Get ready for quite a change from last weekend. Defending this year’s South Carolina team and this year’s Arkansas team could not be more different. To stop the Gamecocks, Auburn needed every defender to key on Lattimore. To stop this Arkansas offense—first in the SEC in passing offense, total offense and scoring offense—even after a bad day against Alabama’s defense… what do you do?

This week the Wishbone would prefer to simply ignore what transpired on the football field last Saturday—and what may be about to transpire this coming Saturday at the Chicken Coop in Columbia, if the Auburn defense doesn’t straighten itself out pronto—and focus entirely on the topic of conference realignment. We’d like to do that, sure—but [...]

For the Auburn Tigers, Saturday, September 17, 2011 was THE DAY NOTHING WORKED. And thus here we are, your intrepid Wishbone columnists, doing our first ever column following an Auburn loss.  Yes, that’s hard for us to believe, too—but it’s true.  We started this feature the week before last year’s Clemson game, and now we [...]

With a big, bold, exciting win over allegedly up-and-coming Mississippi State in our collective rear-view mirrors, and our current “Streak” standing at 17-0 (only three wins shy of Terry Bowden’s 1993-94 record), we move on to game three of the 2011 season. This weekend, the Tigers from the Yellowhammer State march over to the Yellow Sauce State, to face our Tiger cousins from Clemson in a rematch of last year’s nerve-shredding overtime thriller.

Other than their game with Auburn last year, Miss State allowed 29, 30 and 38 points in their other three losses. Auburn will play better on defense that they did against the Aggies, but playing better may only mean holding MSU to 30 points. Auburn will need to come out on offense knowing that possessions are important and the Tigers can’t squander them because it will probably take a lot of points to win this game. More than last year’s 17; definitely more than the legendary 3 of only three years ago.

And so the 2011 season begins right where the 2010 edition left off: Auburn is undefeated and facing a team from out west, in a place where it gets really hot. The difference is, of course, that we are facing Utah State instead of Oregon and in the “brunch” game on ESPN2 instead of the BCS National Title Game in prime time. And Auburn is hotter in September than Arizona is in January.

The other eleven universities competing in the Southeastern Conference are out of the way—we looked at the East and at the West in previous installments—and now it’s time to turn our attention to the only one that really matters. Ladies and gentlemen, we give you the Auburn Tigers.

“[Alabama's] all SUITED up and ready to AUTOGRAPH their names on a national championship.”

Can you smell that?  No?  Open the windows or walk outside for a minute.  Sure, it’s blazing hot and humid as anything, but there’s something else—the hint, nay, the promise of big things in the air.  There, in the distance, a faint whiff of tailgating on the breeze:  barbecue smoke, freshly mown grass and corndogs. [...]

For so many reasons, reasons most Auburn fans will immediately and implicitly understand, this game towers above all the others played in Jordan-Hare. It is without question the single greatest—and most important—game ever played in Auburn’s home stadium. Here are some of those reasons.