All Aboard!

Funny thing. When Wes Byrum's extra point kick rattled off the upright in the first half, I had the same thought as when LSU missed a PAT in 2004: "Ah, that won't matter much."

Oops.

Well, here we go again. Another second half when the offense can't buy a first down, the defense stays on the field too long, and a game that ought to have been put away goes the other way instead. No surprises, which might be the most damning comment I could make today.

Before I go any further, give Vanderbilt the credit. This team is fundamentally solid, they didn't have the traditional "Vandy breakdown" when they got behind or when the game was on the line, and they are very well coached. They certainly deserved the win, which is more than I can say for their opponent Saturday night.

The offense's performance in the first quarter was enough to have long-suffering Auburn fans doing Tim Allen impressions: line up under center, put the line in a three-point stance, blow the defense off the line and run downhill. Might not have been what anybody expected to see this year, but hey, it worked great, even if the lack of a fullback killed the first drive within inches of the goal line. Worked so well that the defense even gave Chris Todd time to find open receivers down the field, and that led to two pretty easy scores.

Fast-forward ahead to the second half, when Vandy, having been given a new spark from a new quarterback (hey, guys, not to be too critical, but let's just quit knocking out the other guys' starter for the rest of this year, okay? I'm tired of seeing backups come in and play lights out), gets back in the game, and eventually takes a one-point lead.

One point. No big deal, right? Lots of time on the clock. No reason to panic.

Well, not unless you're Tony Franklin, or whomever is making the decisions for Auburn's offense. If you're that guy, you drop back in the shotgun and let the opposing defense do to you what every other opposing defense has done to you in the second half this year: tee off on the quarterback and shut down your one running play. Once you've established that, all the rest is just commentary.

It's hard to overstate just how awful Auburn's offense was in that second half. The line couldn't block anybody. The receivers couldn't break the press. With no Robert Dunn in the game, there wasn't a credible threat at wideout, and Vandy figured that out by halftime. The running backs and quarterbacks were entirely ineffectual--but to be fair to them, no QB on the planet is effective when they can't sell their own souls to get a block.

It's hard to see how this offense can be described as anything other than a fiasco. Franklin is nightmarishly bad as a situational play caller. Hugh Nall is apparently incapable of coaching linemen how to pass protect from a two-point stance. Greg Knox has yet to teach a receiver how to run a route properly (check the NFL scouting reports on Obomanu and Aromashodu if you doubt me), and one look at Auburn's tight ends will demonstrate that Steve Ensminger is the very definition of negative coaching.

This season is another unfortunate demonstration of one of Tommy Tuberville's two worst traits, namely excessive loyalty to assistants who are also his buddies (the other is complacency). Tuberville used his near-martyrdom in the wake of the 2003 fiasco to retain Nall and Ensminger, even after the dysfunctional duo had reduced a roster full of NFL talent into an offense barely better than the one we see today. During the two times since when Tuberville has had to go and hire an actual offensive coordinator, rule number one for any prospective coach has been that all the current position staff must remain on the payroll. This was a terrible, selfish, destructive position, and one that's directly related to Auburn's woes today.

Five years later, Nall, after demonstrating spectacular offensive incompetence during his one pathetic season at OC, still thinks he got a raw deal, and has managed to sabotage both of his successors via bad coaching and meddling behind the scenes. I don't want to hear any more accolades about how Nall is an "elite line coach" when his guys just got pushed around by Vanderbilt. He's managed to take a stellar group of linemen and make them look like a 2-A scout team. I won't even bother critiquing Ensminger any further, since it's an open question as to what the hell he does all day anyway.

The problem here is that this offense (or more accurately, lack of an offense) is neither fish nor fowl. It doesn't know what it is. Is it a running team, like the one we briefly saw in the first quarter? Franklin doesn't think so. Is it a passing team? Well, no, not based on performance. Is it a "spread" team? Certainly not, regardless of the formations. It's doing very little well, and most things quite badly.

The point is that the oil-and-water mix of a "spread" coach with this group of position coaches (the notable exception being the inestimable Eddie Gran) is a complete failure, on a par with Tuberville's split-the-baby decision to put "Nallsminger" in charge of the offense after Bobby Petrino's departure. It serves no one involved well, most certainly including Auburn University.

I believe Tuberville when he says he needed to change Auburn's offensive philosophy, but apparently Tubs didn't believe himself enough to do what he really needed to, which is hire a proven OC and let him bring in the right assistants to get the job done properly. Whether Franklin as an individual was the right hire or not (he certainly doesn't look like it at this point), trying to shoehorn a spread attack into the straight-out-of-1980 abilities of Nall and Company was a terrible mistake.

What gets done about it now, I have no idea. If nothing else, it ought to be interesting (if not terribly informative) to see what happens when the exceptionally resistible force of Auburn's offense meets the thoroughly movable object of Arkansas' defense this Saturday. I wouldn't be hugely surprised (well, okay, I would) if the Tigers manage to put a more respectable point total up against the Pigs, but that won't really tell us anything, and worse, it could well lead to a likely-incorrect assumption that the ship has been righted and everything is both hunky and dory on the Plains.

