I’ve been to a lot of football games. I’ve been happy. I’ve been thrilled. I’ve been pleased and surprised and shocked. I’ve been sad. I’ve been numb. I’ve sat through a 3-8 season and a 3-9 season. I’ve watched the slow, inevitable loss of a game to a rival you can’t control because you know your side has no answer. I saw a juggernaut produce an undefeated season. I watched a championship unfold in front of hopeful, too-nervous-to-believe-it eyes.
This game was altogether different than any of those things.
In the first half you abused the other team’s defense, gashing them for 246 yards rushing when they allow about half that per game. You had a 20-point lead, but you’ve lost all of the momentum. In the second half, your defense begins hemorrhaging yards and points against an incredible comeback helmed by the most prolific scorer in the history of the conference. There are six minutes on the clock. You have a narrow lead.
And you go three and out on three pass attempts. Those kids had played too hard and did not deserve to lose, and that’s what the play calling set them up for.
Very frustrating.
And then you punt. An ill-timed shank gives Georgia, and the best scoring quarterback in the history of ever, the ball on your 45. They score. Now you’re behind with under two minutes to go. That sequence starts here.
But these boys have a bit of John Paul Jones in them. And, of course, the perfectly insensible and the divinely improbable happened at the end. This is Rod Bramblett’s radio call, which is instantly a thing of lore:
We had a great view of the final scoring play, standing directly over Nick Marshall’s shoulder. He threw the ball and it was instantly recognizable that the flight path of the ball and the line the boy in blue was taking were not to meet. Hope sank immediately. Then the bounce and the deflection through the unholy Georgia trinity and Ricardo Louis, immediately a living legend as a freshman, kept running. Turns out he turned his head in the last moment of a hummingbird’s heartbeat to find the ball as it fluttered near him.
I covered my mouth. “What the War Damn?”
Angels didn’t sing. They roared. Jordan-Hare Stadium, at the end of the night, was as loud as it has been in the last 20 years. The old Tiger decibel lights on the south end zone scoreboard would have surged, flickered, browned out, returned and exploded. They would have burst into fireballs and landed on the Georgia sideline. There would have been nothing else to it.
How do you react to that play? A heaved prayer that should have never been answered was addressed in most convincing fashion. It happened at the end of an equally inconceivable series of events too dense to unpack and process, even during the tediously long CBS commercial breaks. You saw those young men realize what the writer and philosopher Joseph Campbell meant about not “looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.” That’s what they found. I turned to the lady behind and said “We should hug.” And we all did, we hugged everyone, everywhere, mostly because we couldn’t hug Ricardo.
And, in the end, it was the somewhat-maligned defense that sealed the day. Dee Ford’s crushing fait accompli, a bruising blow to Georgia’s Aaron Murray, ended the game as the Bulldogs were looking to score while the final flickering filament in the scoreboard shifted from 00:01 to 00:00. Some of the people there rated it a two on the Rapture Scale. Some folks in the Southern endzone saw it as a three.
Despite the questionable play calls, and an officiating crew no one on the field liked, Auburn won tonight because they never quit. A team that was accused of that and worst last year, showed their moxie and their talent and their grit. They fought hard. As hard as any team we’ve cheered. If they hadn’t already satisfied the sports cliche, they learned how to win. Tonight they deserved it.
We reflected on all of this in the stadium. At the tailgate. Watching it again at home. We reflect on all of this each time we watch the Jordan-Prayer. Still not sure what we all saw. Still anxious about the outcome, even as I watch it a third or fourth time.
My in-laws were here for this game. They are 4-0 across four seasons. They’ve seen a homecoming, a conference game and a cupcake. Today the weather was perfect, the tailgating was amazing, the friends charming and they were there for the most breathtakingly incredible finish of the year, and perhaps in the history of the Deep South’s Oldest Rivalry.
Now what do I do for an encore?
Here are the game’s Auburn-centric highlights, with more calls from the great Rod Bramblett:
