Making Defenses Look Stupid, One Play At A Time

This much-linked instructional video on Malzahn-ball from Offensive Musings is... pretty awesome.  Check it out:

Oily Irony

As noted here a few weeks back, long-time Birmingham News mediocrity and certified Nick Sucker Ray Melick recently left both the paper and the newspaper business.  In an example of irony worthy of Biff Henderson's Realm of Mystery, it turns out Melick's new job is... spokesman for British Petroleum.

Really, it wasn't that much of a career change for old Ray.  One on the one hand, you've got a steady gig as an apologist and booster for an oily, dishonest and generally disreputable megalomaniac... and on the other, you get to be the mouthpiece for BP.

Looks pretty good on him, now that I think about it.

New At Rivals

I have another new column up at AuburnSports.com, this time regarding the recent spate of conference expansion madness.  It's on the subscriber side, but here's a preview:

First of all, what the heck are we supposed to call all these Conferences Run By People Who Can't Count? 

"Pac Televen" is an easy one, but what about the others? The Big 10 now has 12 teams and the Big 12 has 10. 

Wouldn't everybody's lives be easier if they'd just mutually swap all their t-shirts and banners and stationary? Or maybe the Big XII-Minus-II should just revert back to the old Southwest Conference moniker, since they're now all but formally Texas And A Bunch Of Texas' Rivals.

It's enough to drive one to drink-assuming, of course, that one stopped drinking beforehand.

The Truth Comes, Er, Out

The Onion reveals the secret behind the world's worst sport:


Soccer Officially Announces It Is Gay

More "Journalism" From ESPN

Here's ESPN SEC blogger Chris Low, in (admittedly) a nice-ish column about the 2004 Tigers:

After all, go back and check how many times over the past two decades that an SEC team has run the table with an unblemished record.


The answer: Four.


Alabama did it in 1992 and again last season. Both were national championship clubs. Tennessee did it in 1998 and also won the national championship.


The fourth was Auburn in 2004.

Um, Chris, that number is actually five.  The fifth undefeated team was Auburn, in 1993.  You may recall hearing a little something about that.

Sheesh.

Rivals Redux

I'm very happy to announce that I'll be returning to the AuburnSports.com site at Rivals.com as an opinion columnist this season. We haven't worked out the frequency of the new columns yet, but there will be at the very least a new column the Monday after every game, and additional columns as situations merit (I'll also continue to blog about Auburn and the SEC here at FTB--this site isn't going anywhere).

One situation that merited comment is today's announcement of NCAA sanctions against Southern Cal, including the forfeiture vacating of all USC's games from the 2004 season the 2005 Orange Bowl. At the request of AuburnSports honcho Jeffrey Lee, I wrote up this column on the retroactive impact (if any) of those forfeits the vacation (insert Go-Go's joke here) on the 2004 Auburn Tigers.

Short version: I don't care.

UPDATE: Now that the actual sanctions report is out (as opposed to the early reports from ESPN, some of which turned out to be erroneous), I've corrected the column accordingly.

Exodus: Ray Melick

Long-time columnist Ray Melick is leaving the Birmingham News, and apparently the newspaper business as well.

I was never much of a fan, but I wish him well.

The Banality of A-Day

Here's what's good about A-Day, or any other spring game: The weather is usually nice, and during the interminable off-season lull, fans to go on campus and see a somewhat-reasonable facsimile of football. And that's about it.

Every spring game is, by design, something of a bore. Coaches hate to show anything to anybody when they don't have to, and the tendency to turn spring games into demonstrations of distilled vanilla has only intensified since cable programmers with way too much air time to fill started televising them. So what you got in Auburn on Saturday was the same thing you got from every other big-program spring game: something that sort of looked like football, but really wasn't.

I know, I know, the message boards are alive today with speculation over whether Cameron Newton is a flop, whether Auburn should play it safe with Neal Caudle, or hand it over to Barrett Trotter, or just hang it all up and forfeit the season out of sheer ennui. Opposing fans, also with nothing better to do, are all a-twitter--literally so these days--as well, which all by itself is kind of funny. About the only thing more boring and pathetic than watching your own team's spring game is watching somebody else's.

To all of the above, I say: Get a grip, folks. It's just A-Day.

With one single exception*, no spring game has ever told anybody a meaningful thing about their football team. If you want to have a much better idea about the team, I suggest you sneak into the final, closed scrimmage this week (but don't tell the security guards I said it was okay)**. That's where the real offense and defense will be on display--very limited display--and where the serious decisions about the initial starting lineups will be made. The A-Day films have probably already been flushed down the digital memory hole as far as the Auburn staff are concerned.

Given the coach-mandated limitations and constant shuffling of the lineups on both sides of the ball, I hesitate to draw any specific conclusions out of the "game" that was "played" on Saturday. That's not to say that some individuals didn't impress. One thing you can't hide is speed, and Auburn should have plenty of that when the real thing starts in September. On defense, I liked the hustle from Nick Fairley and Antoine Carter and whoa-Nellie, Demond Washington. On offense the running back stable looks solid even before the freshmen arrive, and whoever the quarterback is in 2010, he should be able to look forward to having more than two productive wideouts; DeAngelo Benton and Quindarius Carr both stuck out.

