losing streak of 1999 (playing not to lose cost them close games against both Mississippis, for instance), but it was clear from early October that they were dealing from a very limited deck.

Watching Auburn's defense trying in vain to bottle up Kentucky's running game on Saturday night was probably enough to remove any lingering nostalgia for the Tommy Tuberville era among Auburn fans. While Gene Chizik and Ted Roof will and should share some of the blame for the current mess on the field, neither can do anything about the two or three years of lackadaisical recruiting that brought us to this point. It's hard to locate even half a dozen starters who'd make the two-deep on any SEC defense this side of Nashville, and I'm sorry to say that Tuberville's legendary laziness is largely to blame.

The problems aren't limited to simple talent deficiencies. All those defenders leaving their feet or vainly grasping at passing ankles goes right back to not having practiced adequately. Lack of numbers and fear of injuries on defense led Chizik to ban full-speed tackling during the week. Unfortunately for Auburn, the numbers aren't going to get any better from here on out, and it's still up to Chizik and Roof to find some workable answers. Yes, they're limited in what they can do, but what they've been doing so far isn't enough.

Of course, the defense wouldn't be so much of a concern if the offense hadn't come 360 degrees back around to its flailing level of a year ago. Back in August, you would never have convinced me that Auburn could average scoring 40-plus points over five games--and after those five games, you'd have had a hard time convincing anybody that the Tigers could be held to seven offensive points... against Kentucky. But all of that still happened.

The reasons why aren't that hard to hash out. Gus Malzahn's offense is quarterback-centric, and Chris Todd is on his second consecutive bad outing. But what's far worse is that apparently five games worth of film was all that was needed for two very middling defensive teams to out-scheme the Mad Scientist. During the first half, when Todd would step up and fake a snap count, then look to the sidelines for the check play, Kentucky's defensive backfield would almost always shift... and far more often than not, they shifted to the right places to stop that play.

I did a little checking around on Sunday to make sure I wasn't seeing things, but the consensus was pretty clear: Malzahn is showing his cards. He's playing to consistent tendencies, and his opposition has figured that out. When both Arkansas and Kentucky are blowing up your plays left and right, that's as clear a sign as you can get that you've tipped your hand. Malzahn's offense is highly dependent upon misdirection and confusing the defense, but I'm here to tell you: they weren't confused these last two weeks. It doesn't say anything good that nobody realized that after the Arkansas game--or worse, they did realize it, but didn't do anything about it.

Maybe worse than the lack of performance, Auburn showed a distressing lack of composure and discipline for the first time this year. Just when the offense finally looked like it could put together a decent second-half drive, five consecutive penalties effectively ended the game. That's something nobody can blame on Tommy Tuberville. Whether the penalty on the goofy third-down trick play was correctly called or not, it's up to the coaches to warn the referee ahead of time when you're going to pull something like that. If you don't, you're running the risk of confusing the officials, and confused officials penalize first and apologize later (if that).

Add all that up and you've got a very bad combination. After a boffo start, Auburn is now way off its moorings, and there are some very nasty storms rolling up on the horizon.

For almost all of the last staff's tenure, one of Tuberville's better traits was his ability to coach up his assistants when matters got particularly dire (although one of his worst traits was the converse; when things were going well, Tubs didn't bother). Now that responsibility falls to Chizik. It's up to him to push Malzahn's schemes away from where his opposite numbers can predict what's coming, and to get Roof and the defense on track regarding basic fundamentals. If he can't do either (and very likely if he can't do both), it's hard to see how he's going to do better than break even in his first season as head coach.

But I Don't Like Spam

When the game time for Arkansas was announced late last weekend, I had a mind to put up a short post linking to previous early-kickoff debacles against the Razorbacks. I never had the time to go chase down the links (last week was exceptionally busy in the real world), but it would have looked something like this:

So the Arkansas game will be kicking off at 11AM. What could possibly go wrong?

... and, of course, this Saturday's game wound up being yet another can of rancid Spam for breakfast.

I could try and be cool here and rant about how I don't get how this keeps happening, but the truth is really pretty plain: Auburn just doesn't take playing lightly-regarded Arkansas teams seriously, and as you can see by perusing the above links (to which I could have added 1992 and 1995, even though the latter wasn't a day game), the results of that casual disdain are usually pretty ugly.

