No. 1 Bama. No. 4 Auburn.
This video plays. The horizon explodes. Time ends.
War Eagle.
football
21
Nov 13
I did not write about meetings
Coca-Cola is getting set to dump press releases. They’ve found something better. Brand journalism, of which I approve, as it can be a powerful tool when used correctly. As this Ragan piece demonstrates, there is a paradigm shift coming:
Perhaps you caught the story in Mashable, The Daily Mail, Adweek, or The Huffington Post.
Coca-Cola’s Singapore team designed a novel double can that
splits into two, so customers can share the fizzy beverage with a friend.Fantastic PR. But one major reason it got so much play was “because we covered it,” says Ashley Brown, who leads digital communications and social media for The Coca-Cola Company.
The rest of the piece is worth reading, do check it out if you are interested in journalism, public relations or marketing.
Here’s something of an example at Auburn:
Nosa Eguae just graduated with his first degree and his pursuing a second while finishing up his playing days terrorizing quarterbacks. The guy is 22, telling you the children are our future. Here you see him away from the field, the roaring crowd and the mixed life of a student/celebrity, like he is pretty much everywhere in town.
Auburn’s athletic department is putting considerable resources toward telling stories like this, humanizing the young man behind the face mask:
I shot that of him at an equestrian meet last year.
Every team has at least a handful or more of hardworking, successful on-and-off-the field people like Eguae. We should see more of the great stories our institutions are producing in the young men and women that attend there. This is one of the great victories a university can demonstrate to the world, after all.
(Samford does a good job of this, too. They have an incredibly strong social media presence and interaction with all of the university’s various stakeholders. Freshmen are published on the university’s home page. The athletes are widely accessible. There’s even a reality show being shot on campus by the students in our department. There are plans in place to expand on those efforts, too.)
Here is the other side of the “branded” coin. One must find the right balance of telling stories to your multiple audiences and working alongside the traditional (and nontraditional) media. No one has arrived at a formula for this, but you have to develop a deft touch. Otherwise, you might hear about it, as you’ll see in the first of these two quick links:
Photojournalists want better access to the White House
Obama’s Image Machine: Monopolistic Propaganda Funded by You
And, finally, this: When an artist allowed her 4-year-old daughter to finish her drawings, something awesome happened. Great art there.
And that’s enough for one night. I’m tuckered.
16
Nov 13
Georgia at Auburn
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:
13
Nov 13
I ran a lot, let’s just leave it at that
Here are two extra photos from last week’s fall foliage kick. This tree probably won’t have anything left on its limbs the next time I see it. But it is flaring beautifully:
This, more about the sun and the darkness, really, is at my grandparents’ place. While I prefer the longer days like everyone else, we do get some great angles from the sun this time of year:
Elsewhere, I ran my first 10K tonight. I was going to run the usual five, but everything felt OK, so I kept going. When I got to five miles, my previous personal best, I decided I could press on to get the nice round kilometer number. And everything felt more or less OK.
And that continued until I stopped running and took a shower. After that it all seemed like a bad idea. Since then, through the night various and different parts have been achy. My feet and my knees. My feet and my quads. My feet and my calves. Always my feet.
Clearly I have room for improvement.
Things to read …
Which brings us to this, from the Wall Street Journal, that bastion of considerate opinion and coverage of serious issues: OK, You’re a Runner. Get Over It. Once upon a time, kids, the Journal did write about serious things. Promise. I suppose we should blame the Internet.
I learned new terms today: “Snowplow parents” and “teacups.”
This young woman was on track to graduate early. And then she had a bad car accident, with a traumatic brain injury. She had to learn to walk and talk and feed herself again. And then she went back to school and graduate. That’s the short version of a remarkable story. Now her brother is trying to raise money for continued therapy. Read about it, and please share that link.
My friend Jeremy from The War Eagle Reader recites the greatest story ever written about a college football game. Worth a listen for football fans:
2
Nov 13
Auburn at Arkansas
Had a few people over. Had the televisions on. Had a fine time. In the evening Auburn played a vanilla game against a struggling Arkansas team. They threw eight passes. (The lowest total since 1984.) They just ran the ball right at Arkansas. They won 35-17.
It is easy to marvel at how long ago last year’s season feels. Auburn, now 8-1, will be in the BCS top 10 after this game. No one expected it. Not sure anyone really believes it.
They are fun to watch.