That, like many of the decisions made in Auburn over the last couple of years, is likely to be an incorrect assumption. Wish I could be more optimistic here, but the train wreck is liable to continue until further notice.

Freshly Squeezed

Ho hum, just another game. Just another hand-wringing, nail-gnawing, hair-pulling three hours plus of frustrating immovability followed by... another W on the schedule.

I'm getting too old for this crap.

Auburn put on a defensive showcase, again, and again, it was just barely enough. Sophomore Josh Bynes, substituting for an injured Tray Blackmon, was the breakout player numerically with an eye-popping eleven tackes (six of those solo), but the entire defense deserves player-of-the-game honors. Tennessee's much ballyhooed offensive talent couldn't do a thing when the game was on the line, and couldn't do much the rest of the day. The Vols had seven possessions in the second half, and all but one of them started no more than four yards from midfield. They scored exactly once, and in that case were assisted by an interception.

Never have so few made so many clutch stops with so little help. And oh, yeah, the defense scored a touchdown for the third time in five games. In a word, "Wow."

I've resigned myself at this point to seeing Auburn get career days out of every opponent's punter. Tennessee's Chad Cunningham is bringing up the conference's rear statistically, but he played lights-out all afternoon. Between Cunningham's punting and Auburn's offensive immovability, the Tigers spent almost every minute of the second half in the shadow of their own goalposts.

I have never, ever seen a team spend that much of a game backed up and still win. The work this defense is doing is nothing short of astonishing.

But...

This team doesn't have an offense. It has a bunch of players who block and run and catch and throw, and some coaches who call formations and plays, but when all those pieces are put together, they don't add up to an actual offense.

It's not an accident that Auburn's lone scoring drive featured a lot of things we hadn't seen before. That made sense, as most of the plays and formations we had seen before don't seem to work all that well. Tennessee was caught off-balance, and the playmakers that AU does have started to make plays. And what do you know--the Tigers marched right down the field and scored. My question is, hey, Tony Franklin: where'd all stuff that go to afterwards? Were you afraid to use any of it again, because, you know, it worked? That gives me flashbacks to Terry Bowden, and not in a good way.

"Hey, wait," you may be saying. "Hang on a second here, you just finished praising Auburn's defense to the skies for shutting Tennessee down for most of the game. Why aren't you doing the same for Tennessee's defense?"

Because, let's be honest here: Tennessee is not a good defensive team. You can quote me "best secondary in the conference" all you want, but the numbers say that the Vols have not been good on defense for at least two years now. Tennessee is so far down, even Instapundit is making fun of them--and he works there! This is the same unit that got shredded by a UCLA squad that itself couldn't get a point against BYU. John Chavis is the least-competent defensive coordinator in the SEC, and he still managed to figure out Franklin's "system." With very rare exceptions, Franklin seemed unable to do anything to break the Tigers out of their rut; his situational play-calling was nothing short of awful. If you doubt me, just count all the no-blocking draw plays on third and very long.

So, in short: I don't get it. Is Franklin so married to his "system" that he can't bring himself to work with what he's got? Is he so bound to running a "script" that he literally can't call the right plays in key situations? Heck if I know, but you don't need to be any kind of an expert to note that when an offense only gets one first down in thirty minutes of play, that offense has serious problems. Kudos to Kodi Burns and Montez Billings for making that first down--thanks to Phil Fulmer's pissing away of UT's timeouts, it won the game for Auburn--but what the hell? ONE first down? In a HALF?

It's enough to make your hair turn gray, and although I'm on the cusp of forty, I'm still in no mood to start trying out Grecian Formula.

Deja Vu All Over Again

How's this for a quick rundown of last night's game:

Once again, Auburn was able to take control of a game and dominate the first half, but also once again, AU was not able to maintain that control after halftime. Whether it was due to the fan-decried "Tubershell" of conservative play-calling with a lead or simply LSU stepping up its game in the third quarter (I think it was the latter), Auburn stopped moving the ball until after the Bengals had taken the lead midway though the final period.

What I didn't like is fairly obvious: Auburn's running game lost steam and the pass defense all but fell apart in the third quarter. I didn't like the pooch kickoffs, and I really didn't understand pooch-kicking after Auburn's last score. Yes, AU's kick coverage has been awful this year and LSU has a great return game, but I don't think that validates giving them the ball on the 40 for that last drive.

The preceeding was lifted directly from my column on last year's Auburn-LSU tilt. I removed exactly one word ("road," as in "road game"), but otherwise it fits the 2008 edition just fine.

I've heard of deja vu, but this is ridiculous.

Obviously, not everything was quite the same, but enough was to make an orange-and-blue Tiger feel like tearing some hair out, starting with the kicking game. Tommy Tuberville turned out to be dead on when he predicted last week that special teams would be the difference in the game. Whether Ryan Shoemaker was being told to corner-punt (if he was, why, particularly after Trindon Holliday was benched for fumbling?) or just shanking everything he hit in the second half, bad field position put a tiring Auburn defense in terrible situations. Was Chad Jones really a threat to make a big return? I tend to doubt it--but we're never going to know based on that game.

