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Games on the plain

Holiday travels this week, so we’re padding this out with videos and memories. But there’s a theme! This is Iron Bowl week after all. So let’s talk about football all week. Happy Thanksgiving!

Thought I’d throw in a few clips from memorable games during my years as an undergraduate. This space is nothing if it isn’t good for self-indulgent memories. So let’s take a stroll down that particular lane.

The first game I attended as a student was against Ole Miss. A fight broke out in the student body, probably over too many drinks or girls. Order was quickly restored by the people around them and Auburn won 46-13.

The biggest games of my freshman season were unavailable to me. Student tickets were sold on a seniority basis, which meant no Florida and no Alabama. I had to watch them both from my place just off campus.

Strange to now think that the 1995 Iron Bowl was just the third one on campus. I’d only missed history, the first time Alabama finally played a true road game in the series, by a few years. (This may sound silly to readers that aren’t involved. To you I recommend this column, this article, and also this piece and the CBS pre-game video below.)

That was all just before my time in undergrad. My freshman year was a mediocre one for football in the state. Both Alabama and Auburn came into the Iron Bowl with seven wins. Auburn would win 31-27 and Tide fans still complain about a referee’s call late in that game.

Later, in bowl season, a struggling Auburn played a solid Penn State.

Moving on, then.

In 1996 we watched The Barn burn down. That was one of the athletic buildings on campus. They used to play basketball in the facility, but in 1996 it housed the gymnastics team and was one of three wooden buildings on campus. A tailgater put their grill too near the structure and during the game the flames leapt higher than the football stadium directly across the street.

I asked Carl Stephens, the former public address announcer, about his most memorable games, and this one was in his top three. No one who was there will ever forget it, or Stephens’ deep voice announcing “Attention Auburn fans if you parked near the barn please exit the stadium and move your vehicle.”

A moment later he followed that up with “Attention fans. It is too late to move your vehicle.”

From most views in the stadium it looked like we were on fire. There’s no way you’re moving 85,000 people, so we were resigned: Well, if you have to go, go with friends.

The bigger problem at the moment, however, was why Auburn could not kick a field goal. Priorities: We have them.

Ironically, it was a building donated by LSU — my roommate said “Pistol Pete played in there!” — and it was destroyed during the LSU game. That there is no footage of this online is a glaring blind spot in mid 1990s video uploading. My friend Joe McAdory wrote about it, however.

That year there was also the famous four overtime game with Georgia. I was in Kansas City, but I could have flown home, driven from Montgomery to Auburn and caught the end. Georgia won, unfortunately, so I was glad to watch from my hotel room. Mostly, this is remember as the day Uga tried to bite Robert Baker:

The next week Auburn lost a narrow game to Alabama, 24-23 in Birmingham. But the days of going to Legion Field for that game were coming to an end.

Now to the story you will not believe. In 1997, I called this turnover. It wasn’t a wish or a hope. I was not being an irrational, desperate fan late in the game. I turned to the friend standing next to me and said “They are about to give the ball back to Auburn, just as if I’d looked into the sky and said “It is night.”

Ed Scissum, who fumbled the ball at the crucial moment, works at Evangeline Booth College, a theological school in Atlanta. Martavious Houston, who forced the fumble, had a nice career in the Canadian Football League and then had a moment in the NFL. Jaret Holmes, the placekicker who scored the winning points for Auburn, had three years in the NFL and is now back home in Mississippi.

Auburn earned their way into the SEC Championship that year, but we don’t speak of it much.

So 1998, then, featured the last ever Iron Bowl in Birmingham. I was there, and on a chill night watched the Tide close that chapter in a storied history with a 31-17 win over my Tigers.

Shaun Alexander was a good back.

To make matters worse, the next year Alabama came back to Auburn and for the first time won the Iron Bowl there. Not a pleasant experience:

On the other hand, it would be 2008 until Alabama won the Iron Bowl at their own stadium. Just took them three centuries to accomplish the feat.

