Perhaps like you, I embarked on a shopping frenzy this January after Auburn won the national championship. I bought a Michael Dyer jersey, which is my gameday attire (or as my mom puts it, “formal wear.”) I bought a t-shirt commemorating our season. I bought a cap (which unfortunately doesn’t fit my enormous head.) And, I bought a snappy Auburn tie. It’s a deep blue number slashed with orange diagonal stripes, a plaid pattern between them of the same blue but picked out in a subtly different stitching, and a tasteful postage-stamp Auburn logo right at the end. It’s a classy tie – my wife loves it. And it has nudged me into a standard uniform for Fridays: khakis, white shirt with thin blue horizontal and vertical lines*, and the tie.

I’m not really a superstitious man. I’ve never had a pregame ritual, I always wash my socks, and even if I took the notion to grow a probability-altering beard, the wife wouldn’t stand for it. (If my facial hair holds that sway over Auburn’s success on the football field, well, sorry fellas. You ain’t near as pretty.) Spooky things happen, sure, but for me it’s purely retrospective. But here’s the thing with this year and the tie: I haven’t exactly worn it consistently. I forgot to wear it pre-game on September 16 and 23, and October 7. Those dates would correspond to the Clemson, Arkansas and FAU games, our only two losses and a loss-in-everything-but-points. That’s a strong correlation between Auburn football and…

… and a necktie? When we look at superstitions and rituals as a phenomenon (especially associated with sports,) the situations most burdened by superstition are those in which, statistically speaking, the players and fans have the least amount of actual control over those events. That is to say, people seem to put the most faith in their superstitions when they matter the least. And that makes sense. The natural impulse is to search for even the haziest connection, to make even the sparest attributions in order to assign some cause for a team’s success or defeat. I know this. In reality, the existence of a superstition mostly serves as an indicator that the cause of a team’s struggles are too large or too complex or too far out of reach to be acted upon by the players and fans.

Especially the fans. Maybe this is the feeling we’re all getting from Auburn’s 2011 season, with 2010 glowing brightly in recent memory and our current tigers struggling to execute.

It’s hard. By this time last year, the Auburn tigers carried an aura not necessarily of invincibility but of certainty. They would take their licks, but they always hit back harder. Twenty-four points down to a jacked-up Bama beneath the roar of an even more jacked-up Bryant-Denny and its houndstooth mob? Never looked back once that field goal unit trotted onto the field. Shut ‘em up. Made it into history. The 2011 tigers are anything but certain, even when the receivers are open, when the D-line is getting a push, when the right play is dialed up, when our QB finds the open man, hurls it to him as he blazes from hash to hash. What happens when the ball hits his hands, when the safety’s shoulder pads crack againt him?

We don’t know, just can’t foresee. But that’s the point: uncertainty. There’s no beauty in myth without mystery, no possibility of heroism without a chance of defeat. 2010 was almost mathematical, in that we knew however deep the line on the graph dropped, it was always going to pop back into the positive. It was the mind-blowing conclusion of a story that had already been written, historic in every sense of the word. 2011 is a story that is being written before our eyes.

There, in the struggle, is a joyous narrative. Our hopes laid bare in a season of triumph through struggle. A preamble of coming seasons. Ground fertile for new heroes. This is the same ground Jason Campbell stood on when, in 2004, a first down on a deep cross sparked our rally versus LSU. The same ground under Bill Newton’s cleats as he sprinted toward two blocked punts and hundreds of thousands of bumper stickers. This is our earth to be worked and harvested.

Dare I wear the tie, knowing fate? You’re damn right I am.

* Looks like graph paper. How am I supposed to resist?

John has been going to Auburn games since before he was born. He was in -Legion Field- utero when Bo went over the top. Some mothers play Mozart to their developing progeny. John was raised on the roars of the Tiger faithful. You can chart his growth with his fantastic column, God, Girl, Grill, Gridiron, and write to him at godgirlgrillgridiron@thewareaglereader.com.

…

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Auburn Warrior Princess Grace Byrd Morris (right) and friend hold up a banner after Auburn's win over 22-19 win over Oregon.

Surely, a win is a win no matter how it is forged.

That said, certain wins are more deeply satisfying than others. The win that comes despite poor team play — egregious errors, boneheaded play calls, slop-bucket tackling and defensive angles — is nothing more than a relief at a narrow escape. Everyone breathes easy once the final whistle sounds, but that feeling of victory? Hollow. And what’s even worse than winning in spite of yourself is beating a team determined to beat itself. For one, there’s no joy in merely helping another team along the path of self-destruction. For two, the essential questions go unanswered: did the defense step up? Did our halftime adjustments make a difference? Has the offense figured out how to force the defense’s hand? Unknowns. Truly, who is the better team?

And in contrast, there are games in which the Tigers lose but lose so damn well, it’s nearly as good as winning. Last year’s Iron Bowl could not have been a better example of this phenomenon. We lost. But we lost in such a way that displayed potential and character and an inerrantly upward trajectory. A loss… but a loss in which the Plainsmen gave every last ounce, then dug in for more. It may seem trite, but just as a victory over a self-destructive opponent rings hollow, there is no shame in defeat if you leave it all on the field.

This season, Auburn has gotten every opponent’s best. They’ve taken it on the chin just about every week… but they’ve hit back. Harder. And harder. January 10, 2011, was no exception, as the Ducks put up one of the most complete games the Tigers have seen all year — and one of the most astonishing. Chip Kelly came to Glendale to win and his boys came to play. There was the brilliantly-devised fake punt play, with one of the back protectors scooting into the flats. The out-of-nowhere speed option on that first — first of two! — two-point conversions. The HB-crazy option on the goal line that gave the Ducks their second touchdown. The ballsy play action from their own five. The across-the-grain from-the-bootleg pass to Maehl for their second two-pointer. Chip Kelly may have called himself a great game, but most importantly his players truly believed in the game he called and they executed. Nothing can be taken from this Oregon team, who went out in a neon blaze of carbon-fiber glory, who deserve to hold their heads high.

Nothing from Kelly, but at the very end of the game I questioned his clock management, thinking the Ducks would have wanted to call time out. Maybe, at first, he’d thought that keeping the Tigers out of scoring range (and forcing overtime) was best done by limiting the number of plays Auburn could run. Why stop the clock? Then came Dyer’s two game-cinching runs… and it still doesn’t make sense to call time, to prolong the inevitable, to force his players to run another meaningless play. And then during his postgame interview, though very obviously overcome, Chip Kelly conducted himself with class. His Ducks wanted it bad, and he wanted it bad for them. They are a team whose time is achingly close to their first championship, a team I’d like Auburn to play again. And a team it would be worth losing to.

Honestly, given the level at which the Oregon Ducks and Auburn Tigers played, even a loss would have been meaningful. Would it still have been disappointing? It would have been gut-wrenching (and my heart goes out to the Oregon). But this would still have been a game of which the Tigers could be proud — of which the Ducks should be proud. This truly is what makes the victory worthwhile.

It must be acknowledged that this game continues the SEC’s stunning domination of the national title game. Five straight wins from any single conference, even the mighty SEC, is incredible — to say nothing of six wins in eight years and seven wins out of all fifteen. None of these champions had it easy, none emerged from the meat grinder of SEC divisional play without bruises and scars. They all had to fight, every tilt of the season — and the Tigers are no different. Auburn won this championship having played a host of close games, games in which they fought back from overwhelming deficits, games which required a whole lot of stick-to-it-iveness. games that demonstrated an unstoppable will to live, a spirit that is not afraid, a true well of character. This pattern to their gameday successes — taking early body blows, adjusting, rising, destroying — was leveled at the Auburn Tigers as damning by no few commentators. The debate raged: Is it better to win close games, or unblinkingly obliterate every opponent?

What should we expect of our champions? Looking at Oregon’s season, there were only two games in which they seemed to meet a challenge, Stanford and Cal. All other comers were flattened by a top-flight defense and a superb offense, the likes of which are rarely seen — you’ll not find me doubting Oregon’s deserved place versus Auburn. But which requires more of a football player, coach or team: to continue to score points on an overmatched opponent, or to rise from your back to your knees to your feet with fists ready? Which obstacle, when overcome, more effectively develops and demonstrates character: the temptation to give less effort when it is clear you have already won, or the temptation to give less effort because it is clear that you may almost certainly lose?

Ask Coach Yox how it works. Ask him how he builds strength in his boys, ask him about the heat and the puking exhaustion. Ask him if young men learn to trust themselves and their teammates by taking it easy, by always feeling good, by never being pushed to do more than they ever believed they could.

And how can we ignore… the contrast between the two fanbases could not have been more drastic. The Duck fans were hopelessly outnumbered in Glendale — not just in the stadium, but outnumbered at the tailgate, outnumbered among non-ticket-holding fans who made the trip anyway, outnumbered in their own bars. One particular bar was designated (somehow) as “Oregon Duck fan headquarters,” and not long after the announcement was made, the place was swarmed by Tiger fans in orange and navy. The stadium roared with “IT’S GREAT… TO BE… AN AUBURN TIGER” over and over again. Nick Saban had to shout over 70,000 voices to be heard in his mike. The kickoffs, just like in Jordan-Hare, “WAR EAGLE! HEY!” We made that dome ours — Jordan-Hare West ours. We have photographic evidence that the Oregonians couldn’t even manage a decent tailgate.

Is it any wonder, given how strongly the Ducks are associated not just with their university, but with a multinational clothing giant? People don’t throng by land and air 1,700 miles to the middle of the desert out of curiosity as to the fashionable socks their players are sporting, even if — I just can’t resist, a buddy of mine said it best — even if the Ducks were dressed perfectly to ambush the Tigers from within the confines of a lemon meringue pie. You just can’t buy a fanbase like the Auburn Family.  We believe in Auburn and we love it and we teach our children to love it.

A win is a win, and this is a win like no other. But it matters how the victory is forged. It matters that Auburn — the players, the coaches and trainers, the AD, the students, the most distant alums crying War Eagle — is not a system, not an audience, but a family. The sacrifices they make they make for each other, be it a last-ditch road trip through the heart of the country to be with their team, be it the sacrifice of personal goals for the good of others, be it the willingness to accept public derision for decisions in which you truly believe. It matters that Auburn has fought through adversity: through coaching entropy and staff dissolution, through uncertainty and injury, humiliating defeats and high-piling deficits, through bitterly-fought victories without just reward.

It matters. This championship is not the success of a programmatic system, not the work or dream of one man or woman, not merely the perfect confluence of favorable events. This championship does not belong to a single player or coach — but to Auburn. This championship represents a success of Auburn, a success of the principles of character that George Petrie put to paper in 1945 and ever since have rung like eight hammers on white-hot metal.