It was a frustrating second half, but you have to give credit to LSU's depth for being the difference in the game. They were able to hold off a slackening Auburn pass rush and run past the thin AU secondary when it counted. When Paul Rhodes inexplicably stopped blitzing freshman QB Jarrett Lee, the defensive line didn't have enough gas left to get after him on their own. LSU's fleet of receivers did the rest, with no small help from Charles Scott, who looks to be a sensational running back.

On the other side of the ball, Auburn's penchant for not platooning offensive linemen caught up with the Tigers in a big and bad way. LSU's two-deep defensive line stayed fresh enough to account for two monumental sacks, one to knock Auburn out of field goal range in the third quarter, and then again to kill the would-be comeback drive, knocking AU back to an impossible-to-make-up second and 25.

Obviously, things weren't all bad. Auburn really did dominate defensively in the first half, and the Chris Todd-led offense finally showed signs of life. Receivers were getting open, and generally making catches (although Tommy Trott continues to do a good impression of a stone-handed defensive back). Robert Dunn probably had the best day of his career in terms of clutch grabs. The running game was less effective; why Tony Franklin continued to call Ben Tate runs into the heart of the LSU defensive line with no lead blocker is beyond me. There were plenty of times when the offense had LSU on its heels, particularly when Auburn would run a play, immediately get back to the line, and quickly run another play repeatedly. The "Meercat" option of stopping to look back at the sidelines didn't work anywhere near as well, and clearly caused problems in both communication and execution.

And finally, somebody figured out that lining up in the "I" near the goal line makes sense. That somebody has my sincere gratitude.

Before anybody asks, no, I don't know why Kodi Burns didn't play (again). It could be due to that leg injury from the first game; Burns was held out against Mississippi State largely because the cut broke open again during his brief set of snaps against Southern Miss. By most accounts, that was a very nasty cut, and even a highly-conditioned athlete can't make his flesh heal any faster than normal humans (it's my understanding that the NCAA is already moving to ban a new design of facemask visor that caused the cut in the first place). Maybe that was it; maybe the coaches didn't want to break up Todd's play. Given how LSU was crowding the line and leaving the deep ball open, I have to think they simply chose to stay with the "pass first" guy.

Where-to from here is obviously an open question. Saturday's game against Tennessee is a genuine must-win for both teams; you have to think Auburn has the advantage given how inept the Vols have looked this season, but Phat Phil always seems to pull one big surprise win (and usually on the road) out from under his stack of McRibs. Auburn is clearly improving on offense, but "the system" has still got a lot of bugs.

Auburn had better get out the Raid in a big hurry. Saturday's loss removed any margin for error in the SEC West race. LSU could conceivably lose on the road to Florida and at home to Georgia (I think they'll win the rest rather comfortably), but the flipside is, one more conference loss is tantamount to elimination for the eastern Tigers.

Updatage

First up, thanks to Lein Shory for going in an fixing Blogger's mistakes and my blogroll all at the same time. The links to Tony Barnhart's blog and The Wizard of Odds will now send you to the correct sites. As usual, Lein deserves all the credit for the look and layout of FTB.

In other news, some two years after the fact, the NCAA has confirmed that Pete Thamel's much-ballyhooed and deeply-dishonest NY Times story about Auburn athletes was a load of sensationalist bunk:

An NCAA investigation into Auburn University found no instances of academic fraud and has determined the school will not be penalized following a probe into sociology and directed reading courses that student-athletes took in 2005 and 2006.

I'm anxiously awaiting another NYT front-pager on this one.

Well, actually, I'm not waiting for that at all; being Big Media means never having to admit you were full of crap. But if I were Carnell Williams, I'd seriously consider suing Thamel for libel, and James Gundlach for slander.

The does article go on to note that the NCAA determined, "the school committed secondary violations involving student-athletes who took those courses after they had exhausted their eligibility." How this makes any sense (or is of any interest to the NCAA) I have no idea. I guess in the NCAA's eyes, Williams should have just dropped out instead of trying to keep pursuing a degree between the 2005 Sugar Bowl and April 2005 NFL Draft.

Tiger Bowl V

Big one coming up this weekend. Big game, big consequences, big questions to be answered. But that's no surprise; it's Auburn-LSU, and that's serious business.

Of late, the Tiger Bowl is easily the best series in the SEC. Don't give me this Florida-Tennessee or Georgia-Florida or even Auburn-Alabama business. Not one of those has been as competitive, meaningful, or riveting as the Tiger Bowl over the last four years.

After swapping blowouts in the early years of the decade, the two tribes of Tigers have consistently offered up brutal, nail-biting contests in every recent tilt. Not only have the last four games been split evenly and decided by less than a touchdown each, all four went down to the last play, and both teams (and certainly both fan bases) are convinced that they should have won the two games they lost.

Take a look at the rundown:

In 2004, a defensive battle came down to Auburn's final drive. Jason Campbell came into his own by completing a clutch fourth-down pass, and then hit Courteny Taylor for the game-winning touchdown. Campbell lit up every remaining team on AU's schedule, and went on to be the SEC's Player of the Year. Auburn went undefeated, and was never again in serious danger of losing that season.

In 2005, a wild back-and-forth battle ended in a 17-17 deadlock after LSU's Chris Jackson hit a 44-yard field goal late in the fourth quarter. Neither team made it to the end zone in overtime, but Auburn's John Vaughn unbelievably missed his fifth field goal of the night when given a chance to answer. The Bengals went on to the SEC Championship Game, losing to Georgia.

2006 featured a defensive slugfest the likes of which I've never seen before or since. The sheer ferocity of the impacts on the field, play after play, still rings out today. Auburn eked out a 7-3 victory, but if you ask me, AU quarterback Brandon Cox never fully recovered from the pounding he absorbed that day. Both teams went on to win marquee bowl games.

Last year's game was another crazy scene, with the heavy-underdog Auburn Tigers roaring out to a 17-7 halftime lead. LSU responded with four unanswered scores, only to see Cox bring Auburn back to lead 20-17 with 3:21 remaining. It all came down to the improbable Flynn-to-Byrd touchdown with two seconds left, saving Les Miles from a likely sideline lynching, as well as the Bengals' hopes for... well, you know:


What's coming up in 2008? Heck if I know. It's one of those odd years when large chunks both fan bases, obsessed with lackluster quarterback play, are going in suspecting they're going to lose (although true to form, and not without reason, given last Saturday's offensive follies, the pessimism is heavier on the Auburn side).

I think I can safely say that these are easily the two best defensive fronts in the SEC. Neither team is going to have an easy time running the ball, and all four of the starting and backup quarterbacks are likely to be spending most of Sunday in the training room. Both teams have explosive kick returners. If you're looking for edges, LSU's receivers are really going to be a challenge for Auburn's secondary--but whether LSU's quarterbacks have enough time to do anything about it is another question. I'd give Auburn the coaching advantage; Tommy Tuberville vs. Les Miles in a big game is a mismatch--unless, of course, The Hat gets lucky. Again.

And this is a big game, for both teams and for the SEC as a whole. There will be few, if any that get any bigger this year.

Batter Up!

Final score, 3-2. Well, haven't seen that in a while. Like, er, ever.

Let's start with the defense. It'd be well-nigh criminal not to.

With the understanding that Mississippi State is not a good offensive team--even when compared to Auburn--the level of defensive domination parceled out by the Tigers Saturday night is still staggering. Not only was State held to 116 total yards, the Other Bulldogs did not convert on a single third down (in 14 tries) or fourth down (three tries, one of them from less than a yard away). MSU had a grand total of five earned first downs in the entire game, and despite ESPN moron Bob Davie's repeated quoting of Sly Croom's desire to "break Auburn's will" with the running game, only one of those five came on the ground. 2008 marks the third time in four games that Croom's team hasn't scored an offensive point on Auburn. Barring a dumb mistake on the part of an AU offensive lineman (more on that later), State wouldn't have scored at all.

Tray Blackmon was a ravening beast against State's (pretty darn good) running backs. His snuffing out of MSU's close-to-last gasp on a short fourth-and-one was a textbook combination of timing, ferocity and strength. Jerraud Powers continues to bring All-American-caliber play at cornerback, and Auburn may well have found the answer at the other corner in Walter McFadden. Both did stellar work against State's tall wideouts, and along with another suffocating performance from the defensive line, they stomped on any semblance of a passing threat. McFadden's Powers-esque interception late in the fourth quarter most likely salvaged the win.

It was as dominant a team performance against SEC competition as I've seen in quite a while. There can't be much question now as to whether Paul Rhodes was a good hire at defensive coordinator. He's got this team playing sound, smart, disciplined fundamental football--something that would have won this game for Auburn a year ago, despite all the offense's miscues.

Speaking of which...

Now clearly, when one field goal accounts for all your points, you did not have a great or even good day on offense. Still, looking at the other numbers (admittedly, the ones that don't count), Auburn's offense was actually... okay. The Tigers netted 315 yards of offense against a very good defensive team, including running for 161 and passing for 154--they were even balanced. The average per completion was a perfectly good 11 yards (even if the rushing average was a just-getting-by 3.6 yards). Chris Todd's completion percentage was a pedestrian 54%, but he didn't throw an interception, he made some nice reads at the line, and after a two-year-plus hiatus, Auburn is finally throwing the ball down the field, and with some success.

So what was the problem? Besides the awful 0-fer on third down conversions in the first half, it came down to mistakes. Penalties and fumbles. In one of the worst performances by an Auburn team that I've seen in many years, the Tigers were hit for twelve penalties netting just under a hundred yards, and most of those were courtesy of the offensive line. I can't even count the number of drives that either started at first-and-fifteen or ended with third-and-twenty because of holding calls or false starts. Undisciplined, stupid mental errors. Some of them could have been prevented by using this archaic thing known as a "huddle" when communication was obviously a problem, but the really damaging mistakes, including the fumbles and giving up a stupid safety by holding, were thanks to plain old not playing fundamental football.