As for quarterback, all four of them (apologies to Clint Mosely for not mentioning him above) looked good passing the ball. I really liked the dart Newton threw to Darvin Adams on his first possession, and the long bombs from Trotter to Terrell Zackery and Caudle to Carr, respectively, were the offensive highlights of the "game." But with the two-hand touch rule on the quarterbacks and no serious effort made to play at Malzahn Ludicrous Speed, anybody trying to eke out any serious conclusions from the A-Day offense (or defense, for that matter) is kidding themselves.

So, that's A-Day. Kind of fun, kind of dull, kind of like football. For the next four-and-a-half months, it'll have to do.

* Auburn message board readers are by now thoroughly sick and tired of me telling this story, but for the rest of you, there was exactly one meaningful play in the entire history of A-Day "games," and it happened in 1994.

In the '94 spring game, redshirt freshman Dameyune Craig led the second-team White squad against the first-team Blues. Immediately after taking his very first snap in an Auburn uniform, Craig had the ball swatted out of his hands by a defensive lineman (I've forgotten which one). The ball bounced off the turf, Craig grabbed it out of the air, and proceeded to run for his life towards the far sideline. Just inches away from going out of bounds, he pivoted on one foot and rifled the ball 40 yards down the field to hit an open receiver on the other sideline. The pass traveled 60 yards in the air, and I about lost my mind jumping up and down and screaming.

Craig's next pass went for a touchdown, and a legend was born.

** The last closed scrimmage was actually held last week. So never mind.

Recommended Reading

College Football News' Pete Fiutak, on ESPN's fat new contract with the BCS:

Over the past few years when Fox had the big bowls, I’d get a call or five every late September from various higher-ups making sure that CFN (who provides content for FoxSports.com) didn’t go over the top when commenting on the BCS. To be fair and thankful, no one ever told me or anyone else at CFN what we could and couldn’t write or tried to limit what we could say on TV and radio appearances. That was never a problem (outside of not commenting on some of the announcer teams) since we’ve made it a point to not get dragged down in all the “BCS Sucks” rhetoric (again, since the ranting goes nowhere), and there was never any discussion of what we could and couldn’t write and say when it came to the BCS chase and how the rankings were shaping up. Fire on the process and the system … not really. Go nuts on what was happening within the system … fine. It’s extremely doubtful that the ESPNers will get the same leeway and freedom.

ESPN is unabashedly about making money through entertainment, and that’s fine. However, the self-proclaimed Worldwide Leader is to hard-hitting sports commentary what Tiger Woods is to Buddhism. Each throws out the idea of doing something noble in an attempt to distract from what they’d really rather be doing.

ESPN sticks the controversial discussions and the most in-depth pieces on at times when most stations are running test patterns and informercials. Why ruffle feathers when Keyshawn Johnson can do yet another enabling “interview” with a guy who doesn’t know that 85 in Spanish is ochenta y cinco? That’s no problem for 95% of the programming hours, but it’s a huge issue when it’s time to put on the big boy pants and examine the controversial items like steroids and HGH (a topic that ESPN has been embarrassingly inept at covering and shameful in its lack of integrity when it comes to delving into the question marks surrounding stars like Barry Bonds, Usain Bolt, Lance Armstrong, Albert Pujols, Michael Phelps, and any other athlete whose performances appear to be way too good to be true), or Ben Roethlisberger’s alleged transgressions (at least the first time around). And it’s also a problem when the job of the analysts is to be a major influence peddler for a sport that relies on the judges.

No, college football’s national champion isn’t really decided on the field. Boise State, Cincinnati, TCU, and 114 other teams had no chance whatsoever of playing for the title in 2009 if Texas and the Florida/Alabama winner went undefeated. None. It wouldn’t have mattered if the Bearcats beat everyone on the slate by 40 points. As long as the SEC champion and Texas were unbeaten, they were going to play for the national championship because the pollsters weren’t going to budge the top teams out of the top spots as long as they kept winning.

Read the whole thing. Extra kudos to Pete for also noticing an issue related to the preseason polls that we talked about here last year: for most of the poll voters, if a game doesn't get mentioned on ESPN, in their minds it didn't actually happen.

Theme Music

While catching up on the ridiculously-prolific Jerry's WarBlogEagle posts, I came across this photo of Cameron Newton:


... and the first thing that went through my mind was this riff:



Reminds me a little of the first time I laid eyes on Daunte Culpepper, in a homecoming game Auburn played against Central Florida many moons ago. I'd heard Culpepper's name before, when he signed with but failed to qualify for enrolling at Florida State, but I'd never actually seen any clips of him playing. UCF hadn't been on TV much (if at all) up to that point, so when they broke the huddle for their first offensive play, I locked on to that one huge dude and said to myself, "Self, that is the biggest damned tight end I've ever seen in my life."

And then he lined up at quarterback...

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.