First, the important thing. Tonight’s halftime entertainment at the Beav: Quick Change!
If you don’t know, educate yourself. If you had to pick one Auburn home game to see this season … well, I would hope you already picked the Kentucky or Alabama dates. But if you had to pick one of the remaining home games, tonight’s the night, man.
So … about the game? Not an easy one to call. Despite the identical 2-6 records, Georgia’s been the much better team over the course of the SEC season; their two wins have come over much stronger teams by much wider margins, and the Dawgs have been more competitive in their losses as well.
But of course Auburn’s playing at home, and they’ve got an interesting matchup advantage in the backcourt, where they rank in the top 50 in the country in steals and the Dawgs rank amongst D-I’s very worst at giving steals up. The Dawgs’ size (and particularly their offensive rebounding prowess) could cause Auburn major problems if they can get into their halfcourt sets, but if the Tigers can harass the Georgia guards into a 15-20 turnover night and get some easy points on the break things should turn in the home team’s favor.
The stakes? Pretty much every game is a must-win at this point for Auburn and Jeff Lebo if they’re going to make a run to an NIT berth, but a home loss to Georgia would be a particular black eye. As Andy Bitter’s preview emphasizes, this is a matchup between one coach coming off a 10-6 SEC season in his sixth year at his program, and one in his first year at a program that went 3-13 in the league last year. The latter beating the former on the former’s home floor isn’t going to do much for the former’s job security, that’s for sure.
Hey! How dare you say … something that’s probably accurate. Pat Forde’s weekly column at ESPN this week polled a bunch of sportswriters to name the best and worst college towns and college hoops towns on their beat. Not entirely surprisingly, Auburn got cited as the worst basketball town in the SEC. Phillip Marshall responds that it’s not the town or the fans so much as the basketball itself … but I’m not all that offended. Marshall’s right that the men’s program’s failures are the principal cause, but I’m not sure the cause matters all that much; however it happened, Auburn’s support and enthusiasm for its hoops surely does rank among the worst in the league, and has for a while.
However, two things do rankle me about Auburn’s cameo in the column:
1. The anonymous quoted writer’s slam on Auburn for setting the capacity of the new arena at 9,600. Capacity of Cameron Indoor: 9,314. Of Hinkle Fieldhouse: barely more than 11,000. The No. 1 complaint about Auburn’s home basketball games is that there’s no atmosphere, so Auburn went with an arena plan that emphasizes atmosphere above everything else. This is somehow a bad thing?
UPDATE: The voice behind this particular quote? None other than Kevin Scarbinksy himself. Not often that K-Scar is this wrong, but he’s way, way off here.
2. Dude, who the hell voted for Auburn as the “Worst Town” in the SEC, period? I wouldn’t expect those without ties to take it over an Athens or Oxford or Nashville, but the worst town in the SEC? Come on.
Sigh. How deflating is it to see Sam Houston St. pop up in ESPN’s Bracketology with their best win listed not as “at Auburn” but “N-Oral Roberts”?
Photo via.
Jerry,
Scarbinsky wrote that comment. He owned up to it on al.com in the spirit of “full disclosure” as he called it.
I would bet that he is also the voter who voted Auburn. This was more of a calling of a few sports writers than a poll. (there were only 50ish writers total) Besides, (as if people who’ve actually been in Auburn NEED to be told) Auburn was listed as one of the top 10 places to live in America in US News & World Report. Also remember that another study found that Tuscaloosa was bar none the laziest city in America. The AL.com sportswriters are just trying to get us back because somebody outside the state finally asked/cared their opinion.
Scarbinsky admitted yesterday on al.com that he indeed was the writer who was griping about the new seating capacity at Auburn Arena, and honestly I can’t blame him. I understand the need to create a unique atmosphere with the new facility, but overall the decision to decrease capacity is very, very short-sighted. It’s almost as if the athletic department has conceded that sell-outs will never be a problem at Auburn, which although true now, does not speak well for their long-term vision for the program.
Downsizing the Arena = Downsizing the sport. Auburn athletics has made a lot of questionable decisions in the past few years. It’s hard to see where their committment is these days. Competitive in equestrian, but not baseball and basketball? I like to see AU competitive in ALL endeavors, but certainly do not these days.
Thanks for the tip on Scarbinsky, guys.
As you could guess, though, I disagree 100 percent regarding the size of the arena. Yes, drawing 20K twice a year for ‘Bama and UK would be nice, but I’m more concerned with giving EVERY Auburn home game a lively crowd and a charged atmosphere. That doesn’t happen in a 15-20,000 seat arena unless you’ve got a decade or more of winning behind you. Auburn could either wait and hope on that … or they could build an incredibly nice, beautifully-designed smaller gym that will put the fans that do show right on top of the action no matter where they sit and turn even December snoozefests against SWAC teams into a fun night out at the arena and give our team(s) SOME kind of homecourt advantage even when the big boys aren’t in town.
AU will never be consistently competitive at basketball. Never. The admin has done the right thing to downsize the arena.
As a fan base we are tremendously apathetic toward the sport and until that changes, the program never will. Hell, I was in school for the ’99 season and I went to a grand total of ONE game. And aside from one Porter dunk I was bored the whole time.
One issue Auburn has is that the school is 2+ hours from any major metro fan base. And basketball being a school-year, weeknight sport makes it hard for anyone to justify the travel time for anyone with a family.
To prove my point, if in the next decade AU has a B-ball sellout (even in the smaller arena) for any game where the Alabama SGA president doesn’t have to sing “War Eagle” at halftime, then I’ll eat a cockroach.
Alex, if the first game in the new arena isn’t sold out, I’ll eat a bucket of cockroaches. I was at AU from 1982-86, the Barkley-Person-Gerald White-Frank Ford years. I attended a lot of games, the atmosphere at many of them was tremendous, and it was great fun. I also went to several games when Doc, Mamadou and Co. had it cooking in the late ’90s-early ’00s and Beaves was rocking then, too. AU will never be Chapel Hill or Lexington, but consistently solid teams will bring consistently decent crowds, if not sellouts every night.
For what it’s worth, I’m with Jerry. A smaller, more intimate arena is a great idea. Ask the people in Cleveland if old 80,000-seat Memorial Stadium was a better baseball venue than 42,000-seat Jacobs Field.
Kscar cites the need to hang a curtain in beard eaves to increase atmosphere as one of its downfalls, yet he doesn’t comprehend why the new facility has fewer seats. So we don’t have a great program currently, but we’ve got a new facility in the works…so how do you immediately impact the demand for basketball tix? if you answered “add more seats (then hang a larger curtain)”, you may be unfamiliar with supply & demand.
Has anyone thought about the need for more seats for events such as AU graduation, UPC concerts, etc?
This decision was narrow-minded and as I said earlier, short-sighted.
We could always dome-inJordan-Hare and fill the seats with animatronic fans.
Well, I am not sure if the first game would be a sellout or not, but one thing is for certain.. somebody’s gonna be eating some cockroaches.
maybe we can have that as a half-time show.
High in protein. Might want to go for chocolate-covered, though.
Tabasco sauce. And beer.
When I turn out to be wrong, I’ll never be more glad for the anonymity of the interwebs.
There can’t be that many Alex P’s in Smyrna. We’ll track them down, don’t worry.