Oh, and if you think I'm letting Tony Franklin off the hook here, I'm not. Franklin is calling plays for players he doesn't have, and that's a recipe for disaster. Some of his situational play calling, particularly conceding drives with a run up the middle on third and long, were nigh-on inexplicable. While things are seemingly improving for a few individuals (most notably Montez Billings), receivers are not consistently getting open, and there are still too many dropped balls. When you don't have great talent at wideout, what you do have had damn well better be well-coached. Right now Auburn has neither of the above. Even worse, and more particularly to Franklin's discredit, hate to say "I told you so," but I told you so. Going into the shotgun from inside the five in the SEC is as crazy as a soup sandwich, and this time it cost Auburn enough points to put the game away.

Note to Franklin: it doesn't matter whether or not "the system," i.e. no-huddle and shotgun, worked at short-and-goal against Sun Belt teams. In the SEC, it doesn't work. It's not going to work. It's stupid to keep trying something that doesn't work. So stop doing it. You've got a bunch of big, tough hosses on this team who know how to punch the ball in from short range. Let them.

I'd be churlish if I didn't give Mississippi State's fine defense a world of credit here. The Other Bulldogs have been solid up front for a couple of years now (everybody forgets that they had LSU shut out for most of the first half in 2007, only to collapse under the weight of about a thousand interceptions), and they played a whale of a game Saturday with absolutely no help from their offensive teammates. Linebacker Dominic Douglas and tackle Jessie Bowman in particular were terrifyingly effective, and what can you say about punter Blake McAdams other than, "Wow."

Finally, regarding the uproar in Auburndom that's been going on since about the second quarter of the State game: A fanbase that's genetically inclined to pessimism is rumbling towards a pitchforks-and-torches revolt over the offense's ongoing struggles. Somebody has bought firetonyfranklin.com already (although there's no page there yet). On the one hand, getting upset is entirely understandable (and appropriate) over an offense that can't seem to get out of its own way after being talked up all off-season as the greatest thing since single-barrel bourbon. On the other hand...

Get a grip, folks. Is this a good offense? Nope. Does it--and Franklin--have serious problems? Yep. Do those two things warrant this level of panic after three games? That's an entirely different question.

Call me a "sunshine pumper" if you must, but I'm inclined to think not. There are tools enough to do well, if they're ever employed correctly. Either way, it's going to take some time to sort out.

Unfortunately, Auburn will play a defensive team very likely better than State's come Saturday. I'm not sold on LSU having a dynastic, greatest-defense-in-the-country thing going--any team that gave up 50 to Arkansas and 43 to Kentucky and what the hell, 24 to Auburn last year could not legitimately be called "great"--but I'm certainly satisfied that they'll be very damn good. Auburn will have to show more improvement than anybody has any business expecting to get many (any?) points against the Bengals.

So, here we are, three games in and dominant on one side, sputtering on the other. One suggestion aimed Auburn-way: Coaches often need coaching themselves. It'd be a good thing for the head coach to carve out a little private time with his offensive assistants for conversations regarding the fundamentals. Not just of football, but also of life--and employment--in the SEC.

Soon.

This Week's Sign Of The Apocalypse

Vanderbilt has sole possession of first place in the SEC East, and has the best record in the conference.

Yes, that's because Vandy is the only team in the league to beat any other team in the league this young season, but still...

Blogger Follies

Here's the part you don't care about: Blogger, aka Google, which runs the servers and software on which FTB is hosted these days, recently changed the way user blogs are set up. In many ways the changes were a massive improvement; I'm now able to manipulate stuff on the page like graphics and the blogroll myself, without having to bother Lein Shory, the guy who does all the actual work for the site's design.

However, BloggerGoogle has also over-automated the piece of software that runs the blogroll (over on the right side) to the point of buffoonery. For reasons I don't even pretend to understand, the blogroll mini-application just will not let me put in direct links to either Tony Barnhart's blog (it reverts to the homepage of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution) or Jay Christensen's new-and-improved Wizard of Odds blog (Blogger reverts to Jay's old, Blogger-hosted site).

So, until either BloggerGoogle fixes this, or alternately until Lein or I figure out how to get around it, here are the correct links:

Tony Barnhart (Mr. College Football)

The Wizard Of Odds

And like Frank and Ed used to say, we thank you for your support...

Southern Comfort

In the Master Of The Obvious segment, a lot went right for Auburn Saturday. Chris Todd racked up more passing yards in the first quarter than all three AU quarterbacks could manage the week before, and he did it against a better team. Todd eventually went 21 of 31 for a solid 248 yards against a squad that held its last opponent to under 150 yards through the air. With the day's emphasis on kickstarting the passing game, the running backs were something of an afterthought, but as long as they held on to the football, Messieurs Lester, Tate and Davis were still moving the chains quite well. The Tiger defense completely locked down a USM ground attack that broke 400 yards a week before, and had a shutout in its grasp before turnovers let the Golden Eagles back in the game.