Now. The purpose of this little entry was to talk about the Iron Bowls and a few other games from my time as a student. I was very fortunate, working as a journalist and in a few other capacities, to see some of these games and work with the people — like Pat Dye, Jim Fyffe, Rod Bramblett and others — that helped create these moments over the years. My experiences are a bit atypical.

For example, one of the best games I’ve ever watched at Auburn — and we’ll discuss the best game tomorrow — was the 2005 Iron Bowl. I was in grad school at UAB at the time, so it doesn’t fit the tidy theme here, but it bears mentioning. My future bride managed to land sideline passes, she worked at Fox at the time, and we shot the game. This was Carl Stephens last game behind the microphone. This was the last Iron Bowl flight for Tiger VI. They named the field in Pat Dye’s honor.

And this happened all night long:

We were on the sideline for that. It couldn’t get much better, I figured, on the way home. And until this last year’s championship run, I was right.

Tomorrow I’ll write about the best contest I’ve ever seen at Jordan-Hare Stadium in a special holiday use of bytes and bits.

Happy Thanksgiving!

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22
Nov 11

Seeing the light

Holiday travels this week, so it might be a bit light here. But there’s a theme! This is Iron Bowl week after all. So let’s talk about football all week. Happy Thanksgiving!

Yesterday we briefly examined a youth “misspent” as an Alabama fan. Today we’ll discuss sorting out the brain washed allegiances and finding what your heart tells you is true and right and just.

This will read like my college decision was centered too much on football. That’s an important part of the culture, but only a side note for me. Education is and has always been an important consideration for me. The program I was interested in at Auburn was great and … well … you’ll see …

The first time I visited Auburn was in the summer of my eighth grade year. It was part of a school trip and the teacher, an Auburn graduate, decided to visit one of the bookstores. This was awkward for me because I was wearing an Alabama shirt at the time.

The visit was brief, though. We got to where we needed to go, participated in the contest we were there to take part in and traveled to Montgomery.

The next visit was a few years later. More school organizations led me to campus for meetings. Being involved in the FFA meant spending more time with ag kids, and that was an important contribution to the exposure. There was also game experiences like this:

I watched Nix-to-Sanders in a hotel room in Montgomery, and — this makes no sense — there was an embodiment of attitude in that team and that game that seemed admirable.

Perhaps most importantly, when I was a high school senior the girl I was dating was a freshman at Auburn. I went to visit early in her freshman year, spent a weekend with friends and had a blast. Everyone was nice and the place was beautiful. And I knew people and all of that was very important to a high school kid.

[She and I dated off and on for the next few years. But being at Auburn never seemed a bad decision. (Except for chemistry classes. Yeesh.)]

I made it home, announced I was going to Auburn and went to my room.

My mother was … less than pleased. “If you’d told me you’d robbed a bank, I would have said ‘That’s OK, son, I still love you.’ But I never, ever, thought you would tell me you were going to Auburn.”

The only thing we’d ever really disagreed about was how to pay for this. There would be a way, said the wide eyed child. The pragmatic parent wasn’t so sure.

That same fall, this happened:

I missed the great comeback because of a flat tire. A flat tire! It would be six or seven years before I actually saw the game. Why LSU was throwing the ball still boggles the mind. But I digress.

I got one scholarship, was able to qualify for good grants and tried to figure out how to live cheaply. And then, just three days after my high school graduation, I was called in for a scholarship interview. I sat in a small room with two older gentlemen and discussed college, life, ambition and study habits. After the meeting I drove to my mother’s business.

“What if I told you they offered me a one-year scholarship?”

“That would be good,” she said.

“What if I told you they offered me a two-year scholarship?”

“That would be good,” she said.

“What if I told you they gave me a three-year scholarship?”

“That would be even better.”

“What if I told you they gave me a four-year scholarship?”

