Ranking the SEC's Most Embarrassing nonconference schedules in 2009

I'm sure somebody out there on the Internets has done this exact thing already, but screw it, a) I can't find it b) I don't have anything else to write today c) these posts do look like a lot of fun to write d) I was looking over my helmet schedule this morning, and honestly, the SEC's current scheduling practices are a disgrace. Every BCS conference's scheduling practices save the Pac-10's are a disgrace, of course, but honestly, consider:

--Excluding annual rivalries, the entire conference will play just four games against BCS teams with winning records in 2008--and two of those games are against the same team (Georgia Tech).

--The league's four presumptive favorites (Florida, Alabama, LSU, and Ole Miss) are combining to play three games total against BCS teams--and one of those is against 0-12 Washington.

--Throw out Georgia's outlier of a schedule, and the SEC has exactly one more game scheduled against BCS competition (11) than it does against I-AA competition (10). And that's not counting D-I transitional Western Kentucky, which is almost still sorta I-AA and would make the comparison dead even.

Pathetic. Anyway, here's the official JCCW ranking of Most Embarrassing 2009 noncon schedules, with Embarrassing being the operative word here. It's not which is strongest or weakest, it's about which team was most craven in its attempt to avoid actual competition, and expectations/tradition counts--Vandy playing a fellow nerd school (OOOOH BURN) like Rice isn't at all like LSU playing Rice. So starting with least embarrassing and counting down ...

12. Georgia: at Oklahoma St., vs. Arizona St., vs. Tennessee Tech, at Georgia Tech.

Congrats, Dawgs, you signed up for this year's "Team to Watch!" from both the Big 12 and the ACC, both on the road, in a season where basically everyone expects you to take a step back in terms of ability. And while the luster of their 2007 season got lost awful fast, Arizona St. is still a Pac-10 team coached by a good coach. The one slate in the league that I think might have actually been a little too ambitious.

11. South Carolina: at N.C. State, vs. Florida International, vs. S.C. State*, vs. Clemson.

So, the 'Cocks have a year-end rivalry game with a decent ACC team, but then they went and did this weird thing--are you paying attention, Florida? are you?--where they decided to actually play a second game against a team with a pulse! And they agreed to do it on the road this year! Crazy! Wild! I can't believe it!

10. Auburn: vs. La. Tech, vs. Ball St., vs. West Virginia, vs. Furman*.

Yes, sadly, this is the third-least embarrassing schedule in the SEC this year. My preliminary read on Ball St. is that they won't be nearly as good as last year's MAC runner-ups, but between the Cardinals and Derek Dooley's Bulldogs, this is still the best pair of mid-major opponents on any slate in the league. And as much stick as I recently gave the Auburn A.D. for its scheduling cowardice, agreeing to play the Mountaineers at the height of their RichRod-fueled heyday deserves some credit.

9. Vanderbilt: vs. Western Carolina*, at Rice, at Army, vs. Georgia Tech.

Not much difference, honestly, between the 'Dores slate, Auburn's, and Mississippi St.'s. Vandy's the only SEC team to play two non-league games away from home, Rice actually won a bowl game last year, and I think we'd probably all forgive the 'Dores if they'd wanted to spend at least a year or two shirking teams like Georgia Tech in an effort to get that bowl monkey off their backs.

8. Mississippi St.: vs. Jackson St.*, vs. Georgia Tech, vs. Houston, vs. Middle Tennessee St.

As with Vandy, you could go easy on State (especially a couple years back when the Tech series was scheduled) for going the all-out cream puff route in an effort to go bowling ... and instead they're hosting both the Yellow Jackets and a highly dangerous Houston team--possibly the best mid-major on any SEC schedule, along with La. Tech and Troy. Only difference between this schedule and Vandy's is that the MTSU game is at home while Vandy plays Army on the road.

I would argue there's a big gap in Cowardice Levels between teams No. 8 and No. 7.

7. Tennessee: vs. Western Kentucky, vs. UCLA, vs. Ohio, vs. Memphis.

Sorry, I can't give the Vols too much credit for not going the I-AA route when the Hilltoppers are, in fact, the I-AAiest team in D-I. And while there are definitely worse teams out there than UCLA, there have been better ones, too, for just about all of this decade. Only Memphis being decent saves this from being far, far below the Vols' usual nonconference standards.

6. Alabama: vs. Virginia Tech (neutral), vs. Florida International, vs. North Texas, vs. UT-Chattanooga*.

Full credit for taking on the likely ACC favorite and a year-in, year-out national contender. Credit taken away for scheduling more-or-less the worst possible opponents in the other three spots: a I-AA patsy and the two worst teams in the worst conference in the country. Where's the Southern Miss or Northern Illinois or Central Florida of yesteryear?

5. Arkansas: vs. Missouri St.*, vs. Eastern Michigan, vs. Texas A&M (neutral), vs. Troy.

Almost a carbon copy of the Alabama slate, except that the neutral-site opponent is a lot, lot worse and one of the mid-major opponents is a lot, lot better. Still, any time you can make a compelling argument that the most difficult team on your nonconference schedule is Troy, it's safe to say you have not put together a challenging slate.

4. LSU: at Washington, vs. UL-Lafayette, vs. Tulane, vs. La. Tech.

I should maybe give LSU more credit for avoiding a I-AA tomato can in favor of three teams that each showed some level of competitiveness last season (and La. Tech, obviously, more than that), but I'm not going to. For starters, this is two years running the best nonconference team LSU--LSU!--has faced will be a mid-major after last season's grueling Appalachian St.-North Texas-Tulane-Troy embarrassment. Sorry, but for Vandy and Mississippi St. to have outscheduled a program as loaded as LSU for two years running is awful. It's a joke. Secondly, I've seen more than one LSU partisan try to explain away the Washington trip by saying "We didn't know they'd be that bad!" Oh yeah? That game was scheduled in May of last year--with the Huskies coming off of a 4-9 season and having won a grand total of 12 games the previous four years combined. So no, the Tigers didn't know they were going to face the single worst team at the BCS level--they just knew they'd be facing one of the worst.

3. Kentucky: vs. Miami (OH), vs. Louisville, vs. UL-Monroe, vs. Eastern Kentucky*.
This is the second straight season Kentucky has surrounded the Louisville game--not even a marquee opponent any more, of course--with nothing but the sweetest, frostiest cupcakes available. Louisville included, UK's three D-I opponents went a combined 11-25 last year. Sad.

2. Florida: vs. Charleston Southern*, vs. Troy, vs. Florida International, vs. Florida St.

In 2006, Florida won the national championship. For that freshman class's senior season, a season in which they knew they would be hosting Florida St., the Gator athletic department added to their nonconference schedule Charleston Southern, Troy, and Florida International. The strongest, most loaded program in the SEC had three games to schedule in addition to a home game against an obviously reeling rival, and they went I-AA, Sun Belt, Sun Belt.

1. Ole Miss: at Memphis, vs. Southeastern Louisiana*, vs. UAB, vs. Northern Arizona*.

Two I-AA teams. The worst team in Conference USA. And Memphis. I'm not even going to dignify this with comment.

*Asterisk indicates a I-AA opponent.

Google surveys the signees: Daren Bates

Because someone needs to do the work of plugging in a given Auburn signee's name into Google and synthesizing the tidbits of information that trickle out. Previous entries in this series here.



