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Auburn / football / friends / photo / weekend — Comments Off
26
Oct 13

Football fans — Florida Atlantic at Auburn

Auburn hosted overmatched Florida Atlantic today. So instead of worrying about football, here’s an opportunity to concentrate on the important people surrounding it. The Yankee approves:

I’m using a Holga lens, a gift from a friend who was cleaning off his shelf and sent the thing to me. The premise behind the Holga lens is to emulate the poor quality of the Holga, a cheap, plastic camera marketed in China. Even the lenses on some of those cameras were plastic, which allowed for a lots of soft focus, fuzzy edges and showed off whatever was happening in the emulsion of your film. (Remember film?) So Holga shots became hip, or hipster depending on how you see it, and now we have a niche lens. These are my first shots with it.

This first set are some of the people with whom we tailgate.

These are the hosts of our tent, Kim and Murphy. You’d have to look hard to find sweeter people:

In the stadium they’re running this feature before the game begins. The winner tonight was a guy who was unaware he was on the screen for 44 seconds. We saw him eat a fair amount of his hot dog. These guys were all on their phones, so the name of the feature was apropos. The young woman on the left was singing along, but she had no idea …

A few people inside the stadium:

Auburn won 45-10, in a game that was truthfully under control after the first two scores within the first five minutes.

Auburn / football / iPhone / overwriting / video / weekend — Comments Off
19
Oct 13

Auburn at Texas A&M

I said, on Thursday night while watching Central Florida upset Louisville, that football is in some ways even more fun when you are watching the emotions of a game in which you aren’t invested.

Sometimes. Because when you are wrapped up in it, this stuff can be anxious.

Four years ago, when Arkansas visited Auburn, was the last time I watched an emotionally wrought football game. I didn’t feel like that in the BCS championship game or in the 2010 Iron Bowl comeback or the SEC Championship game that year. But the back and forth, punch-counterpunch of the Arkansas game that season felt a lot like tonight’s game. Anything was possible, nothing was too absurd, no one was stoppable. The heart races even in a seated position.

Tonight was like that. We got to watch a bunch of young men we don’t know stick with something and stick together. We saw them play against perhaps the best player in the game, just months removed from some of the worst athletic experiences they’ve every encountered.

We watched them claw and fight. We witnessed them realize their goals were before them. We saw them pull off something pretty spectacular. We watched young men with tears of happiness in their eyes and joy in their heart.

Fans gathered just before midnight to welcome the team home:

This is a special place with some special people and they all felt like it tonight.

How can you not be emotional about football?

Auburn / football / photo / video / weekend — Comments Off
5
Oct 13

Ole Miss at Auburn

It was an evening kickoff, which meant an afternoon spent sitting in the tailgating tent, sorta-watching other games.

People coming and going in the tent make for good conversation, but seldom do they let you dissect the intricacies of a cover-two defense. Not that I’d prefer to do that over the former.

The thing you’d prefer to do is watch the game on CBS, but apparently they and Dish are having another spat, and that means we couldn’t get the Georgia at Tennessee game today. It only went to overtime, so thanks CBS and Dish.

Not that we would have seen the end. We would have been inside the stadium watching the Tigers play, which is precisely what we did.

Nova flew this evening:

So did these planes:

I do not know why people wave their shakers at planes, but they do.

Anyway, it was military appreciation night, so all of those themes were added to your usual Saturday night pageantry. And Nick Marshall might have earned his own appreciation night.

The quarterback ran for 140 yards and two scores and threw for 93 yards in a gameplan designed to show off his feet.

Tre Mason showed his off, too:

He gained 77 yards on the ground, 62 receiving yards and the game’s first touchdown.

The game almost got out of hand when Robenson Therezie managed an impressive interception and returned it 78 yards for the score. The best part are the crestfallen looks on the faces of the visiting Rebels fans in the background. I love the background atmosphere shots, the accidental documentary snapshot:

Auburn couldn’t put Ole Miss away, though, and the Rebels would fight back. All the while, Marshall just kept running.

