Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Tubby giveth, Tubby taketh away



So as you've probably all read by now, Tubby has finally acknowledged the limitations of Chris Todd's trick elbow and has named Kodi Burns the starter for the forseeable future. Not a surprise after Burns so comprehensively outplayed Todd Saturday, but it's nice to know that at last Auburn has a guy clearly identified as the team's starting quarterback who they can rally around. Well, a guy they can rally around who can throw the ball further than 15 yards without having to put the kind of arc on it where you'd expect it to come down in a pot of gold.*

That little post by Solomon also represents the Barrett Trotter situation as one where Burns is the clearcut No. 1 guy and Trotter or Caudle would only play in event of injury or gross incompetence:
Todd, Neil Caudle or Barrett Trotter will be Burns' backup. Tuberville said Todd won't throw this week in practice because of his bad arm.
... which would be even better news. From here, burning Trotter's redshirt in order to screw with Burns's confidence and development yet again looks like the worst idea since I cashed out my Enron stock to invest in Washington Mutual (topical ZING!), and we can't rule out the possibility of exactly that happening until we actually see Burns play the entire game in Morgantown. But here and here Tubby doesn't sound like he's expecting Trotter seeing the field, unless statements like "Kodi's our quarterback" and "That's just in the planning stages" don't mean what I think they mean. Methinks Trottermania seems more the byproduct of the beat writers looking for something less miserable to write about and fans looking to clutch at straws than anything else.

So the guess here is that, yes, Virginia, Kodi Burns will finally play the start-to-finish no-yo-yo-strings-attached game he should have played to open the season. Thank goodness for that. But of course, this is Auburn 2008, so no piece of good news can arrive without being accompanied by something as bone-chilling as the first bit of information is encouraging. In this case, the other shoe drops like so:
Tuberville told the audience he is committed to the spread offense, but that he is not sure the next Auburn offensive coordinator will have a background with the spread ...

"You don't have to be a guy that's just a guy who's every-down spread," Tuberville explained to reporters later. "You have to know the spread. You don't have to be that. You have to know other offenses too."


What!?!?



Problem: Hiring spread guy to work with non-spread assistants failed to result in successful spread offense. Solution: Hiring sort-of-spread guy to work with non-spread assistants will result in successful spread offense. Genius!

OK, so we don't have any real idea of what Tubby's got in mind or how the OC hire will actually play out or even--this is the conversation we're having--if Tubby's going to be the one doing the hiring. Semi-offhand comments made at the Coast Guard Youth Auxiliary luncheon or whatever are hardly binding. But if Tubby's really planning on hiring someone with only a passing interest in the spread to work with Hugh Nall and Co. and then shoehorn them all into some half-baked spread with Tubby's fingerprints all over it ... well, it's just going to be another round of what commenter tiger7_88 recently dubbed the "Mazzopetrinallsmingerborgeklin Offense," and it's going to fail.

The No. 1 charge against Tuberville is that he just doesn't understand how a successful offense is constructed, operated, coached. And boy, meaningless as they may be and as much I want Tubby around, I can't say comments like these give me a whole lot of confidence those charges should be dropped.

*Because they're rainbows, see.

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