A few thoughts, links, etc. while I’ve got a minute: No. 1. I’ve spent most of the past week trying to weigh the good of Auburn’s BCS ranking against the bad. And there’s so much bad. The distraction. The swelled heads. The pressure. The amplification of the Iron Bowl to End All Iron Bowls hype [...]

Ziemba and Berry and Pugh and Isom threw them around like so many blocking dummies. Again, and again, and again. Malzahn and Newton are driving the sled. But what makes it go are the four horses to which it’s been harnessed, the four horses that have been pulling Auburn forward for years. Saturday, they pulled Auburn further than they ever have before.

I hate Alabama, of course. But it’s an organic hate, a natural hate, a hate that’s built layer-by-layer over the long years, a hate as solid and deep as the Earth itself in that diagram on your science teacher’s wall that shows you all the strata of hate down to the red-hot magma, which is [...]

I like Charles Barkley. I like him a lot. For a lot of reasons. I like that he speaks his mind. I like that he never seems to take life too seriously. I like that he’s funny. I like that he’s very good at his TNT job. I really like that he hates Alabama. Most of all, I like that he genuinely cares about the places that have made him the person he is: Leeds, and Auburn, and the state of Alabama. So many of our athletes have never looked back. Chuck has never stopped looking back.

Hey guys. Could you take a seat? This’ll only take a minute. You may have noticed that I’d expected this to be the week I made a return to my usual couple-of-posts-a-day blogging rate. You may also have noticed that I haven’t posted a thing since Sunday. I wish I was here to tell you [...]

Let’s go through that again: touchdown, field goal, touchdown, touchdown, field goal, field goal, touchdown, punt, touchdown, touchdown, touchdown, end of game. Against a defense ranked in the top-20 nationally entering the game. Auburn ran for more than 300 yards on the ground for the third consecutive SEC game.

This much we know now, know for a concrete Encyclopedia Auburnica fact: this year’s Tigers are not last year’s Tigers. We went over this entering the Kentucky game: the 2009 team won its fifth game and took four tries to win its sixth, never won a second SEC game on the road, had absorbed three [...]

Obviously, of late things have been … tumultuous, let’s say, for your humble Auburn Blogger. But my Q&A exchange with the excellent fellows at Arkansas Expats, now in its 17th year (or so) feels like something of an annual tradition–to me, at least–and I wanted to make doubleplus sure we kept that alive despite my, [...]

Sorry, everyone, even 48-plus hours after the game my brain is a little too … stretched these days to come up with a coherent theme for this post. It’s bullet point time. Note that I’m trying hard not to repeat Amorak’s points in his excellent Sunday post, which you should read first. Enjoy: – No [...]

1. This is the sort of thing that would have been a lot more useful to post immediately in the wake of the UL-Monroe massacre, and apologies to anyone out there who’s already made the comparison if I’ve missed it. But when considering how much stock to put in the performance of Heavy SEC Favorite [...]