Compare and contrast

One

LB Brandon Fanney, LB Prince Hall, DB Alonzo Lawrence and former Davidson RB Jermaine Preyear "violated some type of team rule or policy and were not invited back on our team," Saban said.

and Two

“That’s something that isn’t true, but I’m not going to say anything about that,” Lawrence said.

vs.

Three

"At this time, Upshaw grabbed Gryzb by the back of the neck and hair with his right hand, and pushed her downward in what appeared to be an attempt to push her to the ground," Officer Rusty Romine wrote.

and Four

Alabama coach Nick Saban confirmed that sophomore linebacker Courtney Upshaw will not be suspended from the team in the wake of a verbal altercation with a girlfriend that police say became physical.

--------------------

(As an aside: if you're wondering whether 'Bama fans are paying attention to the message their head coach is sending about the importance of violence against women, judging by the RBR commenters [click for big] ...



... I'd say they're following his lead as closely as always.)

The Works, no business like show business-style

A picture worth all the words. I've basically ignored this whole "film version of 'The Blind Side'! With real coaches! OMG!" thing, because making that big a deal out of it seems like an exercise in over-the-top coach-worship to being with, and since the Auburn-affiliated coach in it isn't actually our coach any more ... eh, it just seemed like one of those stories that was more interesting in theory than practice.

But even I have to admit that this is a pretty freaking sweet photograph:



Anybody want to take wagers on whether Tubby was able to smooth-talk his way into a larger role? After all, he wasn't actually in the book at all, so he's already playing with house money.

Speaking of departed coaches ... via 3SiB, the Knoxville News-Sentinel has a must-read story about Eddie Gran, his family, their struggle with one daughter's terminal disease, and ultimately their faith.

Back in the saddle. It's probably news enough to note that Tony Barnhart's blog is up and running again for the stretch drive into the fall, but I also though this was an interesting side-note from his "welcome back" post:

Here is another fun stat: In this decade, the SEC has won at least one national championship in 16 of the 20 sports it sponsors. The four sports yet to win a national title in this decade are women’s cross country, volleyball, soccer, and softball.

There's a lesson here, and the one I'm taking away is this: if you want to win titles in a deep-rostered team sport, you'd better have some kind of local talent base to draw from, a talent base that doesn't exist for SEC schools in sports like volleyball and soccer that Southern high schools have been much, much slower to embrace than other parts of the country. And though it's only a matter of time before an SEC softball team breaks through, it's not really a surprise that the SEC's been playing catch-up when for so long so many Southern high schools' girls' sports offerings were limited to cheerleading and hoops, is it?

BlAUgosphere. It takes a lot to rouse TWER from its summer slumber, but it turns out the death of Michael Jackson--and, more specifically, a picture of a stunningly waxen-looking Jackson hanging out with every Auburn fan's favorite Jackson--will do the trick.

In the wake of Tray Blackmon's CFL debut, The Pigskin Pathos imagines a Day in the Life of what has to be the most popular five-star washout in Auburn history:

7:12 Walked out of apartment. Remembered buy-one-get-one coupon for Egg McMuffin's. Celebratory fist pump. Started running.

8:02 Arrived at McDonald's 27 miles away from apartment. Attempted to obtain two McMuffins, one for free with coupon. Was told coupon expired in 2003. Asked to see manager.

8:21 Manager started to jibber-jabber. Asked him when I was going to get my free Egg McMuffin. He said I wasn't.

9:13 Bailed out of jail by wife. Quick trip to hospital to remove glass fragments from leg and back.

There's plenty more good stuff where that came from. And though this chart posted by the Auburner is, as they admit, "neither (as) funny or informative" as usual, it's still thought-provoking enough to qualify as "good stuff," too.

Almost there! With two graduated, third-team seniors predictably (and acceptably) having left the team over the past week, Bama Sports Report reports that the Tide only has ... 10 more scholarships to free up over the rest of the summer! That's not too bad! Here, here's a handy alphabetical run-down of how many scholarships each SEC team still has to clear off the existing roster to bring in their full signing class in fall camp:

Alabama: 10
Auburn: 0
Florida: 0
Georgia: 0
Kentucky: 0
LSU: 0
Mississippi: 0
Mississippi St.: 0
South Carolina: 0
Tennessee: 0
Vanderbilt: 0

See, even if the answer to this question is zero, 'Bama's not really so different from anyone else! (I should note that 1) BSR's Ell isn't nearly so knee-jerk defensive about this issue as many of his fellow 'Bama fans, so the sarcasm here isn't directed in his, uh, direction 2) the "10" number here is on the upper end and could be as low as four or five, it looks like, depending on various other contingencies ... so 'Bama might only have to have four or five more kids leave the roster than the rest of the SEC. We'll see.)

Malzahn. Because "he was the only assistant coach hanging around the complex last week" (points for honesty, there) Andy Bitter profiles Gus Malzahn for the Ledger-Enquirer and at his blog. Lots of worthwhile comments in both places (that he says it's easy for the players to adapt and harder for the coaches seems to echo what happened on the Plains last year, no?), but my favorite is this:

Auburn offensive coordinator Gus Malzahn’s staid personality, one cut from the cloth of one of his coaching idols, Nebraska’s stoic Tom Osborne, doesn’t seem to fit the mold.

“Yeah,” Malzahn said wryly. “I’m not into pirates.”

If Malzahn's offense works, I call dibs selling the t-shirt with an outline of his glasses and NOT INTO PIRATES on it.

Etc. Dewanna Bonner is off to a hot start in the WNBA ... and just for the hell of it, JCCW fave the Gaslight Anthem performing with their idol, the Boss, at the UK's giant Glastonbury festival:

The Works, vacatin'-style

Vacatin', all I ever wanted! Vacatin', had to give wins away! Vacatin', on probation all alone!*

The Fallout. The anticlimactic nature of yesterday's big reveal of the NCAA's Textbookgate sanctions--the final tally of which included the vacating of 21 wins, including a fat wad from 2005--didn't keep every Tom, Dick, Harry, Reginald, Alphonso, Gertrude, Maurice, Beatrix, and Ivan on the Internet from weighing in on the issue. I thought the most concise, to-the-point, accurate summary of the situation came from a Barrett:

So, what do the sanctions mean for the football team? Well, nothing.

Nobody really cares that wins were vacated. Players won the games. Fans in the stands saw them. Fans at home watched on TV. Gamblers won or lost money on them (legally, of course). Vacating wins is really just a glorified slap on the wrist – and this transgression deserved a glorified slap on the wrist ...

Make no mistake though, the COI has put Alabama on notice that it's “staring down the barrel of a gun” yet again. This marks the fourth time in 14 years that Alabama has been penalized by the NCAA. A fifth time anytime in the near future, and Alabama would be in some serious trouble ... (F)or the next five years (three on probation, two more as a repeat offender), the entire Alabama athletic department will be more scrutinized than the Zapruder Film. That's not good for a program that's already spent the better part of two decades under the NCAA's microscope.

I think that just about covers it. For the Auburn fans out there baying for more Tide blood--and honestly, why are you? It's our football team's job to beat them, not the NCAA's--Will has some keen thoughts regarding the difficulty of finding an appropriate punishment in cases like these:

Forfeits are always a weird sanction. They're at once the most appropriate and the most meaningless of penalties. Appropriate because fundamentally, a team that competes with ineligible players does so outside the rules and should not be allowed to claim a victory won in that fashion, but meaningless because few people take a forfeit seriously after the fact. I doubt that the various directional schools who lost to Alabama in, say, 2005 are going to put up any billboards over their new 1-0 record book "win."

The vacations might mean something if we were talking about stripping the Tide of an SEC title, but it's not the NCAA's fault 'Bama never managed to win anything of consequence in the years in question. Yeah, from my perspective Bama's rap sheet means that a couple of docked schollies would have been justified, but I can't say the violations in question demanded it ... and past that, what else can the NCAA do other than force the vacations and prepare to slap them again, harder, if anything else comes up?