Those turnovers--four of them, all ugly--left at least 14 Auburn points on the field, and make that 21 when you add in the meaningless-to-the-play penalty that called back what would have been Robert Dunn's second punt return for a touchdown in as many games. Three discarded touchdowns are expensive mistakes, no matter who you're playing.

USM and their new coach, Larry Fedora, deserve a ton of credit for hanging in there. There isn't any quit in the Golden Eagles, and Fedora showed a mountain of confidence in his team when he went for it on two long fourth downs--and his guys made both of them. The Tiger defense treated quarterback Austin Davis the way Rocky Balboa treats a side of beef for most of the game, but Davis kept popping back up and eventually had a very solid second half.

Defensively, holding a team that scored 55 points the week before to thirteen, and shutting that team down completely for the better part of three quarters was excellent, but with the exception of Jerraud Powers, who put on an absolute clinic Saturday from start to finish, the "D" didn't follow through. Whether due to the stifling heat, fatigue, loss of focus in what looked like a blowout, or plan old getting outplayed, Auburn's pass defense collapsed midway through the second half. The Tigers brought USM's rightly-vaunted running back Damion Fletcher to a near-complete stop, but the Eagles' Shawn Nelson and star-in-waiting Deandre Brown shredded the non-Powers portion of the secondary in the fourth quarter.

Southern Miss converted only one third down the entire game--but then again, they did convert on three of four fourth downs, and two of those were for double-digit yardage. That's an answer to the question, "What's worse than giving up a third and long?", and it's flatly unacceptable.

Here's what I liked the best about Saturday: the Auburn offense not only answered an impressive 90-yard USM scoring drive in the fourth quarter, they did so in a sudden, blinding downpour. I'm not exaggerating when I tell you that brief rain was so heavy that I could barely read numbers on jerseys for most of that possession. I've seen an awful lot of teams that would have quickly gone three and out, followed by a bad punt, in that kind of weather.

Here's what I liked least about Saturday (besides the turnovers, but I liked this a lot less because it was intentional):



The ball is less than a yard from the goal line. Why in the name of Bo would you get in the shotgun and intentionally snap it five yards farther away? As the late Jonnie Cochran (okay, the South Park version of Jonnie Cochran) would have said, "This does not make sense." It's the one thing I hate the most about "the spread." Gave me flashbacks to what Missouri did against Oklahoma in last year's Big 12 Championship, and not in a good way.

Auburn got away with it against Southern Miss (Tate scored on the next play--barely), but they wouldn't have against LSU or Georgia, and probably wouldn't have against Mississippi State, Ole Miss or Alabama. Franklin swore up and down during the offseason that his offense does have a traditional "I" set for short yardage situations; I humbly suggest that he start using said formation in said situations, and soon.

So, two games in, and we've got significant improvement, but this is still not a team that's ready to play against the best in the SEC. Kodi Burns hardly played Saturday, and besides a nice touchdown run (again from the shotgun near the goal line, and again, barely), he didn't play well compared to Todd. Todd himself did a nice job of managing the offense, but he also floated too many passes and was not effective with the long ball. This was not helped by a receiving corps that still can't get separation down the field, much less by a running back position that managed a fumble from each of the top three players on the depth chart. Pass protection is still a problem, and I suspect it was made worse by the injury-forced move of Jason Bosley from center to tackle.

I don't mean to be overly-negative here; a team that can overcome four turnovers and still beat a good opponent by two touchdowns is obviously doing a lot of big things right... but also obviously is still doing to many little things wrong. The offense did look a lot better, and against a better opponent. It's going to have to get better still, and that includes eliminating the dumb mistakes, if the Tigers plan to live up to their billing this season. And some better pass coverage would help, too.

Back To The Future

One of Auburn's questions was answered Saturday night, at least as well as such a thing could be answered against a Louisiana-Monroe: you can have a power running game from "the spread." Running the ball was not a problem. Brad Lester, Ben Tate and newcomer Eric Smith were all able to move the ball on the ground, amassing over 300 rushing yards on the night. Passing, on the other hand...

The first (okay, first and a half) version of the Tony Franklin offense looked an awful lot like the last crippled couple of years of the Al Borges offense: lots of screens with no blocking support, nobody getting open for longer balls, and thus an inability to... wait for it... spread the field. Now, tell me, what hasn't changed here? (*COUGH* "inside receivers" coach *COUGH*). Third and long conversions were, to polite, not good.