There were lots of surprises during the stretch run of Auburn's 2009 recruiting season, and Bates was right up there with the biggest of them: one day, Auburn fans find out a two-star Arkansas St. commit we haven't heard of is coming for an official visit; the next, he's signed up and ready to go. DeAngelo Benton's commitment might have been the bigger shock, but only Josh Jackson went from as off-the-radar to "commited" as suddenly as Bates.

Since then, Bates has unsurprisingly gone back under the radar as Auburn fans daydream of signees who either have already proven themselves in spring practice (Freeman, McCalebb) or boast high-end guru approval (Benton, Lutzenkirchen). It's possible he'll stay there even after arriving at Auburn--but there's also some evidence he'll be much more than his sudden commitment or recruitnik rankings might suggest.

Basics: They go like so:

Daren Bates
DB, 5-11, 195
Olive Branch, MS (Olive Branch HS)
High School Coach: Scott Samsel

HIGH SCHOOL: Collected 90 tackles and four interceptions and had nearly 900 yards of total offense as a senior ... Named to the MHSAA All-Region 1 Class 5A team ... Selected for the Commercial Appeal Shelby Metro All-Suburban team ... Named the BankPlus Player of the Week by the DeSoto Times following a 49-22 victory over Horn Lake in which he had 107 total yards and three touchdowns, 10 tackles and an interception.

That's everything, save for the personal info ... and yes, that's the shortest list of "basics" we've had for any player yet in this series. You'll notice there's no reference to Bates's junior year--because, by basically everyone's account, he waited until his senior season to blow up. Just kind of interesting to see it reflected here.

Recruitnik hoo-ha: If you're looking at exclusively the Rivals/Scout axis ... well, it's not pretty. Between those two, Bates is the lowest-ranked member of Auburn's 2009 class. Rivals gives him two stars and a grade of 5.4, the next-lowest grade in the class next to Jackson; Scout likewise hands out two stars. Neither one bothers to include him in their rankings.

ESPN is a little more enthusiastic--a three-starish grade of 77, a ranking as the No. 59 safety, and the following scouting report:

Bates is a versatile athlete that has the physical build to be a strong safety. He has good size and runs well. Very aggressive on run support and does an excellent job of getting off blocks to get to the ball carrier. Must be careful to not cut tackle too much; needs to drive up through the ball carrier when possible. Shows some vision and cutting ability as a running back along with having good ball skills catching passes out of the backfield. Bates should also be a major producer on special teams.

I think the important thing there is "physical build to be a strong safety"--if that's there, then you'd think there would be a decent shot at Thigpen and Lolley turning Bates into a useful player. Also worth noting: despite that whole "committed to Arkansas St. thing until the last second" thing, Auburn wasn't the only SEC team to hop on the Bates bandwagon as it pulled out of the ... uh ... bandwagon station? Anyway, Tennessee offered according to both major services and the Tide were involved on some level--Rivals doesn't list an offer, but Scout does. It's probably fair to assume the Tide weren't giving Bates a full, no-strings-attached offer at that late stage of the game, but that were talking to him at all at that point is a positive sign.

So, two stars or not, Red Wolves commitment or not, it's not all doom and gloom here.

Links of potential interest: OK, so these aren't really so much "Daren Bates" highlights as "Olive Branch highlights that usually have Bates involved somehow," but keep an eye on No. 3, be patient, and you'll get your fill:



The form tackle at 3:40 is nice to see. Maybe even nicer is the effusive praise from his former head coach:

Olive Branch (Miss.) High School coach Scott Samsel said Auburn struck gold when it got a commitment from defensive back Daren Bates ...

“You are going to look back on him in two years and see he was the steal in the state of Mississippi,” Samsel said. “I guarantee you.”

Bates transferred last summer from Christian Brothers in Memphis to Olive Branch. As a result, Samsel said he didn’t get a lot of recruiting attention.

“This day and time, with all the recruiting services, a lot of kids are made and broken prior to their senior year,” Samsel said. “He moved to our school in July. I couldn’t put my name on him until I’d seen him practice and play.”

I know, I know, what coach doesn't rave about his players, but "guarantee" is still mighty strong language. And it's not like Bates was a kid Samsel had groomed for years to get to this point: as Samsel himself said, he only had the one year with him. On top of that, it's not like Samsel doesn't know from D-I players: four different Conquistadores (how kick-ass a nickname is that?) committed to either SEC schools or Florida St. (Incidentally, that teammate that went to FSU was Aubrey Phillips--who looked like he might heading to Auburn for a minute, thanks in part to the Bates commitment, before heading to Tallahassee.) Current 2010 Auburn commitment Shon Coleman is also an Olive Branch product ... just as an FYI, I guess.

You can read about that game the "Basics" mentioned against Horn Lake here. Player of the Week award write-up here.

One last note: to hear Bates tell it, Auburn's coaches didn't exactly half-ass their recruitment of him ... except maybe for the part where they waited until right before Signing Day. Still, seems like they legitimately wanted him.

What conclusions we can draw, if any: OK, so this has to be said: the odds, as we should all know by now, are not in Bates's favor. There's probably--though certainly not definitely--a reason that he was an Arkansas St. commit before Chizik and Co. swooped in. There's probably a reason he was rated at two stars, and not necessarily because he was an unknown entering his senior year--unknown or not, Olive Branch is a high-profile school outside of Memphis with major prospects coming out its ears. It's not easy to fly under the radar there. And if the ratings are at all accurate, Bates isn't an SEC-caliber player.

All that said ... of course Bates also does have plenty of reasons he might be a genuine sleeper. I think the praise from Samsel is honestly encouraging. Late as they may have come, the offer list is much stronger than you'd expect for an unranked two-star. Transferring after a junior season and apparently making huge strides during his senior season could certainly throw the gurus off. And, most of all, any player who the Auburn coaching staff thinks is worth a shot is worth a shot, always.

Looking at the pool of Auburn's potential "sleepers"--Jackson, Izauea Lanier, Clint Moseley, Nosa Eguae, etc.--there's reasons to think every one might wind up something special, even if the likelihood of all of them contributing is pretty much zero. Even if Bates is as deep a sleeper as Auburn has in this class, it's no different for him.

mini-Works

Get right and come back to us, Reggie.

As you might imagine, not a ton going on, even in the usually-bustling college football bloggitysphere. But there's a few Auburn newsbits that deserve some attention and/or discussion this a.m., starting with ...

Taylor to JUCO: now official. As expected, four-star defensive back signee Reggie Taylor will be going to junior college rather than enrolling at Auburn this fall. Taylor will play at Mississippi Gulf Coast C.C., the same school you may remember from such players as "Eltoro 'The Toro' Freeman" and "Demond Washington," among others. Taylor seems like a decent kid who genuinely likes Auburn, so I'll be surprised if we don't see him on the Plains in a couple of seasons. He'll be welcomed.

As for the impact up-front, well, it's pretty much nil since corner is one of the few places on the depth chart where immediate assistance isn't a necessity. In some ways--well, one way--Taylor's delayed arrival is a good thing, since Auburn (as is its custom) signed a handful of players over the limit of 25 in its 2009 class. 28, to be precise. Assuming Robert Cooper grayshirts as promised, we're now down to 26. If LaVoyd James (as is expected) doesn't qualify, Auburn's set.*

More changes in the swim program. I said not long ago that if there's one program--er, two programs--at Auburn other than football I really, really don't want screwed up, it's the swim teams. Annual national championship contenders aren't easy to come by.

So consider me not particularly happy with this development:

Auburn co-head women's swimming coach Dorsey Tierney-Walker is leaving the Plains to take the top position at Arizona State, a source close to Auburn program told the Press-Register Monday night ...