That's not the tone taken by any number of national columnists, though, who saw a chance to hop on the ever-popular NCAA IS TOOTHLESS soapbox and seized it with both, uh, feet. Unfortunately, this led to several pieces like this warmed-over bit from SI's Andy Staples, who argues that the Tide's getting off easy is evidence the NCAA is too scared to punish big-name teams. Of course, even he admits that the NCAA didn't have a basis for "a stiffer penalty in this case," and that USC's punishment hasn't actually been determined just yet, and that the Florida St. most certainly does care about the vacated wins imposed by the NCAA ... but still! The NCAA doesn't punish big-time teams! (Just don't ask, apparently, what teams he's referring to.) Staples goes on to argue it should be like the good-old days, when, um, the NCAA obliterated SMU as a viable football program in what every college football fan on the planet (save for Staples, I guess) now views as a brutal overreaction. I do think the NCAA could stand to pack a little more wallop with its sanctions (the practice of allowing teams to pre-punish themsevles with reduced scholarships that were sitting around unused already is particularly silly), but arguing that this Alabama case deserved similar draconian treatment to what SMU got 20 years ago ... sorry, Andy, but it's just not working.

More. Jay G. Tate's excellent coaching profile series continues, with a look at Jay Boulware and his stickler-for-detailism that helps explain why Chizik brought him over from ISU in the first place:

Boulware is Auburn's most detail-oriented coach. While fellow assistants like Curtis Luper and Jeff Grimes talk more about hustle and attitude, Boulware asks his players see things on a smaller scale. He is a stickler for footwork, hand placement, stances. I watched him berate TE Bailey Woods during spring drills for aligning too far away from the tackle.

The offending margin measured less than a foot. That didn't matter to Boulware.

I don't have to repeat my distrust of this kind of precision in the off-field arenas of dress codes and locker cleanliness, but on the field? Get as anal as you you wanna be, coach.

Interestingly, on a staff laden with guys rumored for a head coaching position someday, Tate says he also "expect(s) to see Boulware gain regional/national relevance during the next 10 years." That anybody sees that kind of potential in Auburn's special teams coach says something (I hope) about the quality of the staff Chizik put together.

And speaking of the Chiznick, he made an appearance this week at an Auburn club in Gainesville (Ga.). Nothing earth-shattering, but, you know, he was there.

This wasn't news? I haven't seen this anywhere else yet, which is weird, since tracking secondary violations is so quickly becoming a kind of Fulmer Cup-style offseason diversion all on its own, but ... Phillip Marshall is evidently reporting that Auburn will self-report secondary violations stemming from the Big Cat Toomer's rolling. Hardly surprising, but moving the incident from "Auburn may have been guilty of ..." to "OK, yeah, Auburn has admitted they were guilty of ..." seems worth a headline or blog post or two from the rest of the Auburn beat hacks, even if the practical upshot--as explained ad nauseum in Big Cat's wake--is nil.

Not getting easier. The Auburn men's basketball team will be pretty much NCAA-or-bust next year--where "bust" is defined as "Jeff Lebo loses his job"--but it doesn't look like the rest of the league is going to make it easy, as this article from Beyond the Arc neatly summarizes. I'm not convinced at all Miss. St.'s Renardo Sidney will be eligible--when Tim Floyd's USC gives up on you, you know you're at the very top of the sketchy scale--but the 'Dogs will still be quality, for all of Calipari's slitheriness Kentucky's going to be all their hyped up to be, Tennessee and Florida will be Tennessee and Florida ... the good news is that the opportunities for the big in-conference wins that Auburn didn't have this past season will be out there. The bad news is that they're going to be as hard to come by as ever.

(And hey, now that I've brought him up, did you know that Tim Floyd resigned without speaking to a single one of his staff members or players? Man, big-time college hoops is just chock-ful of class acts, isn't it?)

BlAUgosphere. PPL brings us a wrap of Auburn's fortunes in the MLB draft, with a whole bunch of quality tidbits, including a baseball scouting report of Brandon Jacobs, educated guesses as to whether Luke Bailey and Drew Madrigal will make it to campus, why the first-round selection of Nick Franklin was a shock, and some deserved rah-rah for the two current Tigers taken in the draft. Good stuff.

Elsewhere, the Pigskin Pathos is spinning an, um, intense yarn about the Tony Franklin era. It's like reading a good short story out of a fancy magazine, except that it's about Auburn and it's on a blog.

Etc. In this week's sign of the impending apocalypse, South Carolina's football team has apparently extended a verbal offer to a ninth-grader ... Doug casts SEC: THE MOVIE with predictably hilarious results ... if you can control your gag reflex in response to the multiple references to "the Crimson Nation," this long, well-researched piece on Tide anti-legend Ears Whitworth is well worth the effort (via RBR).

*Just for the record, I tossed this video up here not only for the parody stylings, but because this is a freaking perfect pop song. Belinda, I got your back forever, baby.

Glad that's over with

So, as you probably know by now, the Tide football program got the lashes with a wet noodle treatment from the NCAA. No lost scholarships, no postseason bans, maybe a handful of vacated victories no one will ever remember are vacated unless they're looking them up in a book.

Which, to be perfectly honest with you, is fine. Yeah, it would have been fun to see the coachbot squirm under having to recruit a couple fewer players for next year's class (or having find another couple of current players willing to go on medical scholarship, natch), but in the end the only reason this was a potentially big deal at all was the Tide's "repeat violator" status. We are, after all, talking about only a handful of football players who by all accounts repaid the value of whatever textbooks they'd mistakenly been allowed to acquire ... I don't think Tide fans could have blamed the NCAA if they'd wanted to send a firmer "that's TWO strikes" kind of message, but at the same time, we're not exactly talking about a teamwide effort to operate a speakeasy in the basement of a campus dorm, either. The squads that made up the bulk of K-Scar's 200 involved athlete are apparently getting the brunt of the NCAA sanctions, and that's probably only fair.

Which means that the real developments here are that Mike Slive's dream of a probation-less SEC is dead again--way to ruin it for everyone, guys--and that a second set of sanctions, with 'Bama hypothetically a repeat repeat violator, could see the NCAA bring their Serious Hammer out of the closet.

At the very least, we can all now move on to more pressing topics. Like, for instance, this guy: great father, or greatest father?

The Works, Thank you-style

Thank you. So for whatever reason Tommy Tuberville's trip overseas to visit U.S. troops didn't made quite so many headlines as last year's edition, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen, or that Tubby shouldn't have the same amount of gratitude shown his way for his efforts in keeping up the morale of our servicemen and -women.

So reluctant as I am to link to any site with an entire tab devoted to fan-on-fan "Humiliations" and some weird, desperate (and mildly NSFW) plea to LSUFreek to join up, I'd encourage you to check out BusterSports' pair of interviews with Tubby from Djibouti. Nothing earth-shattering there, I guess, but when Tubby says things like

I want to relate to the people back home how important this generation is to us. War is not a game, it’s very serious – I can’t imagine being in it and being as close to it as much as these people are.

you can hear how sincere he is and how much these trips have genuinely mattered to him. As with last year, Tubby and the other coaches involved--Troy Calhoun, Houston Nutt, Jim Tressel, Mack Brown, Jim Grobe, and Rick Neuheisel--deserve maximum kudos for their willingness to help out the troops in whatever fashion they can.

Wake me when the sanctions hit. So Kevin Scarbinsky's column today lifted just a little bit of the curtain of redaction on Textbookgate. The revelations: 200 students involved, apparently, though very few of them are football players or violated rules intentionally; possible vacations of records and victories; a decision--as we've been hearing for a while now--should arrive any minute. I guess the scope of the scam is a little surprising--200 athletes means we're talking about a pretty hefty amount of failing to monitor, I would think--but still, the reaction from this corner is still pretty much ... Eh. The vacating of victories isn't that big a deal, is it? First, the only sport we're really discussing here is football, and it doesn't sound like those players were involved enough to earn that kind of punishment. Second, even if they were, so there's a few asterisks in the history books--no one's going to remember who the "new" winners of those games are when we all remember who won it on the field. Unless we're talking about something like Bobby Bowden's chase of JoePa or an actual championship banner that has to be taken down, past records just don't strike me as being that important.

