OBC

Yeah, that's pretty much the way I feel about the idea too, Coach.

As the Auburner has pointed out, the name gaining momentum out there in the wilds of the Interwebs yesterday was none other than Darth Visor himself, the OBC. Apparently the force behind said momentum is Phillip Marshall's reporting at AuburnUndercover, a point I was going to prove with a screencap of their "Coaching search: here's the scoop!"-type headline plastered above a picture of Spurrier, which was how the site's front page appeared last night. Now that it's changed you'll have to take my word for it, but it's not too tough to put 2 and 2 together: Marshall's saying Spurrier is in the running. As the Auburner so awesomely put it:

When I was a kid, I considered Spurrier as a sort of super villain. It’d be like Shredder or Dr. Claw becoming Auburn’s head coach.

I have a hunch I'm a few years older than the Auburner boys, but even I was only 12 when Spurrier annihilated Pat Dye's undefeated 1990 team 48-7 and essentially began the end of Dye's reign. The point: Spurrier is old, and more of a humorously defanged SEC coaching character by this point than a serious candidate for Auburn's job.

Right? He is, right? As with the alleged Patrick Nix candidacy, I refuse to believe the Auburn administration could really be this befuddled. Aside from his difficulties in constructing a functioning Auburn offense, the single biggest knock against Tubby is that he's lost his energy and passion for the recruiting trail ... so the answer is to hire a 63-year-old who never had much enthusiasm for recruiting even in his Evil Emperor heyday? The way to secure Auburn's football future is to hire a guy today who's going to be rumored to retire tomorrow? Auburn is in essentially the same place Carolina was when Spurrier arrived there--the salad days of the coach who'd pulled the team out of the muck now definitively behind him, but the foundation still strong--and Spurrier, not to put fine a point on it, has failed there. Now he is however many years older and expected to succeed at Auburn where he failed at Carolina?

No. Seriously: this makes no sense whatsoever. It's an auto-fail. I'd rather have Rodney Garner: at least if/when he left after three years, he'd leave some talent behind for the next guy. And I'd rather have, say, Brady Hoke than Rodney Garner.

But I'm scared. That the Spurrier meme hasn't hit the mainstream airwaves yet while every other coach Jacobs is talking to has seemed to be leaked within minutes of his picking up the phone either indicates that there's nothing there--or that it's being shielded from the MSM while the other candidates' names are, as has been speculated in various places, being leaked intentionally as a smokescreen. Marshall's general reporting pedigree also worries me. As I said yesterday, I'm trying my best to wait until we have a firm reason to freak out to freak out. But I would say the freak out-alert has definitely been upgraded to "orange."