Arkansas 2009 was fundamentally no different from those embarrassments of years past. Auburn sauntered in to an early-kickoff game against an SEC opponent (in this case, on the road to boot), played uninspired, lackadaisical ball, and got killed.

Give all the credit where it's deserved: Arkansas had its act together on Saturday. They had a great game plan and they executed it well. Ryan Mallett, bereft of the pressure that had hounded him in a couple of bad outings, played like the NFL prospect he's so highly touted to be, and his receivers caught everything in their time zones. Better still for the Hogs, their defense completely stifled Auburn in the first half, and the successful passing game along with the big lead let the running game get on track for really the first time this season. It was as complete a win as you're likely to see.

Auburn, on the other hand, seemed to be looking for ways to screw up, and the Tigers generally found what they were looking for. Neither line played worth a damn; Chris Todd rarely had time to throw, and in the first half none of the backs had holes to run through. The defense took a huge step backwards in general. There was no pass rush to speak of, tackling was lousy again after showing marked improvement against Tennessee, and the secondary drew more pass intereference calls than I care to remember (some of them were even deserved).

Watching Auburn play Saturday was like a live demonstration of Murphy's Law: every dumb thing that could happen, did. Critical fumbles, stupid penalties, blown assignments. The two most productive players on the offense, Todd and Ben Tate, both blew plays that could have put the Tigers back in the game: Todd overthrew a nobody-near-him Terrell Zackery in the first half, and Tate fumbled inside the five in the third quarter.

The game was a gigantic misfire for the new coaching staff. No team as young and thin as Auburn has any business taking an SEC opponent lightly, and it was up to the coaches to get the team ready to play with intensity. Suffice to say, that didn't happen.

That's not to bury Gene Chizik and his staff just half-a-dozen games into their tenure. There isn't a coach in the world who hasn't had the same problem; Auburn's previous regime was rather infamous for it. The real question is whether the staff and the team will be able to learn from the loss, and have the ability to not repeat the same mistakes again.

I've heard more than a bit of grousing directed at defensive coordinator Ted Roof. While Roof certainly doesn't deserve a pass for what turned out to be a very poor game plan, it ought to be recalled that the guy really doesn't have a lot to work with this year. Auburn is way short of a solid two-deep on defense, and in terms of legitimate SEC players, the numbers are probably even worse than that. Roof had been doing a pretty fair job of working with mirrors to date; some of those mirrors are now just glittering shards on the fake turf of Razorback Stadium. It's going to be a serious challenge for Roof and his boss to patch things up for the rest of the season.

What He Said

Orson Spencer Swindle Hall Mellencamp on Bobby Bowden:

Please remember that in the case of the Bowden family, the coach equals the program, something entirely separate from the school, and not really something tied to the school in any substantive way, like in the form of a library or some other non-footballin’ related thing like that.

Exactly so. The Bowdens are about the Bowdens, and everyone and everything else are, at best, secondary

Full Moon Fever

Towards the end of the 1993 season, a Sports Illustrated writer lamented that year's SEC Championship Game being another Alabama-Florida snooze-fest, and noted that he'd have preferred to see Auburn play Tennessee, for reasons that included, as he put it (or at least as best I can paraphrase from memory), 'two fanbases with an inveterate disrespect for each other.'

I've never been a big SI fan, but in that particular the mag was exactly right. Neither Auburn nor Tennessee folks think much of one another; having spent the better part of fifty years ruining each others' seasons back in the days when the Tigers and Vols were annual early-season opponents will do that to you, and the intervening years since the 1992 conference split haven't changed opinions much. The offseason additions of two new head coaches who've been held in general contempt by rival fans since they days they were hired also helped contribute to the general disdain.

Speaking of intervening years, it's been almost exactly five of them since Auburn last traveled to Knoxville, undefeated but unheralded, and proceeded to run the Vol masses right out of their own stadium.

The more things change...