What matters--as it did before the column--is how many scholarships we're talking about being lost, how severe the terms of the probation are, and what kind of punishment the Tide is being set up for if--great big giant humongous IF there, I know, I know--those other NCAA rumors have any fire behind the smoke. As for information on those counts, we're still waiting.

Meet the coaches, continued. The Auburn beat hacks' profiles of the new Auburn coaching staff have continued to trickle out over the summer. Andy Bitter wrote a nice recap of the stop-and-start path Ted Roof has taken to the Auburn DC's chair for the Ledger-Enquirer, but frankly I enjoyed the "b-sides" post at Bitter's blog even more. "Hit somebody in the teeth," indeed, Mr. Roof. This is also encouraging:

(W)e've got some guys and I was real pleased with Jake Ricks and Mike Blanc's leadership this spring. I thought they did an excellent job leading.

Seeing as how it's absolutely critical for Blanc and Ricks to hold the middle--given the experience everywhere else in the starting defense, the two of them and health are kind of the only thing standing between Auburn and being really, really good defensively--any positive signs for a big year from the two of them is most, most welcome.

Also: Jay G. Tate continues his look at the position coaches by offering his impressions of Tommy Thigpen. Money grafs:

Trooper Taylor gets all the publicity for being Mr. Friendly -- nearly all of it deserved -- but Thigpen also has surplus congeniality. He's a happy guy. He smiles more than Taylor, in fact, and has no problem striking up conversations.

If I was a recruit, Thigpen is the guy I'd want as my primary contact.

With that said, he's not exactly outgoing. Thigpen isn't one to skip down the hall whistling Cameo's "Word Up." Thigpen is relatively quiet, but will open up quickly. He doesn't mince words. He'll assess players pretty evenly.

Thigpen comes across as maybe yet another Auburn assistant who's smarter than the average bear who coaches football, always a plus for a geek like me.

BlAUgosphere. One of the cool thing about the Internet is that the stuff on it doesn't go away. (Look, Boom Goes the Dynamite! Awesome!) This is helpful when you want to show how the thing somebody said at one time in the not-so-distant past is directly contradictory to the thing they're saying now, as PPL does with Tony Franklin in a thorough evisceration of the Franklin "system," which at Auburn meant celebrating his independence one day and griping that he wasn't getting any help the next. Plus there's an illustration of Franklin as a carnival barker. Click over.

The Auburner claims that this excellent piece of work is a leftover from their "too dumb to post" folder, which, like, if that's the case guys, you need to lower your standards a bit.

Elsewhere, PPL reviews the potential impact of the MLB draft on Auburn baseball, and Luke Brietzke counts down the seven most-anticipated newcomers for Auburn football. In the process he revels that DeAngelo Benton's nickname is "Voodooo," which aside from "The Toro" automatically ranks right up there with the best nicknames on the Auburn roster. How did I not know about this before? And how many games into his Auburn career will it be before someone photoshops his face into this logo--



--for the defunct New Orleans VooDoo Arena League team?

Etc. Not surprisingly, a post (via) devoted to finding something interesting about all 119 D-I college football teams goes with "will the Malzahn offense work?" (and, for the overwhelming majority of you who don't keep up with the NBA blogosphere, the Alabama note is a Gilbert Arenas riff) ... Brian Harbach offers five ways to improve the SEC, and though I don't agree with every idea--mandatory bye weeks aren't necessary when there's I-AA num-nums on the schedule--they're definitely thought-provoking ... an "offer" from any school may not mean exactly what you think it means, but it really doesn't in Tennessee's case.

The Works, gameplanning for GamePlan-style

Gone, but their spirit shall live on.

I take that back. I'd said not long ago that I expected to skip purchasing ESPN's GamePlan pay-per-view package this year, since despite it being one of mankind's better inventions--ranking somewhere between the George Foreman Lean Mean Fat-Reducing Grilling Machine and those Haggar slacks with the adjustable waist--I figured the new slate of games on newly-available ESPNU would replace ye olde regional morning telecasts of Raycom/Lincoln/Jefferson-Pilot yore. But now comes Jon Solomon to say Not So Fast My Thin-Walleted Friend, explaining that those games have been assigned to something called "ESPN Regional." I'll let Paul Westerdawg explain what that means:

This is not a network. It's a syndication company that signs deals with third parties to televise the rest of the SEC football and basketball games not shown by options 1-3. So far ESPN Regional has lined up CSS TV (available to Comcast and Charter clients) for six football and 20 basketball games per year. According to the B'ham news above, they are also in discussions with Fox Sports South for an additional package of games. Lastly, ESPN Regional works with local TV stations inside and outside of the SEC geographic footprint for TV distribution deals.

In other words: it's the Raycom system, just operated by ESPN. And as long as that's in place, the ex-pats among us will have to continue to shell out for GamePlan. What a hard-knock life we lead, having to pay to see every single game of our favorite football team via satellite from a thousand miles away. WHY DO YOU KEEP US IN THE DARK AGES, ESPN?

The other negative to this development, Solomon reports (in easy chart form!), is that the early SEC game will now kick-off even earlier. (This is actually a positive for the homebound of us, since that first half-hour when the Big 10/ACC had kicked off but the SEC has proven more frustrating than it should have, but obviously the earlier wake-up call and reduced tailgating suuuuuuuucks for those in attendance.) Here's the upside, though, and it's a big one: if the old Raycom games aren't shifting to ESPNU, that means that it's an extra set of games that will reside on the U and ESPN Classic. Games like last year's surprise thriller between LSU and Troy, or Auburn-La. Tech, or even lower-rung SEC tilts like Miss. St-Vandy ... all of those should now find their way to national television, leaving only the very dregs of the slate on team-only PPV. Thanks to that and ESPN's aggressive pushing of SEC fare into stations elsewhere around the country, the SEC's footprint will only expand even further than it already has. So that's cool.

Don't forget, too, when you're grumbling about waking up for an 11:21 kickoff or a fourth straight night game, that this deal allows the SEC's athletic departments to wallow around in a giant pile of money like a pig in beautiful, beautiful green slop. So there's that.

You're too kind. No, I mean it. Say this for Lache Seastrunk--it's sure as hell not like he doesn't care about his public image:

He was caught on video saying, among other things, "What's up Nick Saban?" while generally having a good time talking up Auburn. The Saban part bothered Seastrunk.

"I called and apologized to him," Seastrunk told (AuburnSports.com). "I wanted him to know I was sorry. I got caught up in the moment and Coach Saban understood that.

"That's not what I'm about. That's not what I stand for ... I wasn't trying to call him out or anything, create any type of controversy and he didn't think I was. He was very receptive and very understanding. He is a really great guy."

Whoa, whoa, whoa there, Lache. The apology is classy. It's a good move. It should put to bed (though it won't) the "diva" chatter from certain crimson-tinted corners. But ... it would have been OK to stop short of calling Saban a "really great guy." Really. You didn't have to go that far. It would have been fine.

Well, it would have been if you'd asked me. The, uh, Auburn fan. And my not-at-all biased and embittered opinion. (PPL has a worthwhile take as well, paired with a Simpsons reference--always a positive--and some cool baseball news.)

Hey! Quit being accurate! Dr. Saturday reproduces a selection of anonymous opposing coach quotes from this year's fresh-off-the-presses Athlon, and some LOSER had this to say about Auburn:

"The biggest thing that's different at Auburn now is there's no true home run threat at tailback. You can stop them from running the ball and make them one-dimensional."