We believe in character, not in miracles. 2010 was no miracle — it was a success of grit and character, a triumph by the Auburn man, of which we may all be justifiably proud.

War Damn Eagle.

Photo submitted by Grace Byrd Morris – she of the 3-hour airplane pep rally and mechanical bull.

…

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This, coming from a man who rarely passes an Autumn Saturday without some football – any football, Auburn Tigers or no. Whom I can still recall telling me excitedly about some lanky guys by the name of Aromashadu and Obomanu that Auburn had just signed, eagerly waving a paper copy of the Auburn football report. Who (despite living in Virginia longer than any place other than his boyhood Montgomery home) to this day is astonished at the lack of gameday colors in central VA. We were sent on the inevitable Thanksgiving trip for groceries, the weekend of the Virginia Tech – UVA game, and he was flat disgusted by the time we got back in the car. “Why are all these grown men not wearing team colors? This place oughta be covered in blue and orange and maroon and there’s nobody excited at all. Where are the dudes with radios?”

And yet, now, at the time when the matchups are most novel and the teams are all playing for pride and for glory six days out of seven… now, nothing. Because this season, the Auburn Tigers have wrung us out nearly every single week. Nearly every single tilt has seen the Plainsmen take it on the chin for a quarter or two, only to explode into life, obliterating all deficits, marching unstoppably downfield, clinching the game with stupefying and improbable interceptions, rising despite their wounds and burying swords to the hilt in their adversaries.

It’s just too much. We’ve hit the bottom of the well. We’ve drained the thing dry. There ain’t enough water left in the earth to wet the lichenified likes of the undercard bowls into palatability. UT-UNC, Army-SMU, Tulsa-Whoever – too bad. I sat in the waiting room at the endodontist’s awaiting a root canal and I could barely bring myself to watch the Armed Forces bowl. I’m parched. I will never forget this season.

——

Earlier this season, I compared Auburn’s 2010 team to the famed Secretariat of 1973 and got a frisson of a jinx. After all, however apparent it was that our whirlwind come-from-behind surge was no mere fluke, however deeply the players and the coaches and the fans knew that this team was special… one doesn’t invoke the spirit of the great thoroughbred lightly. I thought to myself, having written these words it is likely that I will be forced to eat them. But I was wrong. This team has got a heart four sizes too large. The Iron Bowl was our Preakness, not just an opportunity to replicate the incredible feat versus the gamecocks but astonishingly, our moment to outstrip even that monumental feat of courage.

Courage. If there is one value which to this team must be ascribed, it is courage. And not just the courage that propelled them from impending defeat into convincing victory, time and again. Not just the courage to burst forth and every second run faster than the second before. The courage to sacrifice a personal dream for the good of one’s teammates. The courage to step onto a field which very nearly ended your life, barely a year before. All of these and more – these are they whose spirits are not afraid.

Just as Secretariat charged from the gates on June 9, 1973, met the rail and never stopped accelerating, the Tigers took to the gridiron in Atlanta and crushed the gamecocks, start-to-finish. In nineteen years of inter-divisional contests, no other SEC champion – east or west – has hung so many points on their opponent or finished with a higher margin of victory. War Damn Eagle. This was it, the moment when we stared a skilled adversary in the eye and trampled them into the dirt. This was our ’73 Belmont. War. Damn. Eagle.

—–

Restate my assumptions: One, Mathematics is the language of nature. Two, Everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers. Three: If you graph the numbers of any system, patterns emerge. Therefore, there are patterns everywhere in nature. Evidence: The cycling of disease epidemics; the wax and wane of caribou populations; sun spot cycles; the rise and fall of the Nile. So what about the stock market?

- Maximillian Cohen, from “Pi”

…so what about college football?

Spread Sheets has been on hiatus while I did two things – gave a presentation on pediatric stroke to the faculty, residents and students in pediatrics, and began my rotation in the neonatal ICU. For that delay, I apologize. But… in my spare time, while working overnight shifts in the NICU, I managed to finish gathering the data and at least making game progress lines for all the rest of Auburn’s games. I built a season-long chart for the SEC West, too. And, for Oregon.

12:50, press return :

There is no legend because each team’s line is presented in that team’s colors (if this does not come out clear, let me know and I’ll whip something up.) One thing to notice – and ugh, how could one ignore it – is Bama’s (unfortunate) statistical dominance, right up until the Iron Bowl and the SEC championship game. With those two games behind us, Auburn pulls to within thirty yards of the Tide.

Yes, you read that correct – by my very metric, Auburn’s end-of-year numbers are thirty adjusted yards lower than Alabama’s. How, you may ask, is it possible that BCS team numero uno is lagging behind a three-loss division also-ran, whom they beat? How galling. But, we have to point out that the former half of Auburn’s season does not share trajectories with the back end. We played Mississippi state real, real close. By my method – focusing on whole-team performance – we should have lost to Clemson. It wasn’t until the latter end of the South Carolina game that the inflection point came and we really hit full gallop. Bama laid some serious world-killin’ wood on their early-season opponents which built up an enormous GPL lead, but it was not a lead they could sustain. So it’s a bit like the Iron Bowl itself – the Tide jumped out to an early lead, but were unable to keep pace with the resurgent Tigers.

Naturally, too, you notice that Auburn and Alabama are head and shoulders above the rest of the SEC West pack. My final rankings, based purely on GPL, go as such :

1. Auburn
2. Alabama
3. Arkansas
4. LSU
5. MSU
6. Ole Miss

Yes, I rank Auburn ahead of Alabama even though technically Alabama has the higher GPL. This is reasonable given that A. the difference between the teams is a wholly insignificant 0.8%, and B. head to head, baby, head to freakin’ head. Had these teams never played each other, we could not reasonably distinguish between them by mere GPL, but since they have… ’round the bowl, down the hole, roll Tide roll.

We can also compare Auburn’s season to Oregon’s :

Here, the difference is even more clearly in the front end of the season. Just as there is a dramatic uptick in the Tigers’ curve in the back half of the South Carolina game, Oregon too has an inflection point. It isn’t dramatic, but it’s there. These points seem to represent the points at which the two teams truly hit their never-look-back stride. Oregon’s appears early in the second quarter versus Tennessee, whom they go on to beat the tar out of. And yet, even though Auburn took a little longer to get up to speed, their line eventually parallels the Ducks’ line – meaning, the two teams are gaining / defending yards at roughly the same rate. In fact, if we were to compare Auburn’s and Oregon’s seasons, but only the portions that come after each team gets on its game, we get the following chart :

…in which the Tigers and Ducks are practically neck and neck. Our clash with the Ducks looks to be a ferocious matchup. Speed versus speed. Hypermodern rushing attack #1 versus hypermodern rushing attack #2. Heisman trophy winner versus Heisman trophy runner-up. Best uniforms in college football versus (as was so perfectly described) uniforms that look like the Jamaican flag melted over a steel girder.

——

Didn’t even have time to write a true “Digging Up the Hatchet” this year, but trust me, mine is always shinin’.

And I did watch the Iron Bowl. One of my chief residents is an Auburn fan herself, and had scheduled me so I would be off work during the game. In order to make that happen, though, I had to be post-call. So, I went into work Thanksgiving day at 07:00, worked the entire day and the entire night until 07:00 the 26th, went home, showered, got in the car with my wife, slept most of the way up to Richmond, and arrived in time for lunch and pregame. And then, the wild delirium of the 2010 Iron Bowl, in which Auburn sunk to its very lowest low before dishing out the most jaw-dropping three quarters of annihilation all year.

Despite that I was working on about four hours of shut eye, I can clearly recall that horrible moment when, up by 21, Bama was driving for the fourth and undoutably-icing touchdown. My grandfather piped up, “If they get a touchdown here, the game’s over.” We all voiced our resigned agreement – a twenty-eight point first-half deficit would put even the 2010 Auburn Tigers in the dirt. It seemed that the Tide would play both roles in our Alabama tragedy : the underdoggin’ giant killer steal-your-MNC-from-you role that Auburn has played the past couple years, and the arrogant overlord role that Alabama presumes to have occupied for most of our history.

The stage was set for catastrophe, for our dream’s requiem… and then : a stop, a field goal, and a mere twenty-four point deficit to overcome.

Any other year we would still have been consigned to a disappointing, Capital-One-Bowl-again fate. Any other year, it would have been tempting to find other things to do. To let the Iron Bowl pass, kept safe at arms’ length on GameTracker. Any other year, twenty-one points down would have held no less hope than twenty-four. But this year, this year against Bama in our northern home, this year was different. Instead of representing reprieve from an inevitable beat down, the field goal gave us the first indications that our defense was starting to find its oats, that the offense would rise up before long, and both would answer. The room got quiet as the kick sailed between the uprights… but just as the Bama offense would soon go silent. Cam started throwing accurately. The backs started picking up ground. The Tide went three quarters without a touchdown, and we reached the end zone in every quarter thereafter. Something like this.

After the game’s conclusion, we ate Thanksgiving dinner as a family. My sister, my father, both voiced their thanks for the victory and the end to Bama’s run of Iron Bowl wins. My grandfather, all he said was he was happy that we were happy. Driving seven hundred miles to spend four hours with five Auburn fans, watching the crimson and white get pulverized on their home turf, as my father and I leap and roar with every hammerblow the Tigers land, and then sitting down to eat with the victors? Boy if that ain’t the strength of family, I don’t know what is.

Maybe he’s an Auburn man after all.

——

My wife and I decided the other night to get me a sportcoat, as a local store was having a rather improbable sale : the commercial on TV read “Buy One Get Two Free.” She turned to me and said, “Want to go?” On the set, ESPN was about to click back onto the Terrapin beatdown of hapless ECU. Hardly thought once of the poor pirates’ fate : “Let’s go.” And so we loaded ourselves up and headed out to the strip mall, and I found myself in front of a row of sportcoats. I could’ve used one for a good while now, if only so I don’t have to wear my camping / leaf-raking / bike-riding jacket to church. (Certainly my darling bride will appreciate that.)

The majority of them were simple navy blazers of some kind or another, one of which I already own. I started looking through the less conventional / boring jackets, the plaids and tweeds and herringbones. And the houndstooths.

This is where things get a little less rational for me. One the one hand, a houndstooth is indeed a handsome pattern, particularly once one has thumbed past the commonplace ash-grey-and-black to the black-and-gold, the gold-and-brown. And furthermore I know that, despite the saturation of Bammerdom with the aforementioned default houndstooth, Paul Bryant didn’t always keep a houndstooth hat and in fact, wore a plaid or plain number. That the Shug and the Bear respected and befriended one another. That if I like something enough, it’s worth enduring both the less-than-half-in-jest derision of my blue-and-orange-clad family members and the more-than-half-smug approval of my remaining kin.