There were quite a few times on Saturday night when it looked like the 2009 Tigers were about to crank up a similar blowout, but the ball never quite bounced that way. Instead, the Tennessee home crowd and ESPN audience were treated to a remarkably Tubervillian Auburn win: a few big drives accompanied by a lot of offensive miscues, wrapped around a generally solid but occasionally sloppy defensive performance, and a final score that looks closer than the actual game ever was.

The media meme going into the '09 Tigers' first road trip was, "We'll learn a lot about Auburn in this game." What I learned on Saturday night was that this Auburn team is a hell of a lot more physical than it appeared during the first four games. Tennessee has a lot of the same problems today that Auburn had a year ago in terms of the offensive skill players not matching the scheme, but there's nothing wrong with the Vols' offensive or defensive fronts. Even while misfiring too many times in the red zone, Auburn was still able to gash Tennessee for 459 yards of balanced offense without giving up a sack, and while rumbling for 128 of those yards, Ben Tate brought back some very fond memories:

...the more they stay the same.
Photo: Todd Van Ernst

While it's easy (and rather enjoyable) to make fun of little Laney Kiffen and his apparent need for regular diaper changes, the same can't be said for his father Monte, an accomplished veteran who's stepped in to manage Tennessee's defense. As a coach friend of mine noted, the elder Kiffen's respect for Gus Malzahn's offense was clear from the early going. Kiffen played things very safe, sticking with a standard 4-3 alignment for almost the entire game, and committing to keeping big plays to an absolute minimum. While he largely succeeded in the latter, Kiffen still wasn't able to keep Malzahn's speed attack from wearing his guys down. By the time Auburn was driving for the put-away touchdown and coffin-nail field goal in the fourth quarter, the Vol defense looked like it had just finished a triathalon after four or five sleepless nights. Auburn was also able to dial up an answer on virtually every Tennessee blitz (even if the execution wasn't always there) and that all by itself says a lot about Malzahn's abilities as a play caller--just in case outgaining Florida's offense vs. the Vols by 136 yards didn't say enough.

Auburn's defensive performance was exceptionally solid--except when it wasn't. In general the tackling was phenomenally better than we'd seen in the early games, and the Tigers thoroughly stifled Tennessee's admittedly non-explosive offense for a good 55 minutes of the game. Unfortunately though, AU just doesn't have the defensive depth to dominate from start to finish, and it showed at the ends of both halves. Fatigue gave the Vols a hope-saving score just before halftime, and contributed mightily to allowing 16 fourth-quarter points--although even fatigue can't excuse giving up the garbage touchdown as time expired (oh, and Laney: I really doubt you'll ever coach against AU again, but on that off-chance, we'll remember your ridiculous signal to go for two. Punk). The defense deserves great credit for Tennessee never being in position to win the game, but Auburn still needs to bring along some more guys to help out the starters. There are plenty of better offenses than Tennessee's still on the schedule--although not, I suspect, many better defenses.

Lo and behold, the special teams actually showed occasional signs of being good, most notably springing Onterrio McCalebb loose on Tennessee's last kickoff to help slam the door. If the Tiger kickoff team can just pick up their play in coverage, they'll be doing their teammates (and my blood pressure) a world of good.

It was obviously not a perfect night, but a win on the road in the SEC is not required to be perfect. Although confidence is not a trait that Auburn has been conspicuously lacking in this young season, there aren't many confidence-builders better than going into a hundred-thousand-plus hostile stadium and eventually running all those hollering hillbillies off. Auburn had a lot to be proud of, and almost as much to learn from Saturday night. From here, it looks like Gene Chizik's troops are well-positioned to put both of those outcomes to good use.

All-Gustav Thursday

Auburn's 2009 success on offense has not gone unnoticed (well, except for the toad beat writers populating the AP poll and the SIDs voting in the "coaches" poll, of course). Offensive coordinator Gus Malzahn gets the in-depth treatment from Smart Football guru Chris Brown, writing at Dr. Saturday, as well as an, um, somewhat less intellectual take from Clay Travis. Both are impressed, as are Stewart Mandel of SI and Chris Low of ESPN.

In non-Gus news, if this account of blowing off a meeting with Peyton Manning is accurate, Jonathan Crompton may go down as one of history's bigger... hmm, family website. Well, it start with a "d" and ends with "bag, " and has an "oosh" sound in the middle.