As Tommy Tuberville noted at halftime, the much-ballyhooed feature of this offense to speed up the game's tempo was missing in action Saturday night. Kodi Burns rarely threw down the field, and the one time he did attempt a long pass, it bounced off the hands of the receiver. Talk about deja-vu. Chris Todd's standard play was to check about a receiver and a half and then try to scramble. News flash--he's not a scrambler. Teach him to step up in the pocket and/or get rid of the ball. It didn't help either quarterback that pass protection--against LAMO, mind you, not LSU--was downright awful in the first half, something Franklin noted in a Quentin-Riggins-reported chewing out of the rest of the offensive staff at halftime. Said chewing did seem to help; protection was notably better in the second half.

Let's hope we've seen the last of alternating series for the quarterbacks. That's fine for A-Day (and what was this opener, if not a glorified A-Day?), but it's not going to fly against the rest of the schedule. Pick one, preferably Burns. Leave him in, and let him establish something. It's very telling to me that the one time Todd looked good was in the Tigers' last scoring drive, after Burns had left the game and Todd was able to stay in for several series by default (Burns turned out to have a laceration on his leg, and should be fine). The long pass to Rod Smith and follow-up baseline dart to Slaughter were easily Todd's best plays of the night.

On the other side of the ball, it's hard to criticize a shutout that opens with a defensive touchdown. Antonio Coleman has inherited not only Quentin Groves' position (which Coleman actually won and didn't give up midway through last season), but also the miasma of fear generated by Auburn's weakside defensive end over the last several seasons. Jerraud Powers had a couple of outstanding pass breakups, and the hit of the night came courtesy of freshman DB Neiko Thorpe, midway through the fourth quarter.

The kicking game was something of a mixed bag. I think I'm safe in saying that nobody knew what to make of preseason all-SEC punter Ryan Shoemaker losing his position to Clinton Durst, a guy who'd never played football before Saturday night. That impression was enhanced when Durst shanked a punt in the middle of the game, but that flub didn't keep Durst from racking up a decent 43-yard average on seven kicks, with one 58-yard boomer. Robert Dunn's punt return for a touchdown was obviously a great run--but then Dunn reminded everybody why he drives us all up the wall by losing yardage on his next reception. AU's kickoff coverage is still depressingly bad.

So, a first game, a warmup. As such things go, it wasn't great, but it could have been a whole lot worse. With a solid defense and the running game still there, there's reason for optimism going forward, but let's be honest here: Auburn was emphatically not ready to play anybody much better than LAMO on Saturday.

Disclaimer: this is not by any stretch a prediction. But. Four years ago, I wrote this about an Auburn opening against... LAMO:

On the one hand, you've got a workmanlike shutout of (let's face it) one of the worst football teams in the country. To their great credit, Louisiana Monroe's players didn't show a lot of give-up on Saturday, but they also didn't show a whole lot of ability. Auburn substituted all the way into the scout team by the fourth quarter, and the closest LA-MO ever got to scoring was a couple of missed field goals. On the other hand...

Look, it's obvious that the AU coaches went into this game intending to show future opponents absolutely nothing of use, and it's safe to say that they succeeded. "Vanilla" doesn't begin to describe the blandness of the formations and plays displayed on Saturday. Try "tasteless and odorless," or maybe "invisible."

... With that understood, there are still worries. Either La-Mo's defensive line has gotten a lot better since last October (entirely possible; they were big and quick, easily the best-looking athletes as a group that the Indians fielded), or Hugh Nall still has a lot of work to do up front. Run blocking was hit-and-miss (sometimes literally), and pass blocking was downright bad a lot of the time. And don't get me started on the reappearance of last year's bugaboo, the dreaded slanting defenders. More than once, a friend sitting nearby said, "It's a good thing they suck, or we'd be in trouble."

I would also be remiss if I didn't admit that Jason Campbell's play was not encouraging. Whether by habit, design, or just happenstance, Campbell is still locking in on his first guy and not seeing open receivers down the field, he's throwing behind the receiver too often, and his two turnovers were flat-out awful, the kind of stuff you expect from a freshman, not a fifth-year senior.

Sounds kind of familiar, doesn't it?

Now, once again--not a prediction, or anything remotely like it. I'm not expecting, anticipating, or even wildly dreaming about a 2004-ish run for this team. But it's still comforting, in an odd and nostalgic kind of way, that the best Auburn season in recent history also started against LAMO, and not with a bang, but with a "What the--?"

New And Improved

FTB's new look (and the old look, for that matter) is courtesy of my old bud Lein Shory, who learns how to do this stuff so I don't have to. It also helps that he has actual artistic talent and taste--again, so I don't have to. If you're in need of site design, drop me a line, and I'll be glad to pass it on to him.

Thanks, Lein. Great job, as usual.

Benediction

Geoffrey Norman:

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

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

Hallelujah, Amen.

Exodus: Jay Mariotti

Wow:

In a bombshell announcement in the world of sports journalism, star columnist Jay Mariotti has abruptly resigned from the Chicago Sun-Times.

The Sun-Times says Mariotti left to "pursue other opportunities."

But Mariotti told the Chicago Tribune he decided to quit after covering the Olympics in Beijing because newspapers are in serious trouble, and he did not want to go down with the ship.

"I'm a competitor and I get the sense this marketplace doesn't compete," he said in the Tribune story. "Everyone is hanging on for dear life at both papers.