Listen, anonymous ass, just because Ben Tate's led Auburn in rushing for two straight seasons despite averaging less than four-and-a-half-yards a carry, and even less against better teams, doesn't mean that ... but if you look at it from ... well, OK maybe it does mean that! Up yours anyway! (By the way, this exact quote is why I have such high hopes for the Onterio McCalebb era.)

BlAUgosphere. I spent yesterday afternoon fretting Louisiana Tech's strength and experience along their lines, so there's no doubt about my personal highlight from Acid Reign's Ball State preview:

Auburn defensive line vs. Ball State offensive line: On paper, this is a mismatch. Ball State's one returning starter is guard, junior Michael Switzer. Ball State will have to deal with quick ends such as Antonio Coleman, Michael Goggins, and Antoine Carter, with new tackles. Only two of the new starters have even earned a letter!

I'm nowhere near as worried about Ball St. as I am Tech--there won't be the same opening-game jitters, and the Cardinals have had an incredibly tumultuous offseason--but this is still very much in the category of "good news."

Also: does it get more enjoyably meta than the funny, chart-lovin' Auburner publishing a funny reader-submitted chart about how the Auburner isn't publishing funny charts at the moment?

Don't screw this up. College Football Live will be visiting Alabama next week, and maybe I'll be able to make myself sit through it for the first time. There's a poll involved, and if Bo doesn't win "Best Player," may all involved have tarantula eggs laid in their ears.

It's gold, Jerry. Linking to EDSBS is, as always, an exercise from the Department of Redundancy Department, but I have to point out that this little line from Orson's "Commenter Code" post on Alabama--

140 OBJECT RULE=(current coach) + (even a legitimate criticism) RE: (current coach) THEN command RUN FATAL ERROR

--had me howling. The truth can be awfully, awfully funny sometimes.

Etc. Curtis Luper is a Lakers fan ... Bobby Johnson has increased Vandy's Pythagorean wins for six straight seasons, an absolutely, patently ridiculous achievement ... if you've got some time to kill and don't mind some 20 years after-the-fact whining about Dye's decision to kick for the tie, this exhaustive-but-enjoyable recap (like mine? I hope?) of the '88 Sugar Bowl is worth your attention. (Via, then via.)

The Works, much ado about nothing-style

Not a scene that's going to change anytime soon.

Not breaking out the kazoos just yet. So Bobby Lowder has retired from his post as Colonial's Bank's "Chairman, Director, CEO and President and Eternal Glorious Dictator-for-Life of the People's Republic of Colonialia." Here, let me sum up how much impact I think his retirement from his day job will have on his influence on Auburn athletics:










OK, finished. Seriously, as long as he's wealthy (and he still is), sitting on the Board of Trustees (and as Jay points out, he will be until at least April 2011) and as long as various buildings on the Auburn campus bear his name, he's going to be just about as influential as ever. In fact, as Jay (again) points out, this could just give Lowder more free time in which to find new and exciting ways to get his greasy mitts on the Auburn athletic department again. I'll keep my fingers crossed that Lowder scaling back his activity in the public sphere will coincide with a scaling-back of his activity within Auburn's athletic halls, but I just don't think that's going to be the case.

One of the more ... curious ... responses to the Lowder retirement has come from Jay Tate, who writes that Lowder came across as "a very bright nerd" in person and adds:

Sure, he meddled in some stuff. So what?

Say what, Jay? Arranging for the school president, athletic director, and two trustees to take a secret night flight to find a replacement football coach behind the back of the current coach as he was preparing for the Iron Bowl was "meddling in some stuff"? A sitting trustee threatens Auburn University's very accreditation--without which it can simply no longer function as a serious institution of higher learning--and the response is "So what"? Huh?

I know Lowder has done some incredible things for Auburn, and no one (myself included) doubts his love for the school or its community. But in the same way doctors have "first, do no harm," Auburn's trustees have to first, always, protect and uphold Auburn University's academic reputation and institutional integrity. When Lowder sent that plane to Louisville, he may as well have been printing up decals of Calvin pissing on Samford Hall. He's not fit to serve on the Board, much less lead it. I know Jay and the other members of the "Lowder's not so bad/misunderstood" crowd have their reasons, but they don't fly with me at all.

Seasons change, feelings change. Remember about this time last year, when Auburn was piling up the commitments and it was awesome even though none of them were particularly highly-rated, because what you wanted to do was jump on the "sleepers" early before they broke out with a big senior season? Nevermind! Now what we want to do is wait it out, see where the heavy hitters are going, plan accordingly, and not rush into things. That's the way to go! Or so says Curtis Luper:

He was not concerned about the fact that Auburn only has four commitments right now (at this time last year, Auburn had 10). Alabama and Florida, by comparison, each has 12. "We're not in a commitment race," he said. "People in their haste to get early commitments, may not evaluate as thoroughly as they should. So we want to thoroughly evaluate every aspect of every potential student athlete. And we're not going to make any mistakes in character and some of the other intangibles that we can find out.'

That sounds great! (Seriously, the lesson here is that either way can work. It's all about how things wind up next February. I just think the contrast from where we stood 12 months ago is interesting.)

Baseball. Recruiting in baseball must be hard. Go after guys who don't have the skills to get drafted, and maybe you're not going to be as talented as your opponents; go after the top-of-the-line guys, and you risk them never arriving on campus. That's one of several current dilemmas currently faced by John Pawlowski:

LaGrange, Ga., catcher Luke Bailey and infielder Nick Franklin of Longwood, Fla., offer still more speed and versatility. There's only one problem.

Both players are coveted professional prospects. They're expected to be drafted in the first five rounds -- some experts see Bailey as a first-round player -- and may weigh an Auburn scholarship against a six-figure signing bonus.

Pawlowski isn't ready to concede anything.

"I'll be on pins and needles until after the draft," he said. "We'll have to go back into a few of these homes and re-recruit players. You have to reaffirm your commitment to each of them. We need them all."

That article's from the Advertiser and does what seems to be a good job of running down the challenges Pawlowski faces this offseason. (Too bad, then, it's not bylined--who do I credit?) One other quickie bit of baseball news: Academic All-American Ben Jones is definitely not the problem when it comes to the team's iffy APR score.

BlAUgosphere. Lots of good stuff out there:

--Acid Reign continues his season preview series with a look at West Virginia. I'm pretty sure "opponent 31, Auburn 10" easily marks the most pessimistic prediction Acid's made in his two years of doing these posts, which should tell you something about how much talent WVU will bring to J-Hare.

--The Pigskin Pathos says Gene Chizik is a harder man than you. To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure if Ben's saying that's a good or a bad thing, but I like the way he's saying it.

--I was desperately hoping PPL would keep posting even after the end of the baseball season, and it's so far so good as they take a comprehensive look at the Twitter feeds of the SEC's football coaches. Your surprise Best in Show winner: Rich Brooks.

--"I was wearing an Auburn hat in a foreign country/the Alaskan bush/prison on the moon, and someone said War Eagle to me" stories are the best, aren't they? Fields of Donahue has one.

Bamalinks. The coachbot explains why, a la Kiffykins, he handed over a precious graduate assistant slot that could have been a huge benefit to a young coach to well-paid veteran coach Mike Groh, ex-Virginia offensive coordinator:

"He's going to graduate school," Saban said.

"He didn't have a job," Saban continued. "He should have an opportunity to work. We're not violating any rules. His dad is a good friend of mine. We coached together before. I'm sure he would do the same for my son. But he is going to graduate school and he's not making any more money than a graduate assistant ... I think, personally, I'd like to see us have more GAs, more GAs on the field to develop coaches."