A former national champion swimmer at Texas, Tierney-Walker coached at Southern Methodist and Indiana before coming to Auburn prior to the 2006 season to supervise the women's program. She led the Tigers to women's national championships in 2006 and 2007.

Tierney-Walker and men's assistant Brett Hawke supervised the program in 2009 while head coach Richard Quick battled an inoperable brain tumor ... In a 2008 interview with the Press-Register, Quick said he wanted assurances that Tierney-Walker would stay on staff before he took over for long-time coach David Marsh in 2007.

"(The swimmers) know she cares deeply about them as human beings, and that comes across," Quick said. "These women on the team have no doubt that Dorsey cares deeply about their well-being before she cares about them as athletes."

So, to recap, Auburn has lost a coach

1. that was instrumental, if not outright responsible, for back-to-back national titles just two years ago

2. to a program to which I don't believe Tierney-Walker has any connections; upgrade in title or not, this isn't a case of Mama calling

3. in a program, championship-quality as it somehow still is, under considerable duress from Richard Quick's health issues that needs coaching stability now more than ever

4. whose presence, apparently, was one of the reasons Quick signed on in the first place--how happy will he be that she's gone?

Maybe there was nothing Auburn's athletic department--and its athletic director--could have done to prevent Tierney-Jackson from taking what appears to be an opportunity to run her own program, an opportunity she would not have (in title, at least) at Auburn as long as Quick remains in place. But after this same athletic department, and athletic director, lost David Marsh--as Will has said, only an Auburn alum and the most successful college coach in the state's history in any sport--less than two years ago, this is a pull-out-all-the-stops situation. There's too much pride in these swim programs, too much success, to allow them to deteriorate. And maybe they won't--they've proven remarkably resilient over the past few seasons.

But that they appear to be doing so in spite of its relationship with the Auburn A.D. rather than in tandem with it is ... unfortunate.

Bargain hunting? Gene Chizik is making $1.9 million a season, at least for now. Not surprising in the least--wasn't that always the range where the guesstimates of his salary landed?--but it does give us a chance to do the hard match and figure out he's making 2.053 times less tan his counterpart in T-Town. Should he manage to beat the coachbot a time or two (hey, it's a possibility), I suspect that gap will shrink with all appropriate haste. Likewise, while it's weird for Auburn's head coach to be drawing the ninth-highest salary in the SEC, a winning coach will not have the league's ninth-highest salary. I think we can probably rest assured on that point.

As for Chizik not having actually signed a contract ... eh. Maybe it's unusual for it to have taken this long for the lawyers to have hashed things out, mnaybe it's not. It shouldn't be an issue unless Chizik gets caught with a Pensacola stripper and summarily dismissed.

Etc. Fields of Donahue finds some worthwhile information tucked away in Phil Steele's offseason dross.




*Thank goodness--if Auburn ever screws up their assumptions about who's qualifying and who isn't and some kid gets handed a surprise grayshirt, you're going to get a full-on rant. Coaches who screw around with kids are the scum of the profession.

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.

And now ... we wait

Oh, that arguing for an NCAA Tournament berth was as easy as angling for a call.

Close. But not that close. Auburn might almost feel "good" about their NCAA Regional chances if they'd pulled together a sweep of Alabama at Plainsman Park over the weekend, and as you probably know by now, they got themselves 2/3rds of the way there after Sean Ray stonewalled the Tide for 5 1/3 innings and Auburn took a 3-1 win.

Unfortunately, home field or no home field, desperation or no desperation, a clean sweep of a superior team--and Alabama has proven themselves the superior team over the course of the season, Auburn's impressive 3-0 record against the Tide heading into the series finale notwithstanding--is a hard, hard row to hoe. And so Alabama took game 3 13-3. So it goes.

And for the second time in three months, Auburn fans get to sit around for a few days and desperately hope that a mysterious, sequestered band of NCAA officials give us a thumbs-up and sneak our Tigers into their 64-team field. Unlike in hoops, though, I don't have any idea how to project whether that's going to happen. Fortunately, people like Plainsman Parking Lot do. His take: "If Auburn is going to get in, it will be just barely." On the downside: there's some less-than-optimistic takes from a Rivals analyst and some other projection sites. On the upside: Auburn's computer numbers hold up pretty well to the rest of the bubble and there's definitely a precedent for SEC teams that missed out on the SEC tourney to get in.

Of course, one major problem is that there's still an entire week of conference baseball tourneys to be played and automatic bids to be handed out ... so, as in basketball, what we think of as the bubble today is not going to be the bubble when the field is announced a week from today. If I had to take a guess I would say: it's not happening. I mean, if Pawlowski himself isn't confident enough to say more than this, when asked if Auburn will keep practicing:

"There's nothing we can do. You can sit there and watch the scores come in and watch what happens, but we're going to keep moving forward and see what happens," he said. "I'm going to meet with the players and then we'll decide what we're going to do."

I can't see why I should be all that confident. I'm assuming the season's over.

But hey, maybe we'll be surprised. And you can't say Auburn didn't give it a hell of a shot there at the end--as disappointing as missing out on Hoover might be, we'll always have 3-1 against the Tide, right? Right? (I know that's not enough, but if there's no NCAA berth, that'll kind of be all we've got.)

Softball. Auburn softball's been going to NCAA Regionals for years, but they'd never won their opening game--until last Friday, when Anna Thompson blanked Iowa 1-0 in a mild 3-seed-over-the-2 upset. The path for Auburn to a super-regional had never been clearer: upset host Georgia Tech in the next round or beat whichever of Iowa or fourth-seeded Boston staved off elimination in the other second-round game, and Auburn's into the championship round. Anything could happen.

Of course, the downside of "anything can happen" is that sometimes the thing that happens is that Tech shrugs off a slow start to win without too much trouble, and then Boston--your America East conference representative, ladies and gents--goes off on Thompson for three runs in the first and ends Auburn's season 5-0. Whoops.

Overall there wasn't much new to Auburn's softball season that I could see--middle-of-the-pack SEC finish, three-games-and-out NCAA appearance, it's all been done before. But War Eagle, always, to the team's two departing seniors and maybe with as much returning as coach Tina Deese will have, things'll be better next year.

The Works, Friday afternoon-style

For no reason ... other than that 1. it's my favorite Kids in the Hall sketch of all time 2. I'm headed to a beer festival tomorrow and feel like my attendance will finally make up for my unfortunately sweet-toothed, "Chocolate Choo-Choo"-style early drinking habits, please enjoy the following:



And hell, while we're on the KITH kick:



Happy Friday.

Sign in the SEC's window: ARMS WANTED. So I saw this post at ATVS titled

Some Former Assistant Coach Says Jordan Jefferson The 3rd Best QB In the SEC

and my knee-jerk response was--like the rest of you, no doubt--"Right, and I'm the third-best NASA intergalactic electrospectrometer engineer." And then I actually read through the list of the SEC's quarterbacks and ... well ... I'd take Ryan Mallett or Stephen Garcia first. They've got more uppityupside. But you could totally make the argument that Jefferson will, in fact, be the SEC's third-best QB this year. How the hell has the art of quarterbacking in this conference fallen so far? (Not that things weren't already in sad shape last year, as yours truly demonstrated. Top-to-bottom, things might actually be better this season, with guys like Jefferson and Garcia already having a year of seasoning under their belts.)