“I would say ‘War Eagle!'”

And so everything was fine.

She still gave me a hard time about all things Auburn, even beyond football. So did the family. I’m the one Auburn person in the bunch in the whole family — both sides! I catch a lot of grief, but it is, usually, all in jest.

And then after a few wonderful years I graduated (in spite of chemistry).

In 2004 I started graduate school at UAB. They all took great pride in pointing out what the A stood for in that acronym.

But no matter. The boy had long since become an Auburn man.

Tomorrow, we’ll dig up some memorable games from my time as an undergrad, as we try to pad out the holiday week. May all your turkeys be delicious, and all your football teams win. Unless that team is Alabama.

Happy Thanksgiving. War Eagle forever.

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21
Nov 11

Growing up an Alabama fan

Holiday travels this week, so it might be a bit light here. But there’s a theme! This is Iron Bowl week after all. So let’s talk about football all week. Happy Thanksgiving!

I was raised in an Alabama family. There’s a lot of this, people associating with that school or, more specifically, the University of Alabama’s football team because they enjoyed a great deal of success in the middle of the 20th century. People like winners, and so all other things being equal, they side with the winner. Happens all the time.

So I had the room decorated in Alabama stuff. I remember watching the funeral procession go by as they drove Paul Bryant’s body from Tuscaloosa to a Birmingham cemetery. I remember the sign hanging from the overpass: God needs a head coach.

Joey Jones was a brilliant wide receiver — he’s now the head coach at South Alabama. Mike Shula was a heroic quarterback — he coached Alabama and is now back in the NFL. Cornelius Bennett was a terror. The Goodes, “From Town Creek, Alllll-a-bama!” Derrick Thomas, Lee Ozmint and more, they were all legends on the radio and heroes when they appeared on television.

They didn’t always play on television back then, even in the 1980s. But they were there often. And when they weren’t, there was radio, with the call by Eli Gold (I’ve always liked him a bit more than most as a play-by-play man). The big games were always on television though. And they don’t come bigger than the Iron Bowl.

The 1984 Iron Bowl was a big game. Shula was Alabama’s quarterback on a bad 4-6 team. Auburn was 8-3 and one win shy of their second straight SEC title and Sugar Bowl bid. But Bo Jackson went the wrong way as a blocking back on fourth-and-goal:

The next year there was The Kick*:

Football was a big deal, but not the biggest deal. During part of that game I was outside tossing a ball around in the yard. My neighbor was an older kid. He would stand on one end of his yard and throw huge, deep bombs to me on the other end of my yard. It had to be three-tenths of a mile. He’d hurl it high and I’d catch the ball in my arms and it hurt, but he was clearly athletic. I remember my mother would come outside and tell me what this Bo Jackson guy was doing, and how Alabama was stopping him, or struggling to do so.

My neighbor would go on to break many of Bo Jackson’s high school football records, at the same school. He would play a little college football in Tennessee before his career was over. On the other side of my house was another neighbor who was a state champion high school quarterback. Talented neighborhood.

And that was the world I grew up in, in a world where the joke is you declare your allegiance when you move in or you’re assigned from birth. With no real earned allegiances elsewhere, the University of Alabama was the first choice.

It was not to last, and I think it started right here, in 1992, watching Pat Dye’s last game at Auburn. I was at my step-grandparents house. Alabama won, but this was a somber moment, the circumstances that precipitated his resignation notwithstanding:

Tomorrow, we’ll briefly discuss becoming an Auburn man through the football lens.

* Here’s a fun anecdote stemming from that game, a few decades later and from a living piece of Auburn history:

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12
Nov 11

Football. Meh.

CBS fills their studio time discussing Penn State. They wrap it up with

Aaron Taylor — of Notre Dame and the Packers and Chargers — compares Joe Paterno’s legacy to a goal line fumble. It was a properly tortured analogy concluded with a somber note by his studio colleague Adam Zucker, “And he’d never fumbled before.”