1. I'm sure Groh is in grad school, because that's a requirement for the GA gig, but what use is a Master's degree to him at this stage of his career? He's not in grad school to get the degree, he's in it so he can keep coaching the football team, and his presence makes a mockery of whatever academic program he's landed in 2. The answer to Groh not having a job but there not being enough GA slots for developing coaches isn't to, you know, actually hire a developing coach in the existing GA slot and let Groh find a proper job elsewhere, it's just to add more GA slots 3. I'm sure whatever young coach who got passed over in Groh's favor is totally fine with that now that he knows Saban was just doing Groh's father a favor 4. If there was ever a phrase to sum up the coachbot approach to building a program, it's "We're not violating any rules." The spirit of them, sure, the integrity of the academic institution, yeah, that might have been a little violated. But the rules--why, Saban's always happy to follow those. Sort of.

Now that that's out of the way, it's only fair that I make note of Saban's sage observation that the NCAA doesn't do nearly enough to help develop minority coaches, a point on which I completely agree and which I tip my cap to him for making. Saban also made an appearance in front of the Tide softball team before their trip to the College Softball World Series; for a guy who supposedly doesn't have time for this s**t, I'll grant that there have been a lot of these kinds of stories during Saban's time in T-Town. So good on him for that. (HT: TSK.)

One other "in the interest of fairness" note: having made a note of Nico Johnson's recent arrest in this space before, I'm also obligated to point out that Johnson was found not guilty in a trial in which his accuser didn't even show. So, uh, yeah, you might want to file this one retroactively under "strange applications of law enforcement" rather than "Parole Tide!"

There's not really any news on the incoming Textbookgate sanctions, but both Chris Low and Mal Moore seem to think the NCAA will make its announcement in the very near future.

Etc. The world's soccer fans continue to make LSU fans look downright hospitable ... more on John Calipari and his bid for the presidency of Associated Skeezebags of America here and here ... not that you didn't know this already, but there's a lot of similarities between Auburn and Tennessee, including that both Kiffin and Chizik were on the field for that Texas-USC Rose Bowl classic, which I feel like I actually didn't know (HT:RTT) ... and during yesterday's Cox look-back, I took a glance at the 2002 Rivals top 100. Check out the five-star wideout at No. 32 overall, and consider the hype that would greet him if he committed with that kind of rating today.

Smoke smoke smoke smoke smoke smoke smoke

Back at the end of April, Will Collier noted that Kevin Scarbinsky's column on the Limo Gambit had included a rather curious reference to lawyers leasing out vehicles to recruits. Will didn't mention a second, equally curious turn-of-phrase, however, at the end of the column:

As recruiting tactics go, better stretching out in a limo than stretching the truth. And better the coaches show up in a sweet ride than the recruits.

For any Auburn or Alabama fan with an Internet connection, both of these references are so obvious that's it's not even accurate to call them "veiled"--K-Scar is slyly playing off of the Gadsden rumors that I'm sure 99.9 percent of this blog's readership are already plenty familiar with.

Will cites these little dropped hints as an indication Scarbinsky "knows the score," and that might be accurate, but what's interesting to me is not what they say about K-Scar--it's what they say about the rumors. For the state's leading sports columnist to acknowledge their existence, however subtly, means we're reaching something approaching critical mass. We moved another notch closer at the tail end of last week, when (as TrackEm noted) a Gadsden car dealership was raided by the feds, shut down, and had financial documents confiscated.

Now, let me as clear as I can about this: I am NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT claiming that the rumors are legitimate. Not claiming the raid was connected to any kind of NCAA investigation. Not claiming any of this is anything more than message board ravings and tinfoil hat conspiracy-mongering. Rumors of this sort so, so rarely become anything more than "Hey, remember when people were saying such-and-such?" footnotes and cautionary tales that putting stock in any of them before the NCAA is actually in the process of announcing something is a fool's errand. That the Gadsden thing really started gathering steam after Textbookgate broke--when the anti-Tide conspiracy traders are going to have the most receptive audience--is another reason to stay on the skeptical side until proven otherwise.

However: there is a lot of smoke out there if there's no fire. It's like a gauge, with one side yellow and the other red, with a line in the middle and either side labeled "Nothing out there"/"Something out there." When there's this much smoke out there, it's only fair to say that needle has starting moving towards that "something out there" reading, right? Even if the most likely outcome today is still, probably, "nothing," we've reached the point where pretending a) it's a total non-story b) every mention of it is to be blithely dismissed as orange-and-blue desperation isn't the most rational response.

Since it's quite possible there could be something big out there and it still won't amount to anything when all is said and done, I don't blame the cynics for assuming this will all just be a lot of sound and fury over nothing. But when there's this much sound, this much fury, at the very least it's time to start listening. No one knows what's going to happen in Gadsden, but no one knows what's not going to happen, either.

This is the sort of technology we cannot let fall into Russian hands

So, unless you're a subscriber to Life Under a Rock brand Internet service, there's a good chance you've noticed that over the past 10 days or so we've finally reached the apex of human evolution. Unless you think there's a better explanation for the invention of Play Him Off, Keyboard Cat.







Now, just when you thought things couldn't get any more awesome, you can have Keyboard Cat play off anyone you like. Sure, the results don't have the breathtaking grace and subtlety of the clips made by the professionals of YouTubeland--no overdubbed sound or slo-mo replays, unfortunately--but that's a minor complaint when you can

PLAY MIKE PATRICK OFF, KEYBOARD CAT

PLAY "BAMA'S BACK" OFF, KEYBOARD CAT

PUNT BAMA OFF, KEYBOARD CAT

Anyone who wants to gussy those up with actual editing (a96?), feel free. Until then, enjoy as is. (HT: The Dish.)

The Works, GIMME GIMME GIMME-style

GIMME GIMME GIMME. This video's popped up a couple of places already, and posting video of "recruits" rather than "commits" feels like dipping our toes into the dark lake of overconfidence ... but when I found myself watching this a second time, I figured I ought to pass it along in this space anyway (audio NSFW, and not in that charmingly audio NSFW way like yesterday):



These gentlemen should most certainly play college football for the Auburn Tigers.

So should you elite wide receiving prospects out there. When Florida-based wide receiving recruit DeJoshua Jackson recently ruled out playing for a spread offense because he thought it would hurt his draft prospects, you couldn't blame him too much, I guess. Sure, he's flat wrong--you could ask first-round picks Michael Crabtree, Percy Harvin, or Jeremy Maclin how much it hurt them, but they wouldn't be able to hear you as they drive by in their solid gold rocket-cars--but tons upon tons of fans and coaches of pro-style teams have been reciting the same line of misinformation the past couple of years. (Tide fans, as we know, have become particularly fond of it since the Franklin hire.) Fortunately for Auburn coaches on the recruiting trail, they're just wrong, as Varsity Blue comprehensively demonstrates:

13 Receivers from spread offenses and 17 from pro-style offenses were selected, with 4 from 1-AA teams, which I didn’t include because 1) I don’t know what type of offense most 1-AA schools run, and 2) If they’re taking a guy from a 1-AA school, offensive scheme is probably not on the forefront of NFL GMs’ decisions. Considering that more schools run a pro-style offense (particularly in power conferences, from which most NFL players are likely to come), that’s not bad at all. In the first round, the same number of players from each offensive type (3 apiece). When you consider that some schools that I placed in the “pro style” category also have some elements of spread offenses, such as Ohio State, LSU, and Oregon State, it’s a complete wash, at worst. And I guess that brings me back to my main point, which is not that the spread is inherently better for a wide receiver prospect’s chances of making it to the NFL, but rather than the offensive scheme on the whole is irrelevant.

I think Tim maybe undersells the spread's impact on the NFL's quarterback scouting (there's a reason neither Chase Daniel nor Graham Harrell got drafted), but I think that's pretty definitive where wideouts are concerned.

Meyer redux. So, the Gainesville Sun columnist who delivered His Moral Infallibleness's anti-limo sentiments realized the error of his ways and backtracked:

Ah, the World Wide Interweb (another movie reference). When you make a mistake, you're going to hear it. Last week I had a Dooley Noted item about Auburn coaches parading recruits around in limos. I obviously misread the story because it was Auburn coaches in the limos going from school to school. War Eagle fans have corrected me with dozens of e-mails. My bad. Now calm down.