These and more ran through my head as I stood before a couple of sturdy and subtle houndstooth coats. Rationally speaking, I could at least have tried one on. I turned away – just as I hesitated even to pick up a deep red sweater.

What if a houndstooth sport coat looks right dapper on yours truly? It wouldn’t change my heritage, a muddled blend of the Loveliest Village and Tuscaloosa since generations back. Wouldn’t change my blooded love of the orange and blue, wouldn’t make me less of a Tiger fan, wouldn’t put a quaver in my voice when I cried War Eagle. But it would be a concession, however small, and one for which I would go to bat whenever I put it on my shoulders. The same sort of concession my mother made when she began dating my father in earnest – she got rid of a whole lot of red clothing, and then became an Auburn student herself. For her, giving up crimson gained her a devoted husband. For me, what would be placed in the balance, should I wear that houndstooth coat?

It wasn’t worth just the looking good, or even finding out. I left it on the rack.

Seen in Bryant-Denny bathroom stall: "For a good time, tweet @ThayerEvansFOX".

The latest Thayer Evans piece has plopped onto the interwebs.  Give it a read if you missed your daily frisson of rage – as with every way Evans has been involved in the Cam saga, it’s completely stupid.

The point he’s trying to make regards the precedent set by this decision, about which “many” head coaches are “fuming.”  He seems to have found two anonymous head coaches willing to take an anonymous, nebulous stand:

We’ve got to take a stand or we’re not going to be able to close these floodgates. Now, the kid and all the people associated with him just have to say, ‘He didn’t know.’ And with that, he’s set free. That’s not fair to us or the kid.

And, the other :

What they’re saying is as long as the kid has nothing to do with the solicitation then you’re OK. It’s a joke, man. This blows everything wide open. Now, it really becomes the haves and the have-nots. It’ll be everybody doing the SEC money thing, but all across the country. Here we go. Get ready.

For the moment, forget that the head coaches neither make nor interpret NCAA bylaws – they only follow them.  Or don’t.  Also, forget that the “SEC money thing” ought to be properly termed the “college football money thing.”  These guys are mad, sure, but they aren’t taking the time to check which end of the cart the horse is at.

I want to address this idea that this ruling sets some kind of dangerous precedent, that floodgates have been opened through which pours the black tide of agents, money-grubbing parents and the accelerated death of amateurism.  Consider it an addendum to the previous piece which predicted this outcome.

First of all, let’s put the thing right on the table: the NCAA’s ruling on Cam Newton makes it de facto legal to ask how much your kid’s LOI is worth.  And yes, that’s immoral.  And yes, now all those families who want to ask how much their children are worth at one school, take no money, and send their kid to another school have been given the green light to do so.  However, it remains to be seen why it is important to college football that kids be punished for the sins of their fathers.

Because that’s what we’re talking about here, right?  The actions taken by parents having consequences for the unknowing kid.

At their basic level, NCAA bylaws (concerning this situation) should exist to prevent a kid from committing to a school because of money, whether they know they are doing so or not. There are two ways this could happen: the kid makes the decision based on the cash, or his family steers him to a school because of money they receive without his knowledge.  In order to prevent these from happening, the NCAA must strictly enforce the ethical character of the student-athlete, and must prevent a black market of talent.

Regarding the former task: even if parents are de facto allowed to ask what their kid is worth, if the kids don’t know, then no harm is done to the student-athlete’s ethical character.  If he doesn’t know what his parents are doing or have done, then he has neither participated in the ethical violation, nor could he have prevented it, i.e. he has neither aided nor abetted the crime.  These anonymous coaches seem to think it’s unfair to the kid if he is not held accountable for actions he neither took nor could have prevented… that it’s somehow wrong that a person of upstanding moral character is not punished for the transgressions of their relatives.

Secondly, the illegal economy of talent is nonexistent without exchange of money for goods.   It’s silly to claim that, with this “dangerous” precedent set, every kid’s dad is going to demand a price for the young buck’s playing time.  After all, it’s still illegal to enter into an agreement to receive payment.  This vast, seething tide of solicitous parents is going to be pretty frustrated when they find out that they still can’t get any money legally.  What exactly are these coaches bemoaning?  That now, every parent will ask for some cash, and they’ll just have to say “No”?  Weren’t they doing that already?  What exactly changes here, from a practical standpoint?  Pay for play is still thoroughly illegal.

So this ruling, really, doesn’t change anything.

…

John has been going to Auburn games since before he was born. He was in -Legion Field- utero when Bo went over the top. Some mothers play Mozart to their developing progeny. John was raised on the roars of the Tiger faithful. You can chart his growth with his fantastic column, God, Girl, Grill, Gridiron, and write to him at godgirlgrillgridiron@thewareaglereader.com.

(Remember when he treated a former Vandy law student like a Vandy football player?)

Vanderbilt Law School is no match for Magruder.

Being that the rapidly-evolving Cam Cycle was on pause for the weekend, I thought it might be a good idea to review the cases being made against our boy out on the intertubes, specifically Clay Travis’s piece at Fanhouse, in which he outlines several ways that Cam Newton could be ruled ineligible not by NCAA but SEC bylaws.

Now, I am no lawyer. But I find it hard to believe that Travis is correct.

The initial point he makes is that asking for benefits is indistinct from agreeing to receive them. We can all agree on the text of the SEC bylaws :

If at any time before or after matriculation in a member institution a student-athlete or any member of his/her family receives or agrees to receive, directly or indirectly, any aid or assistance beyond or in addition to that permitted by the Bylaws of this Conference (except such aid or assistance as such student-athlete may receive from those persons on whom the student is naturally or legally dependent for support), such student- athlete shall be ineligible for competition in any intercollegiate sport within the Conference for the remainder of his/her college career.

That’s Section 14.01.3.2. Where Travis is (first) wrong is when he states the following :

A solicitation is a request or encouragement of another to perform an act. If Cecil Newton solicited Mississippi State then he agreed to receive the improper benefits by nature of the solicitation.

First of all : if that is true, why don’t the bylaws clearly state it is illegal to ask for benefits? In fact, the language therein seems to be structured to explicitly exclude asking for benefits from the discussion. The bylaws do make it crystal clear that receiving money is verboten – if it is illegal to ask for benefits, then there’s no reason to establish the illegality of receiving benefits*. If the writers of the bylaws wanted it to be illegal to ask, then they could and would have made that clear. Why obfuscate the letter and the spirit of the law?

Second, asking for something is distinct from entering into an agreement to receive it. I can understand Travis’s point in that asking is indicating a potential willingness to receive. But with respect to an agreement to receive money, this potential willingness is not sufficient to constitute an agreement – what the bylaws describe is an oral or written contract.

Let’s say you want to buy an old church organ, and Cecil Newton has one he could sell. He turns to you and says “I’d sell this organ for $180,000. You got that kind of money?” In that moment, we can agree, Cecil has indicated he might take some cash for an old organ, but he has not yet agreed to sell. In order to enter into an agreement, both you and Cecil have to agree to exchange goods. If you assent, and he assents, and you start to figure out who is paying for the U-Haul, that is an agreement. If, however, he decides to donate the organ to another church, well, you can kiss that old music-maker goodbye. It was never your organ, because no agreement had been forged – despite the fact that Cecil had floated a price to you.

(This ought to be perfectly clear to anyone not looking frantically for a way to disqualify our superhero quarterback.)

The second and more wide-reaching point is his insinuation that “the SEC’s bylaw [regarding unethical conduct] has no knowledge requirement.” Here, he says (somewhat farcically) :

…much of the media attention thus far has focused on whether Cam Newton knew that his father solicited Mississippi State for payment (if those allegations prove true). That focus on Cam’s knowledge is based upon a reading of the NCAA’s own bylaws. But the SEC’s bylaw has no knowledge requirement.

The bylaw to which he refers is section 19.10.3.4. The pertinent statement within this section (which he emphasizes) is :

The Commissioner has the duty and power to investigate the validity of violations and impose penalties and sanctions against member institutions, their athletic staff members or student-athletes, for practices and conduct which violate the spirit, as well as the letter of NCAA and SEC rules and regulations. This shall include the ability to render prospective student-athletes or current student-athletes ineligible for competition due to their involvement in a violation of NCAA or SEC rules that occurs during the individual’s recruitment.

It baffles the mind. Travis is suggesting that a student athlete could be involved in a recruiting violation, without even knowing that violation is occurring, and that this would be a breach of ethical conduct. I can’t understand how such a thing is possible. It’s a stretch enough to say that a player could have true involvement with things that happened without him knowing. But it’s flat ludicrous to claim that the player himself violated any ethical precept, because of actions taken by someone else, of which he had no knowledge.

Certainly, if Cam violated the rules, he’s acted unethically. And certainly if others violated the rules on Cam’s behalf with his knowledge, he’s allowed a violation to occur and has acted unethically. And certainly, if others violated the rules without Cam’s knowledge, they have acted unethically… but how is this third scenario at all a reflection on Cam’s ethics? Clay Travis is suggesting that, because the SEC bylaws have no knowledge clause, student-athletes can be held ethically responsible for actions others took without their knowledge. In other words, he is saying that a person is ethically responsible for actions that they did not take and could not have prevented. They are ethically responsible for things with which it was impossible for them to ethically engage. Again : flat ludicrous. The bylaw has no knowledge clause for the same reason it has no rutabaga clause – that wouldn’t make any sense.

That horse is going to have a hell of a time pushing its cart around.

For what it’s worth, I read through the SEC and NCAA bylaws regarding student-athletes’ eligibility, and as best as I can tell, they are in agreement. There doesn’t seem to be a way a player could violate one and not violate the other in identical fashion. Thus, I’m confident in Cam’s eligibility, until such a time as we hear that Cecil entered into some oral or written contract, or that Cam had some knowledge of the goings-on. Auburn and their roided-up compliance department seem to have made exact right decision, based on the information which we now enjoy**.

So, one might ask, why is this important? If we take SEC football on the whole from a flat, non-homeric perspective, it could be claimed that this is just a business and the bylaws are the bylaws, and they mean what important people say they mean. This is merely an opportunity to establish that meaning. And of folks who share Mr. Travis’s opinion can successfully establish their case, then to the victor go the spoils and tough luck for #2. Why, beyond any affection / antipathy for Auburn, would this decision even matter?