Except the LAST TWO DECADES.

So there was the Georgia game. And that was bad. Just in case no one paid attention to that game, which started with a bad call and was punctuated throughout with poor play with only one exception. Selected tweets, from a :

That first down was brought to you by Georgia math.

Hey a legitimate UGa first down. Congratulations to the referee who did not have to compromise his ethics or vision plan to make it happen.

Referees 7, UGa 0, Auburn, 0. Thanks for that first down spot, fellas.

TOUCHDOWN AUBURN! C.J. Uzomah to @LUTZenkirchen! 7-7, still in the first.

Bulldog to helmet. I suspect whining to begin any moment now.

I’d like to point out we have an All-American caliber running back on the roster … and he has one total yard thus far.

Pass pass pass pass pass pass pass pass pass pass pass. Third and long? Let’s run a draw!

So about that bye week …

Remember when Malzahn described the offense as a play action down field rushing attack? Good times.

Alright, the first time they ran the backdoor pass it was nice. That’s just … not good.

This game is where even the generally fair-minded are questioning Ted Roof. There’s enough of that for most everyone just now.

So let’s see: Youth, Murray, play calling, defensive schemes … anybody else want to contribute?

Was that four go routes and O-Mac underneath? Is that as good as it gets now?

Defensively that’s an unforced fumble, a punt and a drive stopped by a clock. (Let’s not acknowledge the five TDs.) War Adjustments.

89 net yards for AU in the first half. Four yds for Dyer. 10:53 TOP. 2/7 on third down conversions. UGA? 318 yards, 7/8 3rd downs.

Not interested in demanding firings, but 89 yards against the SEC’s #4 defense should earn a partial $1.3 million refund.

Between @WBE_Jerry, 14-year vet @HABOTN and the boards, everyone has decided that was the worst half of Auburn football maybe ever.

Of course that’s a modern conceit. Some folks do recall the Barfield years. But most recent comparisons are … comparable.

I would say the 2008 and 2001 Iron Bowls are as close a 21st century similarity as you could get people to consider.

Mark Richt, most impressed by a spear. Yeah, that’s about right.

Auburn has played five top-15 teams on the road this year. That never ceases to impress.

What in this game has impressed upon the coaching staff that the screen pass is there? What?

Tough setback for T’Sharvan Bell. Depth in the secondary now beyond being an issue.

On air with @IngramSmith, and considering the enigma that is/was UGa, I thought it would be a close game, pending ball bounces. Oops.

Youth was on display, and that was one part of why this game was so bad. They’ll get better in due time, but the Tigers will get even younger with T’Sharvan Bell’s knee injury. It didn’t look like the news was good on the sideline, and so the shaky secondary becomes a bit less stable. Two games to go, homecoming next weekend against Samford and then Alabama brings the nation’s best defense into Jordan-Hare to finish the season. No biggie.

Otherwise Alabama won. UAB won, improving to 2-8 on the year with the biggest comeback in school history. Samford also won with a late comeback.

Samford lost in the first round of the soccer playoffs, ending a terrific season. But Auburn won, and advances to second round playoff action.

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5
Nov 11

Geaux Tigers

Auburn is off today, but we’re keeping it in the feline family. Top ranked LSU on the road at second ranked Alabama. It is the supposed Game of the Century. Allie is cheering for the other Tigers.

Well. Didn’t live up to that hype — though no game could — but it was an entertaining evening of football. Bengal Tigers won on the road, in overtime, after a 9-6 slugfest. Good game for everyone. Shame it came down to low percentage kicks, but those are two good teams otherwise.

LSU is rubbing it in with their game shirts, too:

The Crimson Tide just weren’t destined to have an undefeated season. They’ll complain about bad calls and lack of offense, but deep down the Tide will know they just got beat by a better team — your LSU Tigers.

That must sting.