Year2 at TeamSpeedKills notes that the columnist may have not just made the error in the blog post: he may have, in fact, told Meyer that Auburn had recruits riding in the limos, and that was what Meyer was responding to. An Orlando Sentinel blogger argued for the same assumption.

Sorry, but I'm not buying it. First off, none of us knows what Dooley said to Meyer and what he didn't. His mea culpa didn't apologize for misleading Meyer--just for making the mistake on his blog. To assume both that Meyer was ignorant of what Auburn was doing (really? despite the fact it's been just about the biggest story in the SEC over the past week?) and that Dooley laid out his misinformation rather than just asking "So, how 'bout those Auburn limos?" is a mighty big leap if you ask me. Second, Meyer would know good and well Auburn wouldn't have recruits inside the limos--coaches can't do more than "bump" recruits during the current recruiting period, so the idea of them rounding up students in the middle of the school day for a quick joyride is ludicrous to anyone who's aware of how the current rules work. Even if Dooley was misinformed, Meyer wasn't, and he made the comments anyway--note that he didn't say that Florida's recruits won't be riding in limos, he says Florida's coaches won't be. Third, Meyer has been unbearably smug in dealing with other coaches' actions before and however well- or mis-informed he was, he was being unbearably smug again (why take the swipe at Tennessee's coaches yet again?). He and Dooley both deserved every word of anger they got from Auburn fan's direction.

Speaking of that response, Jay's Meyer takedown created its own mini-brouhaha when that same Sentinel blogger accused its "streets of Miami" reference as "racist (and) insulting." That response was then responded to by Plainsman Parking Lot. What a tangled, angry web we weave!

More from the BlAUgosphere. JCCW commenter and Bracket Challenge winner Jonesy has a blog, and he's even using it for the powers of good with Fun Facts like these:

The last Auburn football coach to leave Auburn and coach a significant game at another school was Chet A. Wynne. He left Auburn in 1933 for Kentucky. Jack Meagher, Carl Voyles, Earl Brown, Shug Jordan, Doug Barfield, Pat Dye, Terry Bowden, and Bill Oliver all have ended their head coaching career at Auburn, at least for the time being.

Dude ... whoa. When Chizik says this is his last job, he's probably not kidding, is he?

PPL also enjoyably fisked a braindead Tide-slurping column from the Decatur Daily.

Reputation: upheld! UPDATE: Per DocSat, and with no set date for the shirt's appearance at the store, the t-shirt item is retracted. Some things really are too good to be true, I guess.

Speaking of the Tide, K-Scar paid them one hell of a backhanded compliment this week by praising them for going an entire 10 months without a player arrested! Why, that's almost an entire year without so much as an armed robbery! Good for them! That's great!

Etc. Auburn's men's golf coach steps down ... ATVS skewers the cult of "leadership" in football, and except for the, uh, Hitler reference, I pretty much co-sign.

Developments, continued

Happy trails

--We can finally put the Fantastical Mr. Oku watch to bed this morning as Tennessee's Rivals site reported late last night that he'd signed with--whaddya know--the Vols. Obviously, with as many quality running backs (and total players ... remember, someone's got to fail to qualify to trim the class to 25) as Auburn already signed in this class, the biggest negative of Oku's decision isn't that he's not coming to the Plains, it's that he might hurt us down the road as a Vol. So it goes.

The JCCW genuinely wishes Mr. Oku the best of luck, Auburn games excepted, in the hopes the next eccentric weirdo flaky kid isn't summarily dismissed as "crazy"/"a vag"/"not worth the trouble" before he's even set foot on campus. The world ought to be big enough for weirdo flakes, right? (If Oku turns out to be a high-maintenance prima donna who goes Owens on the Vols, please forget I ever wrote this paragraph.)

--More on textbookgate: Will updates his previous post with the important detail that the violations appear to have fallen inside Alabama's "repeat offender" window, which hadn't even closed the last time the Tide were ensnared in one of the NCAA's nets. Uh-oh.

The consensus seems to be growing that some scholarship loss is imminent, particularly when we're talking about thousands of dollars' worth of books. That the Tide have such a long rap sheet with the NCAA (and that the NCAA rejected their request for summary disposition) makes it much, much more likely in my view that some serious sanctions may be coming ... though Jay takes the opportunity to speculate about a much darker--and, frankly, kind of hilarious from our perspective--future for 'Bama.

The coldly rational part of my brain that I don't particularly like actually feels a little bit of sympathy for the Tide--if Auburn's football team was about to land in the NCAA's jail cell because a handful of athletes tried to do their friends a solid and a handful of bookstore employees weren't on the ball enough to notice, I'd be livid.

Then again: Auburn hasn't had a Textbookgate. Georgia hasn't had a Textbookgate. Florida, Ole Miss, South Carolina ... no one else in the SEC has had this problem. (When I read that Alabama defended themselves by saying the athletes didn't know it was an infraction ... well, isn't it someone's job to teach them what's an infraction and what isn't?) And it wouldn't be so big a deal anyway, one suspects, if not for 'Bama's preexisiting history ... at which point we have to point out that the SEC's other schools haven't had an Albert Means-level scandal this decade, either.

This is the bed Alabama--unfortunately for their fans--has made for themselves. Now we wait, and see how the NCAA makes them lie in it.

--South Carolina's ugly home loss to Tennessee last night sealed the Vols' spot on top of the SEC East, meaning Auburn and Tennessee are now locked in to a potential matchup in the SEC Tournament semifinals should they survive the quarters. Who Auburn's quarterfinal opponent will be is still very much up in the air--it'll be the winner of a first-round meeting between Arkansas and the third-place East team, so probably the third-place East team. That should be the winner of Saturday's bubble elimination game between Florida and Kentucky, but if Carolina slips up on the road at Georgia--after their no-show at Vandy and Georgia's resurgence in Lexington, it's hardly out of the question--the 'Cocks could slip to third in their division via tiebreaker.

So, yeah, I kinda wish Carolina had taken care of business last night and stuck the Vols--quite obviously the hottest team in the league at the moment, with back-to-back road wins over two of their fellow SEC bubblers--in the other half of the tourney bracket, forcing them to tangle with LSU instead. That would have left Auburn with the more manageable prospect of a 1. Kentucky/Florida 2. Carolina path to the finals. Then again, from my mid-major perspective, Carolina's loss was just what the doctor ordered: thanks to Florida falling out of the RPI top 50, the 'Cocks now have zero RPI top 50 wins. They're 0-4 at that level despite getting two different shots at home. The 7-3 mark against teams 50-100 isn't bad (by contrast, Kentucky is 4-4), but that's not NCAA-worthy. The current NCAA pecking order amongst the East bubblers looks to me like 1. Florida 2. Kentucky 3. Carolina, but it's hard to make a case for any of the three of them entering today. Would you like a stat to blow your mind? Here's one: Northwestern (who has never been to the NCAA Tournament and wasn't even considered a bubble team until they upset Purdue on the road Wednesday) has more RPI top 50 wins than Kentucky, Florida, and South Carolina combined. Right now, Florida getting hot or a surprise automatic-bid winner are the only things standing between the SEC and a disastrous two-bid season.

Developments

A few odds and ends of an Auburn-related nature:

--Longtime good friend of the JCCW Will Collier has been accused by some of taking a little too much relish in the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune suffered by the Tide, and certainly he has more of a taste for delicious, delicious 'Bama-related dirt than yours truly. But there are times when this is a very good attribute for a blogger to have, because it means Will's willing to read and decipher the NCAA's "Preliminary Letter of inquiry"/Notice of allegations"--available here--sent last May in the wake of 2007's textbookgate. Money grafs from Will:

Among other things, the mildly-redacted PLOI charges UAT with Failure To Monitor (page 6), which is basically the second most serious charge in the NCAA rulebook, behind the dreaded Failure Of Institutional Control.

Contrary to everything you've read in the media to date, the NCAA considers this is a major violations case (page 4).