Cam Newton’s case is important, and not just to Auburn and their future opponents. Think about why these laws are structured as they are. Let’s say you have a son, a huge mack-truck of a nose tackle who mauls offensive lines and mows down quarterbacks and is being recruited throughout the SEC. And that you’re in a bitter dispute with an ex-spouse, who might threaten to torpedo his ineligibility if certain demands aren’t met. Or your own brother is in a bad way, in a tight spot for cash, and could see an opportunity to escape his dire straits by offering to steer his nephew toward a certain school. Does it hurt the asker to casually propose a price to a major university? Probably not, if no bargain is struck – correct me if I’m wrong but I can’t imagine there would be legal repercussions for that. Would that asking end the student-athlete’s career? If Clay Travis is right, then yes, it would.

This is a precedent that the NCAA could not afford to set. If a student-athlete could be rendered ineligible by their family member asking for money (but not even agreeing to receive it) without the athlete’s knowledge, this opens a potentially lethal weakness in that athlete’s eligibility from which they can not be protected***. It becomes easier to use athletes as bargaining chips, not harder. Forget for the moment that it doesn’t make a lick of sense with the letter of the law, that an athlete ought to at least be able to engage an issue without being tarred as unethical. The spirit of the bylaw is to protect athletes from the ethical dilemma of selling their amateur playing time. Clay Travis’s reading of these bylaws would open the door for student-athletes to be used as bargaining chips without their knowledge.

Ironically enough, if Clay Travis is right, then Newton v. NCAA would be more effective in weakening amateur status than in protecting it. After all, if these kids are made more vulnerable by laws meant to ensconce their amateur status, then perhaps the solution is to bring all the sordid dealings into the open where the spurious solicitations can have no power. Make it legal to request and receive payment for LOI’s, and the accountants can sort out what’s real and what isn’t.

It’s a neat trick: reading a bylaw and finding a meaning that contradicts both the language therein and the express purpose thereof, a potential interpretation within the law that allows the law to evaporate with a single precedent. I’m genuinely impressed – guess this is what lawyers are paid to do. But this precedent would be dangerous. If, with the information we have now, Cam Newton is ruled ineligible, that special protected status of the student-athlete is irreparably weakened.

So I don’t care who you root for – college, pro, Bama, ‘Cocks, Ducks or no one at all. If you have any love for this sport, honest logic and rational self-interest demand that you root for Cam Newton.

War Damn Eagle. Hat tip to my dad for realizing why the bylaws are structured as they are.

* That is, unless receiving benefits without asking for them is an ethical offense, in which case I’m about to send Mark Ingram and Trent Richardson five bucks and a letter that says “Please continue to play at Bama” by registered mail, thankyouverymuch Mr. Slive.

** Which does not preclude further bombshells, of course – the lies have to stop somewhere, eh? I’ll say – for the record, indelibly – that if further revelations prove Cecil struck a deal for real, or that Cam had any clue this was going on… then no mercy whatsoever for anyone involved. I believe that I can count only on what I earn. I believe in obedience to law because it protects the rights of all. So daisy-cutters for everyone, service with a smile. Hard work, but I’d pony up for that round.

*** Think people aren’t that vindictive or that nasty? Think again.

Don’t just let Magruder clean the Clay Travis off the fan — show your support for Cam (and our sponsors) by purchasing a Stand By Your Cam t-shirt.

…

John has been going to Auburn games since before he was born. He was in -Legion Field- utero when Bo went over the top. Some mothers play Mozart to their developing progeny. John was raised on the roars of the Tiger faithful. You can chart his growth with his fantastic column, God, Girl, Grill, Gridiron, and write to him at godgirlgrillgridiron@thewareaglereader.com.

Did you read his piece on the hyper-amateurization of college football?

What with the fresh coat of paint over Reggie Bush’s collegiate exploits, the multi-player scandal at UNC, AJ Greene’s jerseygate, and, yes, the allegations that swirl around Cam… again the question rears its head: should college football players get paid?

The issue seems to boil down to this: college football is an enormous industry, generating hundreds of millions of dollars every year, and excluding scholarships, the young men on whose backs this enterprise is built see nary a dime of that vast take. Some folks see this as basically criminal – after all, aren’t college athletes risking life and limb to play a game for our entertainment, for historic but impractical rivalries, simply to play it at all? Do they not earn every penny on the field? And isn’t this stuff going on everywhere, anyway?

The model that underlies that reasoning is a sort of NFL-lite : colleges are businesses, businesses create revenue, and those who toil in body and mind to make it happen are entitled to their share. On the surface it makes plain sense. But it’s wrong.

Collegiate endeavors – athletic or academic – are not built on that model. Think about the average grad student, who pays nothing but time and effort into attaining a terminal degree. Think of the student volunteers who help run community organizations, the kids who run political clubs that stump for candidates, the participants in intramural competitions. Does the president grace his Young Democrats with their cut of the financial spoils? No. Does the grad student get a share of the enormous grant they help their principal investigator win? No. Not one of them gets paid – or if they do, it’s not a share, it’s more of a stipend that allows them to eke out a living whilst they study.

So why do they do it? Why does a grad student slave over their thesis, staining their teeth with buckets of cheap coffee and sacrificing much of an average twenty-something’s normalcy as they burn through day after day in the lab? Why do the Young Republicans invest hour after hour as they grassroots-campaign for their candidate? Why do the mathletes compete? What they get out of these non-paying positions is what we all hope to get out of our educations: opportunity. Just about every college student emerges in worse financial straits than when they entered, but in far better position to make and to seize opportunities in their chosen fields. The young politician gets his start on the campaign trail. The PhD who runs an industry lab was once a nose on his PI’s grindstone, scraping by as he completed his training. That’s what makes grad students amateurs. Amateur status is not going unpaid for your work. It’s the period of development that precedes marketable, salable proficiency.

You come to learn, you give us the sweat of your brow, you help the university grow and succeed, and in return, you get the opportunity to make a career out of your particular skill-set. If we’re talking about a master’s program in chemistry or engineering, no one blinks when the patents, grants, and royalties go entirely in the PI’s pockets. We have to remember that, likewise, college football players are still in school, and not just so they can attain a recognized degree in their chosen field of study. These guys attend regular college and are simultaneously attending graduate study in football, entirely analogous to grad school in almost any other field in terms of its commitments and specializations.

And accordingly, its pay structure should be identical – pay them in education and opportunity. They get a college degree for free, and for a select few, the kind of training that will make them into twenty-two year-old millionaires.

What an astronomically good investment, what an incredible deal. The development of complex and specialized skills. The essential physical conditioning. Discovering an appropriate role in a pro football system. Scholarship athletes pay essentially nothing for access to these critical services. How much do you think that kind of training is worth, for the average college football player with any aspirations toward the NFL? Few graduate programs can offer such amazing returns on, essentially, an initial ante of zero. For comparison’s sake, I accrued about $250,000 in loans just going through medical school, currently make less than minimum wage (if you divide my resident’s salary over the hours I put into the hospital,) and as a physician will bring home about a tenth of what successful NFL athletes pull down in a year. Who’s the better investor here?

I say, while still in training, they’re still amateurs, and if they don’t need any more training, then let them declare for the NFL like any other professional might. Eradicate the minimum age at which players go pro, and let the NFL draft be the professional opinion which enforces amateur status. After all, the people who judge whether a player is NFL-ready ought to be the NFL, not the NCAA, or the coaches, or the players themselves. And regarding potential NFL players, I’m for a hyper-amateurization of the sport: take a select few guys and admit them to a graduate football program. Give them a core of basics in terms of mathematics, English, and science and then fill up the rest with seminars on the history of the game, basic offensive / defensive philosophies, and practical economics / business skills they can use to successfully manage their pro-ball fortunes. That’s bound to be more useful – and let’s out with it, more honest – than a parks ‘n’ rec degree.

…

John has been going to Auburn games since before he was born. He was in -Legion Field- utero when Bo went over the top. Some mothers play Mozart to their developing progeny. John was raised on the roars of the Tiger faithful. You can chart his growth with his fantastic column, God, Girl, Grill, Gridiron, and write to him at godgirlgrillgridiron@thewareaglereader.com.

Motivational poster by Auburn Elvis.

How about a nice game of football?

Don’t blink, Tiger fans. You’re guaranteed to miss something incredible, some brilliancy hatched in Malzahn’s mind, some gut-check play by a refuse-to-die defense, some adrenalized explosion of pure speed. You’ll hear about it, you won’t believe it, but it’s true. The obstacles keep falling just as quickly as they step out onto the tracks, most lately, the curse of #1, the emotional trap which our Tigers never seem to avoid… until now. All that’s left is to win – all that was ever left was to win, but the Tigers have shed so much extra weight. The weight of a straggling defense. The weight of an unknowable first-season quarterback. The weight of expectations, of grind-it-out contests, of eye-popping shootouts, good quarterbacks, good running backs, rushing defenses licking their chops.

The only thing left to conquer: three teams lying in wait. There are no illusions, there are no added dimensions. Only : fly down the field. Only: fearless and true. Only: fight on. Only: win.

On to the customary* charts without further ado (and as always, click to enlarge):

Was it any surprise Cam came right out throwing?

In order for Ole Miss to have any shot at the win, they had to flip our game back on us. Deliver some punishment to our wunderkind quarterback, deny him the backbreaking runs that have carried us so far, take that train off the rails. From the very first snap, they dared him to throw… and it didn’t make a hill of beans worth of difference, as he threw and threw and threw, and caught, and then through the defense our tailbacks burst.

It was a big finger right in Ole Miss’s eye, that we knew what their plan had to be, and we made it our plan. Just like that touchdown reception, thrown just beautifully to the back corner, with Newton sheltering the reception with his body, dragging both feet in an NFL-worthy catch. Was that even necessary? Probably not. Was it fun as hell? Was I laughing deliriously, replay after replay? Was ol’ Gus, behind whatever gameday exterior he maintained, grinning like a schoolboy? I can just imagine him sneaking over behind the Ole Miss sideline, sidling up behind Tyrone Nix, and giving him a wet willie. Gotcha! Don’t want Cam to run? That’s cool. The Plainsmen will take to the skies. They will throw the ball for which this world has been waiting.

Or hell, someone else can carry the rock. Good offenses are often built around a player who is a threat to score on any snap, no matter where the offense lines up. Great offenses often find a way to get two such playmakers on the field at all times. But how many offenses have three gamechangers – Dyer, McCalebb, and Newton – in the backfield? You can key on one man, you can slow down two, but when there are three players who can rush for a touchdown from anywhere on the field, good luck Chuck. Ronnie and Cadillac on the field at the same time was a dream come true, but this backfield is the stuff of legend. Dyer needs 107 yards to eclipse Bo Jackson’s freshman rushing record and he’s not even the leading rusher on the team.