Speaking of SEC personnel issues, the Wall Street Journal apparently got so much positive feedback on that "offensive line starts returning = success" tidbit they posted earlier this month they decided to expand it--now you can look up the number of returning o-line starts for virtually every team in the country. The news isn't particularly good from Auburn's standpoint: the SEC is as loaded with experience up front as any conference in D-I, and even though Auburn's 58 returning starts is only a little less than the national average (61), they rank ninth in the league. Georgia looks like an excellent test case for the "which is more important, experience on the line or at the skill positions?"; last year, they had oodles of skill position players but gaping holes up front. This year, the opposite will be true. We'll see how much that helps or hurts.

BlAUgosphere. In an effort to make sure this year's set of Cheese Puff Previews actually gets done--or at least, fer God's sake, gets two-thirds of the way through the schedule--I'm planning on starting them much earlier than the past couple of years. Like, next week early. But Acid Reign's beaten me out of the gate anyway, with his typically useful preview of Louisiana Tech. He concludes:

For Auburn, the key to this game on defense will be to limit (La Tech RB) Phillip Livas, and stop the run. On special teams, Livas also must be contained. On offense, Auburn must generate a running game, and exploit young linebackers and corners. I suspect Auburn will be at their healthiest of the season, early, and the defense will be WAY too much for the Tech offense. Offensively, we'll still be finding our way. It will be interesting to see if Malzhan's offense clicks right out of the gate. If so, the final score can be as ugly as Auburn wants to make it. If we don't take care of the ball, this game could be close.

Here's a sneak preview of my take: I'm nowhere near this confident. Here's to hoping Acid's got a better bead on the Bulldogs than I do.

Also Auburn-related: commenter J.D. has a blog, and this week he ran down the five best Tiger games he's attended. The 2006 Florida win lands at the top for him, while I'd say the 1993 Florida game was my personal favorite, and you know the 2001 win over the Gators ranks first for a lot of people. You have to give the Gators credit--they're an awful lot of fun for Auburn to host. (Since, you know, Auburn usually beats them in incredible, dramatic fashion.)

Not Auburn-related, but seriously, seriously awesome: Grotus Acorn busts out some serious mathematical ninjitsu and an armada of graphs like this one:



to show you the best way to play Monopoly. It's a must-read. Assuming, of course, you've ever played Monopoly, or plan on playing Monopoly at any point in the future.

Writers writin' things. There's going to be a lot of repetition in the mainstream media's discussion about Auburn between now and the fall: quarterback battle, new coordinators, strong defense, Chizik, etc. You can get your first taste from Tony Barnhart and Chris Low. Nothing you don't know about Auburn in there, but I guess it's useful for knowing what John Q. Pundit is thinking ... and what some of the rest of the SEC is up to.

If you'd like a similarly bland take on individual Auburn players, we've got that too: here's Low on Antonio Coleman (No. 12 on his ranking of the top 30 SEC players) and Mr. SEC calling McCalebb the No. 4 freshmen RB to make an impact, or something like that. (HT: Auburntron.)

+1. I'm reading between the lines a bit here, but doesn't Chizik seem to think of golf as more a thing he's supposed to enjoy as someone like himself (i.e. white, male, well-off) than something he genuinely gets a kick out of? Just like me! (Without the "well-off" part, of course.)

Etc. Dr. Saturday on Alabama is of course required reading ... EDSBS has already linked it, but the cleverness behind this 3SiB post really does deserve a thumbs-up.

Enjoy your weekend, everyone.

We have a pulse, doctor

There always comes a point in those sports with extended regular seasons when there's no point in analyzing Pythagorean projections, scoring margin, roster strengths and weaknesses, quality of execution, tea leaves, whatever: it's about winning and only winning. Nothing else. A win means your season can continue. A loss means the opposite.

This is the point Auburn baseball has reached--win this home series against Alabama, and the NCAA Tournament is a very real possibility. Lose it, and, well, who knows, but I for one won't feel optimistic. (Not that you should take my word for it, I'll admit.) So Auburn's 3-2 win over Alabama in 10 innings last night came on a bases loaded walk--it's still the biggest, most thrilling, best win of the season. Reliever Austin Hubbard, after pitching three shutout innings that gave Auburn the chance to mount their comeback:

"We're playing like we really don't have much to lose," Hubbard said. "You kind of leave it all out there."

What Hubbard doesn't say: the reason his team is playing like it has nothing to lose is because it no longer has anything to lose. There is no longer any alternative to leaving it all out there. That was enough to get one victory--grab another, and maybe Auburn will get the chance to play that same way in the NCAAs.

Assorted reaction, first from Plainsman Parking Lot:

The biggest thing? Auburn never quit.

"The kids just kept battling back," Auburn Head Coach John Pawlowski said. "Both pitchers went out there and were dominating. We couldn't get much going, but fortunately for us we battled back."

I wish I could find the picture, but it summed it up perfectly. The change in attitude. In the 9th. Down a run. Down the their final out. Tony Caldwell came up big. Ripping a all through the gap. On TV you could see the shot from the Auburn dugout. All the player with RALLY CAPS on. That’s right. RALLY CAPS. These guys were having fun last night. They were a team and Auburn is a different team under CJP.

The Pigskin Pathos:

For every action, hobby, job, life calling out there, there is a person who pursues it with passion. An all-consuming kind of passion. A passion in which they forget to eat, sleep, talk to the outside world, everything but that one thing, the one thing they want more than anything.

The all-consuming, forget the world passion is personal. It is not a vicarious experience. It is the passion of writers, athletes, scholars, etc.

The all-consuming passion is not the passion of the sports fan, at least not the sane sports fan.

But sometimes it gets close. And when that line blurs and we forget our inherent separation from the players on the field, that is when we feel it.

An hour ago I teared up while watching Auburn baseball tie Alabama 2-2 in the ninth with 2 outs and then go on to win the game in the tenth. No tears were flowing, but the edges were starting to blur.

The Advertiser:

"I feel like our guys are confi­dent, even in the late innings," said Auburn coach John Paw­lowski. "We're fortunate we got a couple of breaks. We got the bases loaded and got a walk."

Jon Luke Jacobs turned in his best pitching performance of the season, recording a career-high nine strikeouts before turning the game over to Austin Hubbard (3-3), who surrendered just two hits and struck out five.

"You've got to credit their pitching, they did a nice job," (Alaba­ma coach Jim) Wells said. "And their reliever, he's real good. But you've got to win a game 2-1 sometimes. Our (starting) guy pitched well, their (starting) guy pitched well, their guy out of the pen was better than our guys and that was the game" ...

"That's why college baseball is such an exciting game," Paw­lowski said. "You look at all the home runs (203) by both teams and look at what transpired. Both pitchers, I thought, were dominating."

There's some ruminations on Auburn's NCAA chances at Track'Em and some reflections on the season's "intangibles" at PPL.

Next: Game 2, 6 p.m. tonight.

Things I think about when I hear the name "Buster"

1. That weird, dorky kid with the stupid hat and dumb dog who wants to sell me a pair of Sunday shoes

2. Being 10 or so, and my Dad and I turning on HBO to watch Mike Tyson maul some new hapless sap, except the hapless sap hangs in there, and starts landing some punches here and there, and now Tyson's down, what's happening ... holy crap, did he lose?



3. "A scrub is a guy that thinks he's fly and is also known as a ..."

4. NEW FOR 2009: Tommy Tuberville, as it turns out.

Tuberville will talk about Southeastern Conference football on BusterSports.com next season. The Web site said Thursday he will contribute on multiple shows each week, including Internet podcasts.