Will points out one of the indications of that potential seriousness: the Tide were denied "summary disposition," or as Will put it in an e-mail (when I asked) a kind of "plea bargain." (More summary dispositions here.) The lead paragraph on page 3 of the letter states:

As indicated in my November 20, 2007 letter, the Committee on Infractions reviews information concerning major possible violations either through the summary disposition process or an in-person hearing. It is my understanding that the enforcement staff has discussed the possibility of processing the case through the summary disposition process and that currently this process does not appear appropriate.

Look, I don't know all that much about this sort of thing. So take anything I say here with a grain of salt. But when the NCAA has both the "work with the offenders to compromise on the investigation and a punishment" option or the "No thanks, we'll decide what we want to do you with you" option, and they choose option B, that can't be good, can it? As Cecil Hurt reported today, the issue resulted in a meeting with the NCAA in late February. It'll be "several weeks" at least until we find out the results of that meeting.

It's hard for me to imagine this will wind up doing anything worse than the Tide than the loss of a scholarship or two: as foreboding as "Failure to Monitor" sounds, it's a textbook program. Your guess is as good as mine whether even lost scholarships are an option for the NCAA, and Chris Low has already opined that the meeting won't result in any additional punishments at all. (In the interests of equal time, you should probably also read OTS's understandable "tempest in a teapot" take at RBR). But: even a couple of lost schollies equal a couple more good players that won't go to Alabama, and might instead go to Auburn. (Not to mention, of course, that scraping up enough scholarships to go around is difficult enough in Tuscaloosa these days.) It's not a MASSIVE deal, but it's certainly worth keeping an eye on.

--Hey, Auburn's Junior Day is this weekend! I can't believe I'm sort of mildly intrigued by it, though I wish I was less intrigued for both the usual recruiting-makes-me-want-to-wash-with-antibacterial-soap reasons and the fact of this quote from the (free) AUUndercover article:

“We didn’t start sending out the invitations until last Wednesday, so we’re behind on that," said Fountain, who moved from Iowa State to Auburn on Feb. 16. "But I think when all is said and done we’ll have a really good crowd here. We actually invited 90 players, which may have been too many. We’re just hitting it running and hope to make it a good day for these guys.”

Emphasis mine, because while I'm sure everything will be super in the end, you'd still rather your brand new administrative guy not admit to two possible imperfections in the planning of the staff's first Junior Day. I guess.

Charles Goldberg has a list of potential attendees, and I'm sure I'm not alone in hoping Vigor's Tremendous Campbell-Scott commits before the weekend is out.

--If you've read my hoops coverage for any length of time you know how keen I am on statistical measures as an indicator of team quality. I'll update those for you for the Auburn men: Pomeroy now has them 59th and rising; Gasaway's league-play efficiency margin ranks them fourth in the SEC, but now only one tenth of a point behind Florida and Kentucky--taking current play into account, you could make an argument that Auburn is currently the SEC's second-best team; Kyle Whelliston's delightfully quirky BBState rankings spit Auburn out at 68th and rising; and the less widely followed adjusted scoring margin metric ($) used by Joe Lunardi is perhaps kindest of all, calling Auburn the 49th-best team in the country. (Yes, even though it's at ESPN, ASM seems kind of overlooked; I never see basketball writers or bloggers refer to it unless they're griping about it or they're Lunardi himself. Weird.)

The point: all of these systems place Auburn's 2008-2009 performance squarely amongst various other major-conference NCAA bubble teams (Michigan, Maryland, Providence, Wisconsin, etc.). Given that Auburn is playing much, much better basketball now than in December or January, it's fair to say they're currently an NCAA Tournament quality team. It's just too bad they didn't prove it when they had the chance to against Dayton, Florida, Mercer, Vandy, etc. Now: three games in Tampa.

(One other quick note about Auburn's RPI, as touched on yesterday: what used to be a simple formula has gotten a couple of tweaks to it over the years, and the latest one mercilessly punishes teams who lose at home. Thus is Kentucky dropped all the way to 78th after losing yet another home game. What does this mean for Auburn? Those 300-plus RPI opponents they scheduled weren't good for the RPI, but losing to beatable opponents like Mercer, Vandy, and Florida was just as bad.)

--The Auburn women will play Ole Miss tomorrow in the first round of the SEC Tournament after the Rebels eliminated Arkansas 65-60. The Tigers probably would have preferred the Razorbacks after having swept them 2-0 and annihilated them in Auburn's home finale/coronation--as opposed to the uninspiring 72-65 win in Beard-Eaves Auburn posted over the Rebels. But obviously, Auburn's hoping for a championship--if you can't beat the SEC's ninth-place team, you can't complain too much, can you?

Sugar Bowlthoughts

Coachbot coachbots it up. Just yesterday, I commented on how even if Paul Johnson's aggression and willingness to take risks didn't pay off against LSU, it's a promising sign for his continued career at Tech.

Would you like an example of the opposite of "aggression"? Would you like an example about how a lack of "willingness to take risks" can hurt one's college football team? Sugar Bowl, last night, Alabama down 28-17, 4 minutes and change left in third quarter. 4th-and-2 on the Utah 32. The options for a Tide team that has spent its entire season making a living (and, we can be honest here, making a pretty damn prosperous living at that) shoving opponents around and imposing its will and all that physical-physical-physical stuff are: try to maintain their 39-yard drive by rushing for 2 yards, or have Leigh Tiffin attempt a 49-yard field goal.

If you're Alabama, trying to make the first has to be the decision here. For starters, Tiffin has always been the definition of "erratic"; his chances of connecting at this distance in this pressure-packed situation can't be higher than 25 or 30 percent, can they? On top of that, passing on the opportunity to run for 2 freaking yards deep in enemy territory is a clear signal from the head coach to his makeshift offensive line: I don't have any faith in you. The Alabama from the regular season makes that distance--especially against an undersized front like Utah's--in its sleep. To take the field goal--barely a step up from punting the ball--is to quit being Alabama, to give up on the identity the Tide had forged all season.

But, hey, going for it on fourth down isn't the sort of risk an NFL-bred coachbot is willing to take, even when kicking the field goal is, percentage-wise, probably a lot riskier. And so boom goes the kick, it sails wide, and Alabama would never come so close to scoring again.

Saban is, quite obviously (and unfortunately), a phenomenal college football coach. But he has his Achilles heels like anyone, and his failure to sack up on key fourth downs (remember his Shulaesque devotion to the punt in the 2007 Iron Bowl?) is one of them. Last night, it cost him.

Furthermore: panic. The Tide's next drive faced 3rd-and-3, just shy of midfield, on the first play of the fourth quarter. Score still 28-17. You are Alabama. The play-call has to be to plow forward two consecutive times for the first, right? There's still a whole quarter to play. You don't have to put the game wholly in the hands of John Parker Wilson just yet, right? Because when you put the game wholly in the hands of John Parker Wilson down two scores, you have lost the game.

No matter--the call is a Wilson drop-back, the result a sack and a punt. Alabama's next possession, score still 28-17, still 11 full minutes on the clock: incompletion, 7-yard pass, incompletion, punt. Hobbled offensive line and all, 2008 Alabama would have been the last team I would have expected to give up on the run, but with the game on the line, that's what they did. And by the time they got the ball again, there was less than six minutes left, and they had no choice but to ask Wilson to save them. That just wasn't ever going to work.

Remember, too, that it's not like the Tide run game was completely incompetent; Coffee and Ingram ran 21 times for 66 yards, or 3.14 yards a carry. Not great, but not rock-bottom, either. Meanwhile, dump the sack yardage into the passing stats as opposed to the rushing game, and you've got 38 called pass plays for 124 yards, an average of 3.26 yards, plus all three Tide turnovers. If abandoning the run didn't make any sense from an identity or time-remaining standpoint, it didn't even make any from a statistical standpoint. It was, simply, panic.