This is to say nothing of the receiving corps, who have done the gritty outside blocking for eight weeks without seeing the ball much themselves, cracking down on corners and safeties and linebackers, opening up grass for the backs to run rampant. It’s a thankless, stat-less job that rarely draws the cameras, but it’s been absolutely crucial. And thus, last Saturday, I was happy to see them get their shot and make something out of it. Keep in mind that in recent years, the receivers might have been just as much of an obstacle to our offense as the defensive backfield, dropping passes, losing blocks, failing to elude the coverage. This year? None of that. Blake, Adams, Zachery and Burns made their catches (or their throws!) and had great games.

That said, the offense wasn’t the best thing about that game.

I first have to credit the defense for its toughness – that first quarter was a real shellshocker. After one busted run for a long, long touchdown on the second play of the game, and then two drives later, another Ole Miss touchdown drive of eighty yards on seven plays, they were on the ropes. This one could have gotten out of hand in a hurry, razorback style. But… the defense stood their ground. And not in the bent-not-broken pattern that’s left our fingernails bit down to the quick, but in truly dominating fashion : the middle belly of Ole Miss’s game was three three-and-outs, a brilliant fourth-down stand halting a promising Rebel drive, a forced field goal, and an absolutely crucial interception (not just a gift from the heavens, but the one turnover we needed to happen right when it did.) That took some serious moxie. And while Ole Miss did alter the box score in the fourth quarter, their latter efforts did nothing to reverse damage that had been done by halftime. That is some standin’ up.

But still, not the best thing. Take a look at the game progress line, at the topo charts for the game in full. What you’ll see before long is, much of this game is eerily matched. The first quarter gave Ole Miss and Auburn two touchdowns apiece, and in fact, the Admiral Nutt-Bars are slightly ahead after their second score. The two turnovers also cancel each other out. And the entire second half is a push. Basically, the amount by which we “win” in terms of adjusted yards can be accounted for – almost entirely – by our second-quarter touchdown drive. The rebels had an answer for everything else.

So what happens to bring us victory? What happens is the second quarter. What happens is our defense, screwing up their will and forcing punt, punt and punt, while the Auburn tiger offense pulled steadily away. Sure, we did the two things our scheme is supposed to avoid at all costs : give up the big play, and give up big rushes. Second play of the game, even. And it must be said that the tigers wore out as the fourth quarter neared, ultimately giving Brandon Bolden his due. But even so – they are the winners of this ball game. That second-quarter Darvin-Adams-Airshow touchdown drive made all the difference, but the reason it would stand on its own is the gutsy play of an Auburn defense.

“Defense wins championships.” By now, you’re probably sick of that refrain, too, as it continues to be laid at our players’ feet like unanswerable law. But there’s a fundamental truth wrapped up in that line. You win a football game by doing things for which the opponent has no answer, for forcing a break in the pattern. Traditionally, the pattern has been defined by each team’s defense bringing multiple drives to their end without scores, with the offenses playing the role of pattern breaker – whoever breaks through first and / or most, wins. Beamerball, I think, is the quintessential expression of this old-school philosophy. Auburn’s game, however, sets the pattern with an overwhelming, juggernaut offense, that (like in the Ole Miss game) rarely leaves the field without seven on the board. And while our defense hasn’t been dominant, they have that role of pattern breaker. They’ve played that role well, particulary with the late-fourth interceptions versus Arkansas, and now with a solid second quarter holding Ole Miss back while the tigers sped away. And that’s why I say that the defense was a bigger factor in this ballgame than the offense.

And on a bum secondary, too. Ted Roof’s comments after the game, that this year’s defense brings in a true freshman whereas last year’s would bring in a walk-on, seem particularly meaningful. At the very worst, losing Bell and Savage hasn’t broken us. Can’t help but wonder if this defense is in the same position as last year’s offense or last year’s special teams – stay with me, blue-sky and glass-half-full and orange-glasses on. Maybe this is the last unit to return to elite form, possessing an effective scheme and a talented coach, but with too much youth and too little depth to execute it in full.

We all know how precious little of Roof’s schemes were implemented in 2009, because there simply weren’t the horses to run with his gameplanning. This year, we’re still depleted, but there has been more blitzing, and there have been more wrinkles. Again, bear with me, but if… if he chose to pull out some of the stops, maybe given the kind of romping that Ole Miss seemed poised to do after the first quarter… and if those adjustments are what stiffened our boys’ backs (and perhaps, part of why they wore out in the fourth)… and granted, the TV coverage doesn’t give me any way of confirming any of my speculations, but…

…if that, then there are better days to come. There is a heart beating proudly in Jordan-Hare, and a plan that will bear delicious, grisly fruit. War Damn Eagle.

Here’s your master game progress line, season-to-date. I left Ole Miss’s line on there, but since we’re goin’ snack-cake-style this coming week, I didn’t put Chattanooga’s in. Dont’ go round hungry now! The way you eat that oatmeal pie makes me just wanna die :

* (Don’t know what on earth I’m doing with all the lines and colors? This should fill you in.)

…

John has been going to Auburn games since before he was born. He was in -Legion Field- utero when Bo went over the top. Some mothers play Mozart to their developing progeny. John was raised on the roars of the Tiger faithful. You can chart his growth with his fantastic column, God, Girl, Grill, Gridiron, and write to him at godgirlgrillgridiron@thewareaglereader.com.

Seems like a damn eternity since we beat LSU.  These past three years have been a gaping chasm filled with spinning dice, and one crazy white guy right in the middle calling “Edge!” every time.  And winning.

Which is why we’ve all come to hate LSU as many rivals come to be hated.  It’s one thing to lose to your most important rival* three seasons running, which, frankly, I could endure if this were Tennessee, Georgia, or (er, probably) even Arkansas.  Consider the flip-side – do Florida fans have any reason to hate Auburn, just because the Tigers had their number all through the glorious reign of the Tebow child?  No.  It’s just a game or three – even with a little more weight given that it’s intra-conference, a game still.

But of late, so much meaning and significance has arisen from the Violence Bowl out of so much meaningless, gibbering chance.  It’s as if your boss walked into your office one day and said, inexplicably, “If there’s a trout in your pencil drawer, you’re fired and you owe me a Mars Bar.”  Somehow, the drawer won’t open when you pull, halting abruptly with a wet thud.  Water drips on your leg – is that lake water?  Is that duckweed under your desk?  With one mighty, scale-scattering heave of the drawer, out bursts the bewildered trout, landing in your lap as if to say “What am I doing here and oh I guess you’re fired.”  Once is bad enough, but three fishy terminations in a row will make you question your luck.

To escape from the vortex of Bayou postmodernism that is Les Miles’s Bengals, Auburn had to be better than luck, had to be a force more powerful than sheer unlidded meaninglessness.  Auburn was.  And LSU couldn’t summon up nearly enough insanity to cover up the truth: we are without a doubt the better team.

Tough luck for Les, last Saturday, with two quarterbacks flopping fish-like on the grass, slowly accumulating more chalk on their hides at the firm insistence of our defensive line.  Maybe from 2007 to 2009, our annual tilt was like being submerged in a deep and airless pool, surrounded by unblinking slow-motion eyes and accusingly scaly fins and skins, with nary a whiff to remind us of the reality of air.  But we emerged, into such cool and clean autumn air.  And the beauty of this year is, so did LSU, leaping from the water like a proud salmon, driven skyward by brackish instinct straight into the gaping maw of a grizzly bear.

Oh, whoops, I meant to put an actual picture of a grizzly bear, about to devour his hapless victim:

How do you like your fish, Auburn Tiger fans?  I like it how Paul Prudhomme likes it: blackened.  Scorched for two hundred-yard rushers and one 84-yarder thanks to a scintillating jet sweep, sizzling in the wake of 440 hard-nosed rushing yards, with another elite SEC rushing defense put to the torch?  Take me back to that Louisiana kitchen! I’ll have the vaunted-defense-reduced-to-soot and a bag of chips.

I tell you what, that game makes the season for me.  Alabama remains, but that game has a whole sinister life unto itself.  Our postseason ambitions also hang in the balance and I still maintain that Auburn has to seize this once-in-a-generation chance…  but even if we slip up now… this is still a season in which we stood up against a strong Clemson team, left Petrino’s razorbacks riddled with bullet holes in a dizzying shootout, and absolutely crushed LSU on the ground.  This is one year I am going to remember fondly for the rest of my life.

Here’s your gallery of charts (and for an explanation of what on earth all the lines and colors be, refer to this post, which should make everything more clear) :

offense

tomb after tomb, boom boom after boom

Auburn’s still got some detractors.  Still.  Around the country, there are folks who think that the offense is way too unbalanced, that there’s a significant doubt as to Cam Newton’s passing ability, that once someone stops the inverted veer off jet-sweep action that we’re in serious trouble of losing.  Seems like there’s some disbelief, even among those who’ve actually seen the Plainsmen plowing over their opponents – why is this offense still working the way that it works?

Hell.  Call me guilty, too.  I’ve been asking that question an awful lot myself.  When we run the same play, and indeed the same read on the same play, over and over and over and it almost always results in Cam bashing his way downfield, you have to ask why opposing defenses aren’t doing more to stop it.  The other common charge levied at Auburn is that they are freakishly unbalanced, depending far too much on the run.  Supposedly, if someone ever was to stop the Tiger run game, we’d be toast because Auburn can’t throw effectively… or something like that.  Now, I understand this objection to our success – one bedrock principle of football offense is that an unbalanced offense is a vulnerable offense.  The defense no longer has to choose between moving backwards (pass) and moving forwards (run), and they all start moving in the direction you’d like ‘em not to.  Then, you’re stuck with the weaker portions of your offense versus a defense more able to defend that segment of the game.

This is all fine and good, and in no way rocket science.  But it is also fairly unsophisticated.  Football  – as the inestimable Chris Brown explained – is at heart a Nash equilibrium:

Imagine you are fortunate enough to have a future All-American guy at RB. He runs for a ton of yards as a junior, and now, a year later, you’re ready to ride him to a state title. But everyone else knows about this guy now. They begin stacking the line. You’ve got this All-American at running back and you’re averaging less per carry than you did three years earlier when you had three Academic All-Americans–and no football All-Americans–splitting time at RB. What’s going on? What do you do?