Tuberville said Buster Sports, based in Raleigh, will allow him to interact with SEC fans. They will be able to talk with him through chat rooms, message boards and call-in questions.

Give Tuberville this: apparently he won't be alone amongst the ungracefully-departed at BusterSports, what with them having also signed on Jim Donnan, Dave Odom, and ... wait for it ... Terry Donahue. So he won't quite fit right in--Tubby was miles better than any of those guys ever dreamed of being--but at least he's not slumming it with, say, Curley Hallman.

Still, I can't shake the nagging feeling I should have made him an offer. I mean, come on: "Buster Sports." Whatever you think of the name "The Joe Cribbs Car Wash," you've got to admit it's got more dignity in it than that. (At least, I'm pretty sure it does.)

Davids and Malzahn, continued

That Malcolm Gladwell article I discussed the other day? It's been everywhere in the sports bloggitysphere the past several days, including the front page of ESPN, where you probably noticed that Bill Simmons brought it up while exchanging e-mails with ... Malcolm Gladwell.

We got another worthwhile response today when Chris Brown of Smart Football, easily one of the smartest and flat best bloggers out there, wrote at length about how Gladwell's piece might be interpreted in the terms of college football. Brown had already written a brief--and logical--note regarding my post and why just because we might cast Malzahn as one of Gladwell's shrewd Davids, Auburn fans shouldn't greenlight those bronze statue plans for him just yet--which, optimistic as I am, I totally agree with.

But today's post (which incorporates arguments from mine and Year2's Gladwell response at TSK), while educational as always, makes an argument regarding the Malzahn offense I think could be a little misleading. Brown writes:

I'm not convinced that going no-huddle is a dominant strategy, better for all teams. A team definitely gains the advantage of endurance, and there is a psychological advantage and all that, but, overall it seems fairly value neutral: it's just the repetition of the same trials over and over again.

Except that it isn't, but in the exact opposite way you'd think. Going extreme hurry-up to get as many plays as possible -- other than endurance, I suppose -- is a Goliath strategy: it decreases variance by increasing the number of trials. The chance of getting only heads and no tails in five coin flips is much higher than it is in a hundred -- i.e. the impact of the law of large numbers or regression to the mean. If Oklahoma has significantly more talent, better schemes, and everything else than the underdog, then the more plays it run the more likely it is to exhibit its raw dominance over the underdog; the underdog is less likely to "steal" a few good plays and get the heck out of dodge. The principle is the same as the difference between an underdog winning a game in a single-elimination tournament and trying to win a seven-game series: the seven-game series is far less likely to produce upsets.

So mere up-tempo, no-huddle is not an underdog strategy (and may in fact be a better strategy for Goliaths).

The mathematics here are sound: to put it in concrete football terms, if you fix the result of a given possession of two opposing teams at a particular point--say, one gains 60 yards and an average of 4 points a possession, the other 30 yards and 2 point--and then multiply the difference in those fixed points over the course of a game, that difference is obviously going to grow wider and wider the more possessions are used. Brown is correct that if the pace of the Malzahn offense had no effect on the success of the Auburn offense--if it would be equally successful at a normal pace, just slower--using it against more talented teams who have more to gain on each exchange of possessions is suicide.

But we have plenty of evidence to suggest that Malzahn's no-huddle pace does have an effect on his offense's success. The value of a Malzahn possession isn't a fixed value that can be multiplied: it increases as the number of possessions increases. So I don't know if describing it as "value neutral" is accurate; it's not "the repetition of the same trials over and over again" when those trials start producing the kind of results Malzahn had at Tulsa. If there wasn't a correlation between his offense's tempo and its success, we'd expect the Golden Hurricane's gaudy offensive numbers to be merely the result of increased possessions and more plays, and their results on a per-play or per-possession basis to be unexceptional. But instead Tulsa finished last season with the best per-play average in the nation. You could argue that it's not the pace that's produced those results but Malzahn's brilliant scheming, but as Brown himself wrote in his December examination of Malzahn:

If done correctly, the tempo and formations really are what eats the defense up. The schemes themselves are simple.

This is why I'm guessing that Brown wouldn't actually disagree with any of the above--there's no way around the importance of pace to Tulsa. In both posts, Brown cites 2008 Oklahoma's success to "talent" or "athletes" first, "scheme" second, and their similarly hyperspeed pace third. The combination of the three is a perfectly logical explanation for the Sooners' offensive output, but it doesn't seem to apply to the Golden Hurricane's: Malzahn's formation trickery helps, but it doesn't seem to account for this level of production, and Tulsa hasn't enjoyed much of a talent advantage, if any. Their 2005 recruiting class was ranked first in C-USA, but by an insignificant margin, while their 2004, 2006, and 2007 classes were all middle-of-the-pack or worse by C-USA standards.

Further, if the no-huddle was merely an amplifier of existing talent/scheme rather than an equalizer, we would expect Tulsa to have struggled more than expected against teams with the better athletes. The opposite, in fact, has been, the case. Tulsa's faced four teams "up a weight class" the past two seasons--BYU and Oklahoma in 2007, New Mexico and Arkansas in 2008. The Sooners were the only one of the four to outgain Tulsa per-play as the Golden Hurricane beat the two Mountain West teams and only fell to the Hogs by virtue of a fourth-quarter kickoff return.

Add all that up and I think it's fair to argue that the Malzahn no-huddle is not "fairly value neutral," and that its "endurance" and "psychological" advantages are greater than Brown seems to be giving them credit for.

However: again, while I have issues with the language Brown is using, I don't think he'd argue with any of that. The question he's trying to answer is: even if we acknowledge that a Malzahnian no-huddle could help Davids likes Tulsa, is it really a David strategy? Because of the math involved, wouldn't it be a bigger help to Goliaths?

It's debatable, but I don't think so. Brown is correct that in most cases, Davids should pick a high-variance strategy like a full-court press over a lower-variance strategy like the Malzahn no-huddle. (In my original post I drew up a series of similarities between the Malzahn no-huddle and the full-court press that didn't take the differences in variance into account; it probably should have been acknowledged.) But I think the endurance factor maybe deserves a fuller examination than it's been getting--and makes the no-huddle legitimately more underdog-friendly than favorite.

Why? Because while increasing the number of possessions and plays in a game increases the effect of a potential talent advantage for Goliath--as Brown describes with Oklahoma--I would argue it does even more to help neutralize a talent gap for David. Any team can get into incredible shape, but that's always going to be harder the larger the players in question are--particularly, I would say, along the defensive line. It's never going to be in Alabama's best interests to either a) spend the necessary energy and time to get Terrence Cody into the kind of shape where his endurance is an asset b) run an offense that gives him the least amount of time on the bench to rest and recover--as the Tide found out first-hand when Utah no-huddled them to death. It's a broad, broad statement to make with all kinds of exceptions, but generally speaking, Goliath really will be larger than David--and when both sides are looking to maximize their advantages of the other, the issue of size is naturally going to drive the latter towards a strategy that emphasizes speed and fitness and the former towards brute force and individual mismatches.

So: is Brown correct when he points out that high-variance strategies like trick plays, big blitzes, game-shortening play-calls, and passes might be closer to David's heart--and maybe more effective--than the no-huddle? Certainly. Is he right when implying (though not stating straight out) that the primary value of the no-huddle to Auburn is that it's simply different, rather than anything specific it brings to underdogs? Yes.