"To see what has happened in this business. … I don't want to go down with it."

Mariotti said he plans to pursue opportunities on the Web, and continue his regular appearances as a panelist on ESPN's "Around the Horn."

Fair Warning

Blogging is liable to be very light for the next week or so--even by my standards. All apologies; the circumstances are quite beyond my control. I'll certainly be making every effort to get some preseason stuff up between now and the first SEC game next Thursday, but I can't promise anything at all at this point.

Fortunately, things will be back to normal by the time the season actually kicks off...

Yowza

Kevin Scarbinsky of the Birmingham News weighs in on Alabama coach Nick "I'm not going to be the Alabama coach" Saban, this week's Forbes cover boy. This might be the most brutal thing I've ever read in that paper about a not-days-away-from-being-fired UAT coach, and Scarbinsky doesn't have to do much more than recite the cold facts:

Nick Saban is the most powerful coach in sports ... who's lost four of his last five games.

Saban is the most powerful coach in sports ... who's one game over .500 at his current job.

Saban is the most powerful coach in sports ... who hasn't had a winning regular season in three years.

... and it gets (a lot) tougher from there. Read the whole thing.

Scarbinsky probably ought to have a bomb-sniffing dog check out his car before he drives home tonight. This one isn't going to go over so well with all the Kool-Aid drinkers in Bamaham--which certainly includes a massive crimson cheering section at the Bamaham News...

Fumble

Oh, great. The SEC just announced that we're stuck with Can't Broadcast Sports as the conference's broadcast TV partner for another fifteen years.

How wonderful. Fifteen years of lousy kickoff times, terrible announcers, and a commercial every ten seconds. Whoo-pee.

And I don't care how big the check is--FIFTEEN YEARS?!? Live sports are one of the only things left on broadcast TV that are DVR-proof, meaning they're only going to get more valuable as advertising dollars for "regular" television dry up. How much future money just got taken off the table by over-committing to such a long term deal?

Dumb move, Slive. Next thing you know, the SEC will commit to a 50-year deal with the Three Idiots Named Dave...

Chris Bertelli in Sacramento, CA...

... you owe me a beer.

(For the rest of you, check out Chris's email, as read on the air by Ivan Maisel in the last minute or so of the August 6, 2008 ESPN College Football Podcast.)

Simpson Pepper, RIP

Simpson Pepper, who was Alabama's stadium announcer during the 1970's, 80's, and 90's, and who also worked Legion Field games for UAB in this decade, died yesterday at age 79.

I feel quite safe in assuming that Pepper was decidely not on Auburn's side, but he was from the "old school" of PA guys who took pride in being absolute professionals on the mike, much like Auburn's own recently-retired Carl Stephens. There are too many schools in the SEC today (LSU, Georgia and Florida, I'm talking to you) whose stadium announcers could learn a lot from the examples of Pepper and Stephens.

Speaking for myself, I will always remember (and not a little fondly) hearing Pepper make the familiar call: "Time out for... Alabamaaaaaa."

RIP.

Exodus: Tony Barnhart

Following up on last week's post regarding the ongoing exodus of top talent from newspapers comes today's news that the only remaining reason to read the Atlanta Journal-Constitution is on his way out the door. Per several online reports, Tony Barnhart has accepted a "voluntary" buyout and will leave the paper.

Barnhart, a near-universal pick as the best college football reporter in the country, will certainly have a new job (hopefully in the new media) before the ink is dry on his buyout check, if not sooner. As far as I'm concerned, this completes the AJC's descent into irrelevance (an impression confirmed by the realization that Terence Moore and Mark Bradley are apparently staying on).

Christmas In August For EDSBS

From UGASports.com:

Long snapper Jeff Henson and backup safety Donavon Baldwin were suspended indefinitely Saturday night by Georgia head coach Mark Richt for unrelated incidents.

Henson was arrested by Athens-Clarke County police early Saturday morning for public defecation and public intoxication, while Baldwin, a backup safety, was involved in an altercation outside a downtown Athens bar.

After all, housetraining problems are inevitable with young Dawgs. Over to you, Orson...

Regarding "The Spread"...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tony^2

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

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

Read the whole thing.

Exodus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Home Of The Linebacker Bullies"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In addition, Bylaw 12.5.2.1 states,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gameday For Smart People

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

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

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

You Haff My Gwatitude

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

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

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

Randy Kennedy: Nick Sucker

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

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

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

No.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, that's lame.

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

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

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

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

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

Wear it in shame.

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

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

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

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

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

Better late than never, I suppose.

Postmortem

One more post on l'affaire Muschamp:

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

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

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

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

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

Cause And Effect

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A few notes:

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

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

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

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

News Flash From OU

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

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

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

Just Peachy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

Flip Out?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lame Excuses at the Alex City Outlook

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Plagiarism at the Alex City Outlook

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Emphasis mine above and below.)

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

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

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

Coach Saban, you have been impeached and replaced.

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

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

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

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