You pass of course. You run bootlegs, you fake it to him, and you throw the ball. But how odd you say. You have the best running back you’ve had in 15 years, and you wind up running less? The answer is simply that everyone else knows you have this stud RB, so they commit so much effort and defensive scheme and structure to push your expected yards per rushing play down to a manageable number, your passing opportunities increase, even if you have less talent there than years past.

This same goes for great passing teams. (Think about all the spread offense teams that have used the defense’s natural tendency to play pass against four wides to their running advantage.)

Essentially, what he’s trying to demonstrate is that your run vs. pass play calling is dictated by how the defense is reacting to your strengths.  A purely balanced offense – IE, 50% rush and 50% pass – might not be the most effective offense.  The key is to find a balance between the run and the pass that creates maximum effectiveness for the entire offense.

So what does that mean for Auburn?  Is it sufficient to say, somewhat blithely, that we’ll just run the same play until someone finds out how to stop it?  And if the LSU defense can’t stop our running game, why should expect anyone else to force us out of it?  I don’t think so.  We have to go back to that question – why is this offense running as well as it is in the way that it is?  One answer for that question materialized late last game, when McCalebb took the ball, turned the corner between flanker and slot, and sprinted past every white-jerseyed Bengal on the field.  If you look at the charts, you see that Auburn on the whole owned first and second down in the second half, but Cam got a little help this time around. I think that LSU decided they were just tired enough of Newton emerging from behind Big Snacks that they were willing to risk the jet sweep. Whoops. Instant seventy yard touchdown versus eight or ten yards a pop – if you were a defensive coordinator, which play would you sell out to stop?

Moreover, our offense is more than Cam-o-rama, and the Tigers have done a lot of different things this year for which they aren’t getting too much credit.  Throwing the long ball.  Pounding it up the gut.  Zipping around the edge.  The screen game.  The intermediate passes.  Every one of them has been run effectively and every one of them has at some point gone for a touchdown.  And I think that, while we currently hang our hat on Cam or Dyer between the tackles, there are aspects of this offense that are being forgotten.  Not by Auburn’s coaches – they’ll pull the little constraint plays out of their pocket whenever the defense lets ‘em.  Not by opposing defensive coordinators, either. These guys aren’t stupid; they read the paper. They other aspects of Auburn’s offense have been forgotten by the people who haven’t been paying as close attention to our Auburn Tigers.

So it’s not that Auburn is a one-trick pony. The truth of the matter is that we are lethal enough in all aspects of the offense that Cameron Newton is the least dangerous option. And apparently, opposing defenses would rather we crash up the middle with God2illa eight or ten plays downfield than (evidently) score immediately on a single long run or a bomb over the top. I’m cool with that.  Especially when those handful of times we commit to the constraint plays, Auburn flat out-muscles or outruns practically an entire defense.

War Damn Eagle!

Brief note on Cam’s passing vs. Cam’s running – I did a sort of game progress line for all his rushes and all his passes (with sacks counting as passes.)  He’s actually fairly balanced :

defense and special teams

I contemplated not even splitting the defense and special teams out for separate analysis, given that these phases of our game were fairly lackluster.  What’s more impressive than what they did was what LSU didn’t do: break a huge return from Peterson, kill us with the passing game.  But truth be told, these two phases of the game had serious help.  For one, we punted three times all night long, and of those three punts, one was not returned, one had a return of one and one had a return of 18.  On any other night, Petey might have broken one.  Jefferson and Lee were like our defense’s twelfth and thirteenth men.   More often than I’d like to admit, LSU receivers were open, painfully open, but it didn’t even seem that the quarterback was trying to lead the receiver appropriately.  The ball would hit the turf, be jarred loose, get tipped and intercepted.  All of which created opportunities which – hate to admit it – Auburn’s defense could not create for themselves.

That said, our defensive line is blowing my mind on a weekly basis, chiefly – in contrast to the Auburn lines of late – the defensive tackles.  Fairley is a monster who lives solely on the fresh blood of quarterbacks, and in my recent memory, I can’t recall any other player who tackled with such joyous ferocity, such sheer violence.  And Blanc, though not quite the technician that Nick is, has been clogging his lanes and forcing the O-line to protect across the breadth of the interior.  And they’ve been used very creatively, such as when Fairley lined up at the backside end position and totally embarrassed the left tackle for a sack. I wish I could say the ends have been up to quite the same standard.  You don’t hear quite so much out of them, and the most I heard out of Eguae last Saturday was the handful of offsides flags he drew.  But at least he’s hungry.  And, again, the front seven has sent a skill player whimpering to the sidelines in pretty much every game so far.  First-string quarterbacks beware – we are comin’ for ya.

what’s next

Ole Miss hasn’t done much all year long, they have a quarterback who can run but has always been somewhat suspect in the passing game, their three interior offensive linemen are freshmen, and they allowed three touchdowns and nearly 200 yards to Knile Davis whom we throttled.  All good signs, right?  The Tigers just have to get through this coming week and then we get to pound a cupcake before squaring off with the Dawgs – right?

In related news, Masoli only threw for 327 and three scores last weekend.  Proceed with the countdown. All groups assume attack coordinates.

Everyone knows this is a trap – the potential exists for Masoli and crew to go Mallett all over our reeling secondary, especially without Savage’s experience, and while we didn’t sustain any horrific injuries against LSU, goodness knows we must be banged up and downright tired.  Auburn is due for a letdown.  The players have to know.  The coaches have to know.  Everyone.  Please, Auburn, hold on to that fire, that man-do-I-love-running-you-over, hope-you-like-the-flavor-of-turf attitude.  We can’t sink down yet.  We have to keep up the pace of annihilation.  I don’t have the heart to think we leave Oxford defeated… but it wouldn’t surprise this Tiger fan to have several minor heart attacks at the hands of one certain former Duck.

Here’s our game progress line, season-to-date, with the LSU line updated and Ole Miss’s in there for good measure :

* I know what you’re thinking, and the University of Alabama is not a rival but an enemy, for reasons I’ve explained in the past.

…

John has been going to Auburn games since before he was born. He was in -Legion Field- utero when Bo went over the top. Some mothers play Mozart to their developing progeny. John was raised on the roars of the Tiger faithful. You can chart his growth with his fantastic column, God, Girl, Grill, Gridiron, and write to him at godgirlgrillgridiron@thewareaglereader.com.

In the late 70′s / early 80′s, my dad trained as an industrial engineer at Auburn and he kind of gave me the spreadsheet bug in the first place.  He’s certainly no stranger to lines and charts and graphs of this like.  So I figure, if the lines and colors were mumbo-jumbo to him, they might be to a good portion of y’all as well.  I’m taking his good suggestion : along with this week’s regular installment of Spread Sheets, this post will serve as a reference as to, well, what the Spread Sheets even mean.

***

Perhaps it’s best to start with why we want to do this at all.

There are many metrics by which one can measure a football game, but the two basic ways we establish a football team’s progress are its yardage and the score.  The more important, of course, is the final score (SCORE-BOARD!  SCORE-BOARD!)  However, the final score may often bely the reality of how the game itself was played – how many times is a football game played closer than the final score would indicate?  And the better team does not always win the game.  How many times does a clearly superior team struggle to establish a strong point differential?  Likewise with total yards, average yards, etc. – how often is a team outgained by fifty to a hundred yards and still emerges the victor?  These metrics offer little basis for evaluation of an entire team.

And especially in this hyper-modern era of college football, they offer little basis for comparison between teams.  Say a team averages six yards a rush.  Does that team have a star-studded backfield and a mammoth offensive line?  Or does that team throw the ball so much that their eight-or-ten rushes a game – every one of them a gut draw – go for good yardage?  And which one is preferable?  In this hyper-modern era of college football, balance no longer indicates a team has spread the yards and play calls evenly between rushing and passing – instead it indicates a team has achieved an equilibrium between pass and run that maximizes the total effectiveness of the offense.  For some teams, that means throwing the ball fifty times a game.  For others, hardly throwing at all.

Granted, this is just another feather in NCAA football’s cap – in what other sport is there such a wealth of competing strategies, such fertile ground for creative game-planning?  But it sure makes things hard to analyze.

More esoteric methods have been employed, which attempt to apply statistical concepts.  Take, for instance, the Sharpe ratio, which compares the average yards gained by the offense on a certain play to the variance of the yards gained by that play.  The theory is, if you run a play A four times and get five, four, five and six yards (Sharpe ratio = 4.5,) this is better than play B that gets zero, zero, zero and twenty yards in four attempts (Sharpe ratio 0.3) and play C that gets four, three, four and five yards (Sharpe ratio = 3.)  Some would go as far as to suggest that you should run play A 1.5 (4.5 / 3) times more often than play C – the Sharpe ratios allow you to prioritize your play-calling.  Seems reasonable, sure, but this method, too, is flawed.  For one, what of the play that gets five, five, five and ten yards – its Sharpe ratio is 0.68, which is even worse than play C, though even the little man under Les Miles’ hat could tell you that this last play is the best one of all.

And even if we ignore all that, these metrics want to take the offense as distinct from the defense, to attempt to measure them independently.  As fate has painfully reiterated to our Auburn Tigers of late, this assumption – that neither has any bearing on the other – is flawed.  A football team is, well, a team.  And the defense’s role – the defense’s performance in that role – is not separable from the offense’s.  All four modalities (your offense, your defense, your opponent’s offense, your opponent’s defense) have some degree of interaction through and with each other.

Small wonder that the BCS computers are so thoroughly distrusted, when all attempts to rank and compare teams are based on obscured, esoteric and essentially flawed concepts and computations.

My hope, therefore, is to establish a basis of evaluating a team and comparing it to others, uniting the scoreboard and the yardage total, and also the offense and defense.  And to do so in such a way that is appealing, offers insight, and is perfectly transparent.  And (eventually) offers us a basis not only of comparison, but of prediction.  Keep in mind that while I did receive my undergraduate degree in engineering, minored in math / chemistry / physics, I do not do this for a living – I’m a pediatric neurology resident by trade.  Spread Sheets is just as much of a public experiment as it is an attempt at genuine analysis.  I’m open to any and all suggestions, corrections, scathing critiques, etc.

***

There are two main things I try to do: game progress lines, and topographic maps.  Each starts with the same data set and the same calculation.

Every non-special-teams play in football has one of four results : a penalty is committed that (like holding or a false-start) determines the yardage total by itself, the ball carrier is tackled for some yards lost or gained (or a pass is incomplete,) the offense scores a touchdown, or there is a turnover.  It’s fairly easy to track the team’s yardage throughout the game.  The key to establishing a single metric is to somehow translate scores and turnovers into an equivalent number of yards.  I honestly don’t have the time to figure out how many yards driven down the field is worth the same as a touchdown or a turnover, but there are helpful people out on the interwebs who have.  Turns out that, when you examine the outcome of events in a game, a turnover is statistically just as bad as losing fifty yards on a single play.  And coincidentally, scoring a touchdown is just as good as getting a fifty-yard gain.  This is the conversion factor that allows us to go from yards and points simply to yards: if there is a touchdown, add fifty to the yardage gained on the scoring play, and if there is a turnover, the yardage result is negative fifty.