But what we can all agree on--Brown, Year2, me, Gladwell, everyone--is that Davids can't afford to not be different, whatever strategy they decide on. Viewed in that light, I don't think you can argue that while Malzahn might not the best possible thing for Auburn, he is, most definitely, a good thing.

(One other brief parenthetical: Brown spends the first half of his post arguing against Gladwell's assumption that "Goliaths should all be using these David strategies as well." I'll be honest: I've read the thing a dozen times and I can't find where Gladwell offers any advice for Goliaths at all. He says more basketball teams ought to run the press, sure, but he never says they all should ... as he's pointed out himself. But maybe I'm missing it.)

So, yeah, Taylor doesn't think, you know, Billings will be back. Wait, what?

So the Anniston Star's Luke Brietzke puts up a post last night on his beat blog, and this morning I'm going over it, and it's pretty cool: he notes that Chizik was kinda sorta getting his Lou Holtz on at the Baldwin County Auburn Club appearance, with the "we've got our work cut out for us" bad-mouthing of his team's fall chances, which I probably should have made more of yesterday. And then Brietzke responds to Chizik's "yeah, the quarterback starter's going to be one of those 'gametime decision'-type things" bombshell with a reference to the 30 Rock TWIST! thing, which you can see in the scene below:



and since I finally started watching 30 Rock* this season and have enjoyed the hell out of it, I was definitely down with that. So I'm readin' along, feeling good, and then all of a sudden we get to the Montez Billings academic issues / wait he graduated conundrum I mentioned Monday, and then ... this (emphasis added):

I frankly have no idea what to make of the situation. What I do know is Trooper Taylor told me last week that he doesn't count on Billings contributing to the team this fall. He said that could change any day, but right now he is going about his business as if Billings will not play.
Stay tuned for some important clarifications just as soon as we get them...

!!!

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this the first indication we've had from someone on the coaching staff that Billings might not be back this fall? Chizik mentioned that it was an academic issue--but the vibe I got at the time was that, as with McKenzie, Billings was expected to get things ironed out. Here's your TWIST.

And, as best we can tell, Taylor's leaving that door open. But if the default position for the wide receiving corps has already been set to "No Billings," how can we feel good about his odds of returning? If Taylor's making the assumption that Billings won't be around--and he knows a great deal more about this situation than we do, safe to say--is there any reason we shouldn't make that same assumption?

It's hard to say losing a player who didn't catch a touchdown pass last year and didn't break the 300-yard mark would be a devastating blow, but I don't think the potential loss of Billings should be underestimated, either: he's still the team's leading returning receiver, and in fact he's the only returning wide receiver who even cracked double digits in receptions. Sure, maybe Benton and Hawthorne will be the home-run hitters we're all hoping for and maybe Trott and Lutzenkirchen will make the tight end position a strength again and maybe someone like Frenchy or Harry Adams or one of the freshmen will turn into a dangerous slot jitterbug ...but even if all of that happens, we still need a new Rod Smith to be the dependable guy who runs solid routes, makes those sure grabs at the sticks, and generally provides our inevitably beleaguered QB's some sense of security. I'm not saying Billings has been the best example of that kind of player thus far in his Auburn career ... but if you've got a better candidate on the roster, I'd love to hear it.

In short: losing Billings might not be the end of the world, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't be a stiff, stiff blow to a unit that needs every bit of help it can get. I'm kind of stunned to find out that the picture on his return is bleak enough that Taylor is already preparing for the worst ... and even more stunned that in the middle of the offseason, this bit of news wound up buried at the bottom of a random beat hack blog post. Weird**.

*I'm a massive Office fan that would still take Michael Scott and crew in a heartbeat if forced to choose, but I think the contrast NBC's set up with their two flagship Thursday night shows is fascinating: The Office can be broad, but it's still nearly exclusively character-driven, from the perspective of both the humor and the ongoing dramatic storylines; 30 Rock has some character-based humor, sure, but the show as a whole is 100 percent devoted, first and foremost, to the gag. There's no such thing on 30 Rock (at least that I've seen) as an "ongoing dramatic storyline" or character development. there's only the tiniest shreds of pathos. It's a full-bore, damn-the-torpedoes approach to producing as many laughs as possible in their 22 minutes, everything else be damned. That decision limits the show's depth enough that it's not ever going to reach the heights of its Thursday night partner, I think, but it does make it a hell of a lot of fun to watch. [/fakecritic]

**It also could be an indication that I'm making entirely too much out of this, or that Brietzke--who doesn't quote Taylor directly, not here at least--somehow got his signals mixed. But I doubt that.

The Works, roster talk-style

Breakin' it down. Earlier this week, Jay G Tate helpfully provided a position-by-position look at the likely 2009 Auburn roster. It's been reproduced a couple of other places, and while I won't do that here--because, you know, it's over there--I do have a couple of reactions:

1. There have been rumors and suggestions about the academic standing of incoming DB Reggie Taylor and incoming WR LaVoyd James, but I think this is the first time one of the Auburn beat hacks has described the pair as "probably headed to JUCO." What this means for Taylor and James, unfortunately, is that they are probably headed to JUCO. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't recall many Auburn signees over the past couple of years that were rumored to be in academic trouble that made it; we've gotten more of the "they should be fine; whoops, nevermind, off to Mississippi with you" treatment.

2. There are 17 (or 19, depending on Brent Slusher and Gabe McKenzie ... and Montez Billings, I think, though Tate doesn't list him as in trouble) receivers on the roster. Consider that a) that's 5 (or 7) more scholarships than we have allotted to offensive linemen, because that's how you build the foundation for a solid, physical football team b) 10 (or 12) of those scholarships will be spent on returning players, and unless Benton, Lutzenkirchen, and Blake, are every single thing they've been made out to be, there's still an excellent chance it's going to be the worst unit on the team. Cripes.

3. I should have mentioned this possibility in his Google survey yesterday, but Tate lists Washington as a WR/DB rather than a running back. Washington hasn't played a lick of wide receiver yet, at least as far I can tell, but it's certainly true there's a chance he could end up there. He's got the quicks, at the very least.

4. If Taylor and James do fail to make the grade, and one or two others like Slusher, McKenzie, or Wadley aren't back, there could be room for Robert Cooper to come in immediately rather than grayshirting. Theoretically.

Besuboru. Auburn could get a big lift in their grudge match series against the Tide this weekend: Joseph Sanders--the team's leader in home runs and RBIs when he went out with a broken jaw 12 games ago--could be back. Sounds unlikely, listening to Pawlowski, but could be.

Auburn could use him: not only is the Tide a solid SEC team, but Auburn's still got an outside shot at landing an NCAA Tournament berth (according to Andrew Gribble) with a strong showing against Alabama. SEC teams have certainly gotten the benefit of the doubt before, so how knows. Turns out the 8-6 win over Georgia Southern last night was much, much bigger than your typical nonleague midweek victory: the Eagles were higher than Auburn in the RPI and provided a nice boost.

As for how Auburn got into this mess, PPL has a whole boatload of sweet-looking graphs that explain things pretty clearly.

Krootin'. In one of their occasional attempts to lure you inside the paywall by putting something actually useful outside it, Rivals provides a free overview of where Auburn currently stands in the recruiting game. The overall impression--with the still somewhat mindboggling RB situation and Rivals saying Auburn is "in great shape to bring in a top-ranked wide receiver class"--is the same one left by Chizik and Co.'s first class last spring: whatever else you think of them, they know how to get the attention of skill position players.