So, is that on McElwain for the play-calling or Saban for not keeping the coaching ship of a more even keel? It doesn't matter. What matters is that the postgame consensus that Utah outcoached Alabama and outcoached Alabama badly is entirely correct.

D? After Smith's dismissal, the Tide's offense struggling the way it did didn't necessarily shock me; it surprised me, certainly, but given how badly the Tide struggled against a Tulane defense far inferior to Utah's in their only other Smithless performance, I thought it was at least a possibility. But 336 passing yards for Brian Johnson? 8.2 yards a pass? Against the fourth-best per-play defense in the country? I'm floored, still. After the Utes scored that third TD in their first three possessions, it wouldn't have been all that surprising at that point if they'd celebrated by taking a victory lap down the sideline on a bunch of Shetland ponies, firing Star Wars-style laser blasters into the air. Or something.

In any case, all those of you who believe a pass-first spread offense can't work in the SEC, please move to the back of the class.

Not fair. I don't know if I'll vote Utah No. 1 in my final BlogPoll ballot--my hunch is that a win by either Oklahoma or Florida over the other would make their schedule strong enough that, combined with their season-long dominance, they'd have the No. 1 resume in the country--but that some very intelligent people believe they ought to be No. 1 should tell you something. What it should tell you is that college football employs a system which makes it impossible for what might be the best team in college football to win a national championship. That Utah can go undefeated twice and not even be part of the conversation isn't just a shame--it's an injustice, and college football has to find some way of undoing it.

Lastly, Auburn fans, let's keep the glee to a minimum, if we can. I'm sure I enjoyed last night's game as much as any of you. But my two cents are these: a fan that goes over-the-top in celebrating another team doing what his or her team couldn't only emphasizes that, well, another team did what his or her team couldn't.

Hate Week: We are Auburn, they are Alabama

You may remember the Looney Tunes cartoons* in which a sheep dog named Sam and a wolf named Ralph wake up, say hello, clock in, spend their day in vicious competition over the fate of a herd of sheep, and then clock back out and walk home together at the end of the day:



This is a good illustration of why I never get too exercised about Alabama fans--even the smart ones--claiming that they don't care about Auburn, that it's just another game, that Auburn fans are pathetically obsessed with Alabama to the point of not caring about anything else, that Auburn will always be the second-best football team in the state no matter what the actual, you know, on-field results have to say about it. This is why Auburn fans have been more than entitled to wag their six fingers in any and all 'Bama fans' faces for the last 12 months, why we get to lord our victories over them in a way we would for no one else, why we should always always always laugh at them for believing A) "little brother's" success is some sort of short-lived, doesn't-really-count fluke when we've had the better of things for most of the last 25 years B) they don't care about us when their endless denials are the classic example of doth protesting too much.

These are our jobs. They are Alabama fans. They are supposed to be arrogant, dismissive, hopelessly entitled, and oftentimes outright delusional. We are Auburn fans. We are supposed to be insufferable about the Streak, derisive about the Tide's mouldering claims of superiortiy, and yes, we are most certainly supposed to be obsessed with Alabama. When we sign up on one side or the other in this state, we clock in. And then we go to work.

I would say fans on both sides of the Iron Bowl should stop holding our jobs against each other and realize this is just how this business works--and there are times, certainly, when they should be held with much less stridency--but then again, holding them against each other is also part of the job.

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I say that as preface to this: I have no problem admitting I am more-or-less obsessed with Alabama and want Auburn to win tomorrow's game so badly it makes my teeth hurt.

I've never understood--other than the requirements of the job--why Tide fans would make fun of Auburn for their obsession. For a whole laundry list of reasons:

1. Doesn't the fact that we'd be obsessed with Alabama sort of imply that they're a program worth obsessing about? Isn't saying something along the lines of "Haha! You losers are losers for wanting to beat a team like us so bad!" an admittance that your team is also, well, a bunch of losers? Isn't "Well, they're obsessed with us, but that makes sense when you consider how awesome we are" a much more positive response? See, Tide fans can admit their team's failings, they just have to do it in a neurotic, roundabout fashion that makes sure they can bring us down with them.

2. Maybe, just maybe, said obsession and the full-time devotion to it has something to do with the fact that outside of the efforts of one particular museum-inspiring coach, Auburn has been the far superior team? We win because we care, yo.

3. I think I've written this before on this site, but it doesn't make sense to put your national cart before your in-state horse. You can't win a national title if you don't win the SEC, you don't win the SEC if you don't win the West, you don't win the West if you don't win your own damn state. If you're second-best at home, you can't be first-best anywhere else. Why wouldn't beating Alabama always be Auburn's No. 1 goal? Again: maybe trying to run to national glory before walking past Auburn is why the Tide has tripped and fallen on its face so often, hm?

4. This one is important.

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Hate and rivalry are not in the blood of college football. Hate and rivalry are the blood of college football. Its first game: in-state rivals in search of a gentlemanly way of tearing the limbs off of the representatives of the other school. Get past the ginormous television contracts and multimillion dollar bowl purses and crystal footballs and Tim Tebow discussing circumcision on ESPN College Gameday built by the Home Depot and this--the competition, the hate, the blood--are still what the game is about. Untether it from those things, and it's just minor-league NFL, Arenaball played outside.

To deny rivalry is to deny that your team is even playing college football. Of course, many Tide fans (though not all) will admit to having a rivalry with Tennessee, or that Auburn is a rivalry game--just not an especially important one. Again: this is their job. This is who they are.

This is, nonetheless, another reason they are wrong and hopeless and forever hated Alabama. Whether they like it or not--or rather, in part, because their obnoxious asses don't like it--this is the greatest rivalry in college football. It is**. And they willingly forsake it just to try and prove a point about their imagined superiority.

They must be punished for it. They are hypocrites, blithely claiming the current outcome of the Iron Bowl irrelevant until such time as they win it again, at which point the outcome will be, of course, of tremendous importance. In response to the same WBGV post by Todd I linked above, Grotus (in his own tour de force post) writes the following:

What's most interesting is the simultaneous embracing and rejection of Tide history that distinguishes the new Bama fan. On one hand, he's obviously denying more than a century of vicious, gladiatorial combat in the form of football. As I need not mention, this is a war fought long by our fathers and grandfathers - and in my case, great-great-grandfathers. To claim that the Iron Bowl holds no significance is to completely ignore the bitter feud that has shaped our two institutions. All while simultaneously proclaiming the resurrection of the Tide, return to the glories of the Alabama past, the days of a new Bear - this itself is an appeal to history, to trudishun, to legacy. Mmm, crimson cake to be eaten and to be had!

If they won't respect the Iron Bowl, they don't deserve to win it. And: for six years going on seven, they don't.

They are Alabama. We are Auburn. We are the obsessed, because we see things as they are. We are the disrespected, because we dare to respect the sport and its blood. We hate, because their screaming arrogance deserves hatred. We are Auburn: the underdogs, the Davids, the storybook heroes. This is why we clock in. This is why we take the job.

This is why War Eagle. War Damn Eagle, forever.

*I embed Looney Tunes as metaphors a lot, I know. But can you come up with anything more awesome in our shared cultural currency I could use instead? Of course not.

**Army and Navy aren't just two sides of the same coin, it's the same face on both sides, too similar to share a hate outside of the context of their 60 minutes of football. Michigan and Ohio St. hate each other, but they don't share a geography and college football just isn't the end-all-be-all of sporting passion in the Midwest the way it is in Alabama***. Texas-Oklahoma perhaps comes closest--certainly (as with UM-OSU) the national stakes are much higher than they are in the Iron Bowl. But the undercurrents of Tide arrogance vs. Tiger grievance aren't there and again, very few Longhorns have to go into the office and face the victorious Sooners on Monday. And what else is there? USC-Notre Dame? Florida-Georgia? Kansas-Missouri? No. Your mileage my vary, but that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

***Confidential to my friends in Ann Arbor: Sorry. But true.