(I wish I could point to a single place that describes the derivation thereof.  If you lurk through the comments at Smart Football, though, you’ll find it before long.  And again, correct me if I’m wrong.)

The other thing I like to do is to model each play, very simply, as a decision.  This is a concept I borrowed from the aforementioned Sharpe ratio.  When you compute the Sharpe ratio, you subtract two from the yardage gained by every play – IE, a five-yard gain becomes a three-yard gain, a two-yard loss becomes a four-yard loss.  Why would you do that?  On nearly any play, it is hypothetically possible for the offense to gain at least two yards without fail.  Maybe it’s the QB draw, or the quick slant, or the screen or what have you, but there’s always a way to pick up two yards with minimal risk.  Granted, to adopt that as your strategy would be pretty idiotic, as 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 does not equal 10.  But it is worth pointing out that calling any other play is in some sense betting that you can do better than two yards.

Thus, the two yards are a sort of ante.  Every blown-up flanker reverse that goes for minus-five is actually a loss of seven, because you could have just pulled the ball and plowed ahead for two.  Every incomplete pass is minus-two.  Every three-yard gain is only one yard better than simply falling forward.  So we take the raw yardage result of the play and we subtract two, every time.  This tells us not only if our plays work, but if they are genuinely worth the risk of running them at all.

A few other things I try to do : first of all, I don’t adjust pre-snap / deadball / non-additive penalties like I do yardage totals, because that’s a matter of pure and basic execution, not of play calling.  So, a false start results in -5 yards, plain and simple.  If a penalty gets tacked onto the end of a play, I take the total yardage gained and subtract two like I otherwise would.  I don’t include special teams (punt returns, kickoff returns, field goals) and other matters of pure field position.  That’s because I’m primarily concerned with how the offense and defense are playing, and issues of field position will become evident in how they do their jobs.  To include special teams yards in my analysis is basically counting it twice.  And turnovers returned for touchdowns don’t get counted double (IE, they are counted for -50 not for -100.)  This is because the defense has little-to-no control over whether they can return turnovers for touchdowns consistently, and it really can’t be part of game-planning.  A win for the defense is a win.

So how’s it all shake out?  Let’s say our running back takes the pitch and runs for five yards: obviously, the raw yardage total is five.  We subtract two for the decision ante and get: three yards gained.  Let’s say that he instead takes the pitch and runs five yards for a score.  We start with five, add fifty for the touchdown, and subtract two for the ante: fifty-three yards.  What if that touchdown run gets called back due to a holding penalty?  The yardage total is minus-10.  What if that five-yard run gets a little boost from a personal foul against the defense?  Five yards, minus two for the ante, plus fifteen for the penalty: eighteen yards gained.  Or let’s say he runs for five yards, but then has the ball stripped and the other team recovers.  Because this is a win for the defense, we start with negative fifty yards, and again subtract two for the ante: negative fifty-two yards.

Clear as mud?

***

Moving on to the visual representations, IE, the actual charts:

The game progress line is an attempt to chart our team’s progress through the game, play by play.  We can calculate the adjusted yards (as I explain above) for each play of the game, both for our offense and for the opponent’s offense.  Then we can make a running total, IE, you add each play’s results to the sum of all the plays before them.  To get the opponent’s plays added on to the same line, we multiply all the opponent’s yards by -1.  That way, things that are good for Auburn take the line higher and things that are bad for Auburn take the line lower, while things that are good for our opponent take the line lower and things that are bad for them take the line higher.  Then, we can keep doing the running total.  For clarity’s sake, I color Auburn’s drives navy blue, and use another color for the other team’s drives.  This is a graph of the first Gamecock drive from this year’s game, which didn’t amount to much:

Here’s the same game with Auburn’s first drive, which resulted in a touchdown:

The Gamecocks responded with a touchdown drive of their own, and the game was on :

We can to the entire game like that, and we end up with – essentially – a drive chart.  (The vertical line indicates the start of the third quarter.)  I call it the game progress line.  It purpose is pretty self-explanatory: represent the progress of the game as a single line.  Here’s the whole shebang from the Carolina game :

And just as you can string plays together to show an entire season, you can also string games together, giving you a game progress line for the entire season to date.  This, I think could form a basis of comparison between teams.  Here’s Auburn’s game progress line, with our most recent opponent’s and our upcoming opponent’s (with diamonds indicating the start of games):

How would you rank those teams?

The topo charts are slightly different.  Their purpose is to help identify, visually, the downs and quarters in which a football team or football player was most and least effective.  First you have to make subsets of the data based on quarter and down.  This is pretty easy to do with a nifty little spreadsheet trick, and computing all these yardage totals allows you to make a chart like so:

This chart displays the total adjusted yards gained by South Carolina versus Auburn in 2010, split out for each down and quarter.  IE, the gamecocks managed to rack up 138 adjusted total yards on first down in the first quarter, but got -75 on first down in the fourth quarter (thanks, Connor!)  Now, this is pretty informative in and of itself – you can see what downs we were winning and what downs we were losing, and also see the change in the trend over time.

But it’s much cooler (and much easier to understand) if we make a topographic map of that data.  What is meant by that?  You’ve no doubt seen maps (like, actual maps of places) that use colors to indicate elevations:

So, imagine if instead of elevations on a map, we used colors to represent yardage totals, with hot colors representing higher totals and cool colors representing lower totals.   Take a look at a topo map of that same data :

Each corner or intersection is a data point.  For instance, the left border of the map is the first quarter, with the top left corner being first down in the first quarter, the middle point being second down, the bottom corner being third.  The first vertical line to the right of the first quarter is the second quarter (same points for downs) and so on across.  The computer makes the highest values red, the lowest values purple, and assigns an intermediate color to the ones in between based on a regular scale.  Then, it colors the area in between the points like one might color the elevations on a topographic map.

The purpose of this kind of map is to create a picture you can glance quickly at and understand.  So, you can see how USC was killin’ us on first downs in the first quarter, but slowed down as the game wore on until Connor Shaw gift-wrapped the ballgame.

Another note: why don’t I include fourth downs in the topo maps?  Because success on fourth down is less a matter of how many yards you gained, and more a matter of how many yards you had to go.  Did you succeed, or did you not succeed?  And that kind of binary value isn’t really compatible with this analysis.  Plus, teams seldom try to convert fourth downs; it just doesn’t yield much useful data.

Also: I make maps for each backfield player, for each team’s offense, and for the game as a whole.  On each map, the hottest colors indicate maximum effectiveness.  As in, when was Auburn’s as an entire team effective?  When was Stephen Garcia effective?  When was the Clemson offense effective?  And just as portions of the game progress line that point downward indicate things that went bad for Auburn and good for their opponent, portions of the graph that are purple / blue / green indicate things that went bad for the offense, but good for the defense.

Hope that’s a useful explanation, and hope that makes Spread Sheets a little more easy to understand at a glance.  As always, this column is just as much a public experiment as it is an attempt at thoughtful analysis : any questions, comments, suggestions or corrections are thoroughly welcome.

Or, perhaps, every week so far has offered distinct challenges, challenges which our team has met, every time:

• The valley of the cowbell, for any chance at relevance, any hope of success — check.

• Versus ACC sleeper Clemson and their powerful backfield, with our offense still bumping down the runway — check.

• Against what may be the best team in the SEC East, then-# 12 and then-stout against the rush South Carolina, led by a brilliant performance by Stephen Garcia — check.

• Kentucky, scrappy and trappy, with an offense tuned and calibrated to give our defense fits, in Lexington, new and better UK coach — check.

• The Hogs, led by the legend, Ryan Mallett, the Mallett-clone who took over for him, with a top-20 defense completing the picture, and with the game spiraling out of control into a shootout to end all SEC shootouts…

Check. And with that, add these to the list of challenges: “bona-fide SEC champion contender,” “genuine Heisman contender on the team,” and “honest-to-God national title aspirations behind only a mid-major who won’t play anyone the whole rest of the season, an Oregon team facing a tough Pac-10 stretch, and Oklahoma in front.” That old threadbare phrase rings true: We truly control our own destiny.

This is when, as a lifelong Auburn fan, I start to get nervous.

Auburn is a dark horse, a Rocky, a Sigurd pushing his sword up to the hilt in Fafnir’s belly, a Beowulf alone with the demon under the lake — the warrior out of nowhere raging to victory. And while that’s Auburn Mythology 101, our teams do seem to play better when they are staring up at a smug and lolling giant, when the world dismisses us, when they yell “You’re a bum!” in our faces. Maybe the Auburn story is supposed to end, like any good tale, when the hero achieves validation. For whatever reason, Auburn’s football success seems to drop off when that story ends. Maybe it’s just because I really came of football age in Tubby’s era. But I still start to get nervous.

(Granted, I’d rather have that story than certain others that seem to begin with validation and then proceed into the world fawning on the victors for the rest of eternity. Even beyond the fact that it doesn’t reflect reality, it’s just a really bad story.)

Thus far under Chizik, the Plainsmen have staked their name on never being out of a contest, on absorbing all kinds of ugly blows and popping back up for more, getting to their feet with another punch ready to throw. If they weren’t so good at that, well, we wouldn’t be having this discussion in the first place — all our wins against quality teams have been achieved by some eye-popping, late-game surge.  It’s just what Gene’s teams seem to do. Stick-to-it-iveness is our MO, and one that is distinctly Auburn, and through it we have met every challenge and will contend in every game. But now that the season is about to be two-thirds over, there are certain things from which the tigers cannot recover. You know how every Friday Preview has “success is/failure is: a win/loss” in it?  How much more true does that ring, now that we have very real aspirations for the crystal football? A single loss is going to end this staggering run, as there just are not enough games left to climb back into the polls, and Atlanta will fall out of reach, and we’ll be looking at a very good bowl game.

Don’t get me wrong: Two years removed from the Tony Franklin Catastrophe, Tubby’s firing, and “5 and 19 Gene,” going 10-2 or 11-1 would be simply astronomical. Taking only a loss or two in the tail-end of a season that contains the defending national champions and the #6-ranked LSU Tigers would be worth remembering in and of itself. But these instances of genuine contendership come about once a decade for Auburn, and rarely emerge without some damning caveat. In 1983, we were on the wrong side of the polls until the last, worst possible moment. In 1993, we were unbeatable, and ineligible. In 2004 (do we have to revisit 2004?) — Auburn never gets their shot without being hobbled by some technicality. And now, out of nowhere, this season. The Tigers are on the right side of the rulebook and the computers, and gaining momentum in the polls, and have the firepower to take every tilt into the fourth quarter. When these chances come along, they must be seized.