As for actual news, most of it's just names you may not have heard before, but I don't know if Auburn's lead for center prospect Chase Hughes has been public info, and this set of kicker rankings has Cody Parkey at No. 1. (Dude, with Tide commit Cade Foster at No. 2, the only two committed kickers on the entire list. Budding rivalry?!?)

It's not one or the other. Orson on playoff vs. not playoff:

When we think about what we don’t like about a playoff, it’s probably this freezing logic. It’s the only rational way to determine a champion, but it kills the romanticism of a single game’s stunning verdict. Nebraska ‘95, the Megalodon of college football teams pre-2000, would have obliterated anyone in a bracket, but the mythmaking’s far more precious and undiluted when all you remember is one colossal crushing noise, a few muffled screams, and then the blood…my god, the blood. The mythos dies a little when you multiply it, and it’s taken us years to figure out exactly that point, but that’s it: one game is simpler to digest semantically than five, and is more epically compelling.

Orson's correct, mostly: part of the reason the Super Bowl is so anticlimactic so many years is because "Immensely Powerful Team A takes on Immensely Powerful Team B In Winner-Take-All Showdown" isn't unique by the time the playoffs have been going on for five weeks. Maybe the strength of the teams has inceased a little--maybe--but the stakes haven't. That college football raises those ultimate stakes for only one game each year, for just one all-defining 60 minute burst, is just another reason its aesthetics tears the NFL's to tiny shreds.

But Orson (here at least) also makes the common mistake of restricting the argument to one game vs. five, to a full-on "bracket" vs. the meteor-impact of a BCS one-off. Those aren't the terms; it's possible to compromise between these two extremes. Semifinals in mid-December, championship at the usual time: mythos intact, all the really important shaftings of the BCS era solved. Compromise, compromise, compromise.

Boldly going. The Red Cup Rebellion:

The new Star Trek film recently came to whatever theater is near you and either dazzled your puny brain or angered your die-hard Trekkie soul. Regardless of your feelings about the film, however, it is important for us to give our props to Dr. Leonard McCoy, University of Mississippi B.S. 2249, M.D. 2253, for his dedication to the mission to the USS Enterprise as the ship's surgeon and chief medical officer. No, this isn't a joke. We've got damned future alumni in outer space shootin' photon torpedos at the m*****f***in' Borg. Be jealous, SEC.

Well, maybe I would be, if McCoy wasn't the chief medical officer and never even touched the weapons station, much less fired at the Borg, who McCoy never even would have seen since they didn't enter Federation space until ... um ... er ... hey, what's that thing over there, behind you? *runs away*

Etc. Year2 takes a swing at the Gladwell piece and the David post, and does so intelligently, though I'm not sure how the 'Bama defense is supposed to be "deliberate" in "attacking the weaknesses in Malzahn's plans" ... courtesy commenter tiger7_88, Keyboard Cat plays off a certain Alabama fan ... Scott Weiland is a huge Notre Dame fan, which is sort of disappointing if you're the sort who's come to think STP was kind of underrated vis a vis their '90s alternative peers ... No one will ever accuse Tyrik Rollison of not being excited about joining up at Auburn ... and lastly, check this out:



That's the "brand narrative" for the brand-new Philadelphia MLS team. My question: why did it take this long for American professional sports to realize how awesome it would be to apply the Ben Franklin "Join or Die" cartoon to a team's identity? Sorry folks, but soccer wins this time.

Review of DEATH: UL-Monroe

Pretty sure is the last recorded flying chest bump between Chris Slaughter and Terrell Zachery. Call it a hunch.

What we expected: With a 26-point spread coming into Auburn's season opener, a Tiger victory was the universal consensus despite a certain team's certain performance against the Warhawks the year before. So the more important expectations centered not on the outcome but on how Auburn would get there: namely, with an appropriately suffocating defensive performance and some promising periods of explosiveness from Tony Franklin's shiny new offense. I think most rational Auburn fans weren't expecting a huge point total in Franklin's first ... er, second game right out of the box--especially with the quarterback issue still to be resolved--but obviously, we didn't think signs that things were coming together at an SEC-quality pace would be too much to ask for, either.

And oh, speaking of the quarterbacking issue, Franklin had conditioned us to not necessarily expect a decisive victor in the Burns vs. Todd battle--but I would say we as Auburn fans also believed that seeing the two of them on the field would give us some level of insight into where the two stood.

What happened: Auburn 34, UL-Monroe 0. Auburn pitched a shutout, ran for 321 yards, outgained the overmatched Warhawks by 180 yards, and covered the spread with a touchdown to spare.

But they also:

--Punted on their first six offensive possessions and failed to put together a touchdown drive longer than 30 yards until 6:49 remained in the game

--Passed for all of 85 yards on 27 attempts, for an average of 3.1 yards a pass

--Saw Burns leave the game with an undefined leg injury that would prove to keep him out of Auburn's next three games, and Phillip Pierre-Louis tear an ACL on the first play of the season.

So, yes, room for improvement on the offensive front, to say the least. Good news did emerge on special teams : mystery walk-on punter Clinton Durst finished the game with a net punting average up over 42 yards an attempt ("If maintained over the entirety of 2007, that would have placed Auburn second in the country") and Robert Dunn broke a 12-year punt-return-for-TD drought. Neiko Thorpe and D'Antoine Hood acquitted themselves well in their Auburn debuts, easing some concerns about their major-by-necessity roles in the secondary. Between the dominant defense and exquisite special teams, Auburn's offensive woes barely even mattered. Sort of.

In retrospect, the Burns injury was the biggest development to come out of this game. If Burns doesn't have to sit out the Southern Miss game, there's a good chance it's him rather than Todd who wins the job headed into the LSU game and beyond. Hard to say that changes anything in the end, given the disastrous level of dysfunction behind the scenes with Auburn's offense ... but maybe it does. And the road to Todd's ascension starts with Burns cutting his shin open here.

The vibe when all was said and done: In the court of public opinion, however ... yeah, they did matter, at least a little. The widespread reaction was an enthusiastic Yeah, but. Defense: great. Running game: even better than expected. Overall: They'd better get better. Soon.

But the panic button hadn't been pressed just yet. As Will pointed out at the time, there was another recent year in which Auburn was breaking in a new offensive coordinator and struggled out of the gate against UL-Monroe. That year was 2004; it was quite the comforting thought.

Also worth noting is that the consensus in the wake of the ULM game was that when healthy again, Burns--who had in some ways thrown the ball better than Todd and had provided his usual spark with this legs--had earned enough separation to start over Todd. If he was healthy.

The JCCW, looking prescient for once: From the ULM Cheese Puff Preview, June 12:

"ULM's problem is that as experienced as it might be, as Acid Reign pointed out it matches up with Auburn's offense about well as Alan Dershowitz matches up with Heidi Klum. They have great safeties; Auburn could probably care less about throwing downfield. They have a great back seven, but are questionable up front; Auburn's offensive line might be its strongest unit on either side of the ball. Auburn won't have it easy early on, particularly if they still have that new offense smell, but by the late stages of the game ULM is going to need a hell of a chin to stand up to the heavyweight blows Ziemba, Green, etc. are going to deliver."

And hey, sure enough, by the fourth quarter Auburn was plowing over the gassed Warhawk linemen at will. Oh, if only every team Auburn played could have been so thin up front.