Forget LSU. Forget the prospect of facing, for the first time this season, a true SEC team: juggernaut defense with a madman at the helm. Forget the looming clash with Alabama, the shadow of the Georgia dome that is cast upon our season. Auburn has been so good at taking punches, at getting back to their feet with a fist rocketing straight at the opponent’s jaw. Forget that. That’s not going to be enough anymore.

The new challenge is: never hit the canvas.

***

Part of the fun of Spread Sheets — for me, at least — is seeing what kind of patterns emerge from the games. The Arkansas game was a classic shootout and the charts reflect that, with the game swinging wildly from one team to another until someone slips up. Check out the charts here:

One refinement of my technique to point out: The topo maps are no longer based on averages (or, arithmetic means.) This was done to avoid the scenario that Stephen Garcia presented us, earlier this season, whereby a couple of brilliant throws skewed his average and destroyed the basis of comparison. So now, the charts are much easier to compare, one to the other, and in fact are pretty much additive to one another. For instance, the chart for when Auburn has the ball and the chart for when Arkansas has the ball, taken together, give us the chart of the whole game from Auburn’s perspective.

I’m going to reboot Spread Sheets in the next few days and by that I mean, I’m going to make a post that explains my methodology and reasoning, and gives a more clear picture of how to read the charts.  Stay tuned.

Now, since we mentioned slipping up … one of the biggest disappointments for me has been Mario Fannin’s recurrent fumbleitis. When your running backs coach comes right out and predicts 1,000 yards for the guy, without reservation, it’s frustrating to watch him fumble at the worse possible times. Such as, when it would kill a promising drive in the cradle. Or, when it would (er, should) negate an essential touchdown. Think about what a goal-line fumble would (well, should) have done there, had the Hogs recovered, to Auburn’s chances for success. One outside run to Ronnie Wingo and a few 15-yard completions later and Arkansas would be in Auburn territory looking at a field goal, worst case, when Auburn had all but been assured of seven on the scoreboard. And it would be business as usual for the Razorbacks versus our boys on the Plains. Another year, another ambush, another tusk in the belly.

I’m not saying it would have definitely happened that way, and yes, even if you give Arky a 10-point swing should they have recovered the ball, the Tigers still ought to have won by a comfortable 12 points. But what an opportunity to run us right through the heart.

The flipside of our good fortune this season has been that our opponents have had few genuine opportunities to break us quite so wide open. That ball, bouncing backward from the goal line, was a big, fat, glistening opportunity for Arkansas to play their customary heartbreaker role. We escaped, but how did that happen? To Auburn? We never catch a break of that magnitude. And if fate is kind, why did it choose that moment to forgive Mario for a fumble that — be honest — we had all held our breath for?

Regardless of the touchdown, my first instinct was to think, “That ought to be his last fumble” if you know what I mean. But Mario will continue to be in our backfield and well that he should.  His skill set is simply not duplicated on our team, as he can be counted on reliably to pass protect, catch that nifty little wheel for huge gains, and yes, run both with speed and physical authority. Other team members may be faster, may be better pure rushers, may be slightly better receivers, but none has all those tricks on his belt at once. If there is any one single concept that pounds the pistons under the hood of the Gus Bus, it’s having players fill multiple roles from diverse locations — passer/rusher, receiver/blocker, receiver/passer, receiver/rusher/blocker. We need Mario. And we need him to get carries, to keep rotating roles to which the defense must adjust. As much as you and I hold our breath when he barrels out of the backfield, ball in a single hand, the defense has got to be holding theirs even longer.

Inexorably, the ball broke the plane. Fate, karma — whatever you want to call it. It was there, down in the grass and chalk of Jordan-Hare. Why? Who knows. In Beowulf, there’s a line that goes, “Wyrd often saves an undoomed hero as long as his courage is good.”  Keep your courage Fannin. Just put two hands on the ball.

As for other stars aligning — how about that Cam Newton? Every game he plays approaches ever closer to the Malzahnian Platonic Ideal. For all that the coaches are touting their willingness to adjust his offense to nonmobile pocketslingers, Malzahn wants to run, run and run and ol’ Gus has got to be giddy. Against an (allegedly) much-improved Arkansas squad, the cannon-armed corner-quick rush end we have taking snaps only rolled the defense for more than 300 yards… by himself. Nearly 200 on the ground and the rest through the air on 10 completions. Seventy-one percent completion rate, 10 yards an attempt. SEC records teeter frankly obliterated. What’s left to ask from this guy? To hope for?  Behind Cam, Auburn is leaving defenses ragged and gasping.

And man does he know it. Maybe in interviews and with the kids at the day care, he’s “Aw-shucks Cam,” and maybe he’s “Hardest-working Cam” in practice. But on game day, the expression on his face says one thing and one thing only: This is awesome. That enormous grin, the breath-catching leaps into the end zone, the explosion of speed from around a pulling guard — Cam Newton plays happier than any player I can remember. And honestly, that exuberance (as long as he doesn’t blow a shoulder on a touchdown dive) may be one thing that helps carry the team down the stretch.  Who wouldn’t want to play with a guy who is that happy to be cleat to turf, blazing and bombing his way down the field?

Can anyone confirm that story, dropped offhand oh-by-the-by-like into the sportscaster’s conversation, that Cam grew up wanting to come to Auburn but got scared off by Kodi Burns’ recruitment? Were we truly that close to missing out on the most physically jaw-dropping athlete to reach the Plains in a generation? He’s the anti-Emmitt Smith. I’ll buy you a Coke if you can find that on the intertubes.

And Dyer. What a monster. By the second fourth-quarter carry, I’m on my feet — “Dyer’s in the game!” — and by the third he’s through the line and roaring downfield for a score and the guy. Is. Limping!  Limping! As if to say, “Yeah, I’m hurt but I’m still going to get a couple tough carries and bust a huge gain for an instant touchdown – try and stop me.” Can you help but come unglued? Check out his chart, which consists of one humongous fourth quarter. If, next year, Newton continues his reign of awesome with Dyer beside him… hell is gonna break loose all over again.

Lastly, here’s hoping McCalebb gets more carries in the weeks to come — his speed demands that he see the ball more. Granted, the way that our opponents have been forced to respect the fly sweep, the right path ought to give him some numeric credit for Cam’s rushing yards.  Without that neck-twisting fake, our offense isn’t plowing quite as hard.

***

The defense is a different story. When I called him post-game, my dad picked up with “Ted Roof must…” which I won’t continue, and was — honest to God — inconsolable.

When I think of classic SEC games, I think of slugfests along the lines of our usual battle with LSU — three or four scores total, a ton of punts, a slowly grinding field position war with the defense carrying the team until the offense breaks through. Down in this rabbit hole, it has completely reversed — the offense holds the other team at bay until the defense comes up with a big play. And in that vein, two things we’ve got going for us: Josh Bynes drifting back into coverage late in the fourth quarter, and the relentless annihilation of the backfield by our defensive line. We’ve had two games now that Bynes has put to bed with consecutive picks, and three games in which the opponent’s starting QB either had the ball ripped out, had to battle through injuries, or just flat got sent back to the locker room. Damn.  Without those monumental efforts, Auburn gets beat at least once or twice.

But the secondary. Man alive, I can’t remember the last time our defensive secondary was playing this badly. Yards given up in huge chunks. Backup quarterbacks looking like starters. Poor angles, poor tackles — just plain old bad. There were three or four runs that Savage recognized and got down to the line to defend, but he came too far to the middle of the field and the back simply ran around him for a first down. There were multiple screens that the corner recognized late, then as he ran down to defend, he ended up a yard or two outside the receiver, giving up big chunks of essentially uncontested yardage. Maybe this is a matter of technique — make ‘em go inside or outside — maybe the idea is that the first defender has support and is corralling the ballcarrier with their assistance. But help never came until the first defender had failed and 7 to 10 yards were ceded. Is that part of the plan? Is it a matter of guys not knowing their assignments, not executing them?

What the charts show us is that, whatever the problem/plan may be, it just flat out sucks. Pull up the QB vs. QB comparison chart — you’ll notice that Arkansas quarterbacks have three lines. One is for Mallett, one is for Wilson all by himself, and one is drawn as though Wilson had picked up right where Mallett left off. Which he did. 

Now, I know that there’s a reason Petrino gave that kid a scholarship. I’m not taking anything away from his talent. But when a redshirt sophomore can step into the game on the road in the SEC and make us wish that Ryan “The Legend” Mallett wasn’t scramble-brained, that’s just bad. And what’s more, this only continues a trend from last year, whereby Auburn anointed multiple second-string quarterbacks.  Remember that LSU game, when Jarrett Lee stepped in after Jerraud Powers rocked the starting QB’s world and played well enough that the sportscasters were calling him “General Lee”? Holy hell, it’s happening again. Twice if you count Connor Shaw’s coming out party.

I don’t know how to fix any of that. And it is only going to get worse, now that we’ve lost multiple starters to injury. I’ve been happy to beat the drum for Ted Roof, especially when his boys have carried the team to victory on several occasions, and Petrino’s genius can’t be denied … but this is getting excessive. Against quality opponents, every week of this season sees the Tigers giving up more points than the last. Granted, Stevan Ridley is the backbone of the LSU offense, and if there is one thing the tiger defense does right, it is the demolition of opposing tailbacks. LSU may end up a bit of a reprieve for our straggling D. But the end of the season is not exactly full of promise.

***

Still, the Plainsmen play one game at a time, and this weekend defies predictions like none other.  If there’s one thing about the Violence Bowl I know, it’s that you never know what to expect and often can scarcely believe what you’ve just witnessed.  All remains to be seen, Tiger fans. I can’t wait for this game — I can’t wait for any game, but especially this one.  I want Dyer and Cam to hit those damn corndogs in the mouth so bad. I want Les Miles laughing at the end because how can you cry when unbelievable voodoo luck shrivels up to nothing? I want bourbon bottles shattering on the floors and the parking lots and the walls all over Red Stick! War Damn Eagle you Auburn tigers.

Here’s our game progress line, season-to-date, with LSU’s in there with it. The little diamonds are game markers :

P.S.: Kentucky charts are forthcoming with the Spread Sheets reboot. But it’s more important, I think,