The JCCW, looking as foolish as usual: From the

"As for the passing game's woes, I'm not sweating just yet. ULM came in way, way more familiar with Franklin's offense from their battles with Troy, for a start. Season-opening nerves are going to have more of an impact on the precision execution needed for the air game than he ground game. And, again: how many times over the past two years has Auburn won with quarterbacking just as bad--if not worse, given Evil Brandon's interception predilections--as we saw yesterday?

Besides: it'll get better. We didn't see a single thing yesterday to suggest that when it does, Auburn won't be every bit the SEC contender we believe them to be."

"When it does." Good one.

What we learned about 2008: Not as much as we should have. Yes, that the defense would have to carry the offense for a while; that Durst was legit; that the freshmen corners would be OK. But that "Hey, the running game's OK after all!" lesson we thought we'd learned ... yeah, that was some misinformation.

What we learned about 2009: Well, if the Gus Malzahn offense comes out and looks as bad in its first game as Franklin's did, I'm not going to be the one to tell the Chicken Littles to hush up this year. It wouldn't be time to write off Malzahn as a whole, of course, but it very well might be time to settle in for another very frustrating offensive year.

I think we also have to be more honest about what poundings of lesser teams actually mean, which is: nothing. Arkansas almost lost--arguably should have lost to this same bunch of Warhawks--and of course would go on to walk out of J-Hare with a win. On the flip side, Alabama looked absolutely dreadful against Tulane and finished the regular season undefeated. I think in some cases you can extrapolate how well a team might fare in the SEC by their nonconference exhibition schedule--combine Mississippi St.'s awful 2007 Pythagorean numbers with the opening-week loss to Louisiana Tech, and you could guess with a high, high degree of confidence that they were headed for the kind of season they had. But otherwise ... just don't read too much into it, one way or the other. (Not that we'll be able to help ourselves, of course.)

Serenity now ... and for a while

We all know that Auburn's not going to have a starting quarterback until fall practice. But ... but maybe Gene Chizik and the Auburn staff secretly feel that either Burns or Caudle stepped up enough to be on the verge of being named the starter, and they just want a little bit of time in the fall to confirm it! That's the ticket! We won't be on pins and needles a week before the opener, no sir, not gonna happen this year.

Or, perhaps it will, actually:

Auburn coach Gene Chizik hates to disappoint those looking for a speedy conclusion to the Tigers' quarterback competition this fall.

Chizik, who was in Robertsdale Tuesday evening for the Mobile County and Baldwin County Auburn Clubs' annual scholarship dinner, said prior to the event the starter may not be named until late August.

Kodi Burns and Neil Caudle got most of the reps during spring drills, but Chizik said he expects incoming freshmen Tyrik Rollison and Clint Moseley of Leroy to join an ongoing competition this fall.

"The position has not been won — that's the main point of emphasis," Chizik said. "We've got some young guys who will come in and challenge for the job. Certainly the ones who have been on campus have an advantage of 15 days anyway, but the quarterback situation probably won't be solved until right before the season starts."

So it goes. Two things:

1. I may be reading too far between the lines here, but is this an exceedingly subtle acknowledgment that Rollison and/or Moseley have a legitimate shot at the starting nod? After spring practice, would Chizik (and/or Malzahn) really expect to need the entirety of fall camp, too, to make a decision as (relatively) straightforward as "Burns or Caudle"? I'd assumed the "it's anybody's job" talk from Chizik was just lip service to keep Burns and Caudle on their toes and throw the freshmen a bone, but ... we'll see.

2. As long as they pick the right guy. As long as they pick the right guy. As long as they pick the right guy. As long as they pick the right guy.

The Nonconference Wish List

Though Johnson is changing things, this 70's logo would be more generally representative of Tech's college football powah (or lack thereof), correct?

There are many tactics we football fans use to negotiate the long and grueling offseason, which fortunately is now down to just ... 3 1/2 months?!? Are you forking kidding me?! Three more months? I'm never going to make it. Go on without me. Tell the Mrs. JCCW I loved her, and that I didn't really want to name our first-born Samford H. Hinnen, where the H stands for "Hall." I mean, kind of, I did, but ... Anyways. The offseason. People use it to make up lists. War Eagle Atlanta likes lists, and he came up with a good one today: the top 5 nonconference opponents he'd like to see Auburn schedule if FAIL Jacobs weren't so relentlessly full of FAIL. No, UCLA didn't make the list, thank goodness. We've suffered enough.

But Bruins or no Bruins, it was an excellent list, one that was so good I thought I'd make my own. So here it is.

1. Georgia Tech. Always the JCCW's official first nonconference option if they're available. Soooooooo much awesome history. Soooooooo much wonderfully bad blood. It's an easy road trip for Auburn and Tech fans alike. And from a personal perspective, it's not often yours truly gets to play the "dude, you're even geekier than I am" card; seeing Dawg fans play it on a regular basis has made me bit envious. And yes, there's a reason they play it so very often:



I would add something here to the effect of "Plus, we'd totally take them," but with Johnson around and the little matter of the 0-2 sweep last time we went home-and-home with the Jackets, I'll just say that's not a reason not to schedule them. As I said: this should be Jacobs' first call if there's a hole to fill.

Odds matchup happens in regular season in next 15 years: 50 percent.

2. Florida State. Freddy Weygand doesn't give a crap that it's nine minutes long--he (and Boston!) demand you watch the following:



My parents are amongst the many who have called this one of the greatest games in Auburn history, and it's just one of a handful of classics between the Tigers and Bobby Bowden's 'Noles: the '89 Sugar Bowl, the 1990 20-17 tightrope walk, to Bo-fueled 59-27 demolition ... these teams know how to put on a show when they get together. Or at least, I'm assuming they still do, since I'm not sure FSU's even returning our calls after the buyout to start the Tubby era. But hey, no need to duck them any more, right?

Odds matchup happens in regular season in next 15 years: 5 percent.

3. Clemson. For God's sake, our schools aren't just similar, we're freaking related. (Auburn got the looks in the family, and the Bowden who at least managed to get it right one or two years.) We need to remind Cousin Clem on a more regular basis who's the black sheep.

Odds matchup happens in regular season in next 15 years: 20 UPDATE: 100 percent. (See comments; I am, as you know, a genius. Compared to sea urchins.)

4. Texas. Not a ton of history on the field here, but the history that is here is rather awesome, what with Auburn's 1983 loss to the 'Horns being the only thing keeping the Tigers from a (deserved) national championship and the 1987 thrashing of the 'Horns in J-Hare sparking what would end up being the first of Dye's three straight SEC titles.

And now, of course, there's the little score to settle with Mack Brown raiding our staff whenever he decides he needs a new defensive coordinator. OK, so maybe settling that particular score would be a tall task these days, but that's all the more reason to accept that challenge--Auburn would have a lot more to gain in that match-up than lose.

Odds matchup happens in regular season in next 15 years: What, like, 2 percent?

5. Michigan. SEC vs. Big 10 is always fun. It's even more fun when the program opposite is one of the most tradition-laden programs in the country and Auburn would, hypothetically, be playing in the biggest stadium in the country. And from yours truly's personal, "surrounded by Michigan fans for the past three years" perspective, well, it would be even more fun that that.

Odds matchup happens in regular season in next 15 years: With Michigan basically ruling out all non-Notre Dame home-and-home opponents for the forseeable future (no nonconference road games outside of South Bend since 2003) and Auburn deeply unlikely to agree to anything less than a true home-and-home, I'm setting this at a depressing .0000001%. That's what the Cap One and Outback Bowls are for.