Ole Miss churned up yards, and they eventually turned a three score deficit into a five-point affair. And despite allowing 464 yards, it felt like a game for the Auburn defense. At the end, when it counted, the defensive line came up huge. The Tigers beat Ole Miss 30-22, the first ranked opponent they’ve defeated since 2011, to go 4-1 on the season.

Here are the video highlights, edited to make the game look terribly lopsided. I assure you it was not:

football / weekend — Comments Off
28
Sep 13

Footballs footballing

Auburn was off, so we turned on two televisions and watched a little football today.

The bad old days will come fast for USC now …

LSU at Georgia was pretty entertaining:

How can you not enjoy Stanford football these days?

Alabama was the only team to shut out there opponent. It was almost like they knew what the Rebels were trying to do all night:

UAB at Vanderbilt? Why not?

Troy at Duke?

football / I do not know what is happening. / iPhone / journalism / links / photo / Samford / swimming / things to read / Tuesday — Comments Off
24
Sep 13

Transferring 14,233 files – 6 percent complete

Spent the day transferring data on computers. You know how that goes, right? Here are a bunch of files on this machine. But this machine is going to be replaced by that machine. So you have to move all of these directories and files from here to there.

Fortunately I have a great server I can connect to and swap out files. Unfortunately I have a lot of big files. A lot. And big ones. So this took Much of the day and night.

And then the process of making sure you don’t need any of those other files. And then double checking that, because once you return this computer it is over, pal.

And then loading new software on the new machine. Only you don’t have all of the software, so you have to track people down tomorrow. No matter, though.

Tonight the students are working on the newspaper. Two weeks ago, on their first issue, they were in the newsroom until 5 a.m. Last week it was 3 a.m. Here’s to hoping that’s a trend.

But they working hard and laughing and sound like they are enjoying their evening. They do good work and ask a few questions and I’m impressed by the quality of work they are producing in just two weeks. They have a great deal of potential.

Went for a swim tonight. I did 1.25 miles. That’s 45 laps, or 90 lengths, if you are counting. It has to be the greatest distance I’ve ever traveled in water that didn’t include a boat or inner tube.

I did 250 yards with a breaststroke. It was slow. It was probably sloppy. And I was exhausted from just that. This summer I could do about four strokes before I had to stop because of my shoulder, so 250 sloppy yards is a tremendous improvement. Someone should have been there to give me a high five.

Well, maybe a low five.

I do not know what is happening.

Also, people need to learn how to swim in lanes. I’d complain, but the guy might read this and just keep distractedly swim right on to my side.

The Samford football team wrapping up practice:

Pat Sullivan just rejoined the team. The head coach had spinal fusion surgery and missed the first three games of the season, but returned on Saturday to coach from a booth above the field.

I’ve interviewed Sullivan. We’ve shook hands. He’s 63 and has paws made of stone and fingers made of iron. Some of his players have been in my classes. I’ve dismissed classes early and watched his players stay in the room. Because, I was told, “Coach said the class runs until 5:30, I don’t want to see you down here until 5:30. Stay in the class.” He’s a good man. A solid, certain, Southern gentleman. The kind of man you’d want to grow up to be like.

I don’t know if he is back at practice yet, out in the gloom and rain and under the low clouds — you can see them clinging to the top of the mountain — but I know that’s where he wants to be.

Things to read: Full of stories I’ve enjoyed today, which you might appreciate as well.

Since we were talking about football, did you hear the one about the team who’s bus caught fire last weekend? It was a small college in Alabama. Concordia-Selma was on their way to a game at the time:

Concordia, a small United States Collegiate Athletic Association school located in a city more famous for its role in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s than anything, saw all of its football equipment, $90,000 worth, including their only set of jerseys, get destroyed in a freak bus fire on its way to play Miles College this past Saturday.

In the days since the incident, the team has drawn closer and others have been drawn to it, donating everything from shoulder pads to girdles so the Hornets can continue their season Thursday at 6 p.m. in Demopolis against West Alabama.

[…]

“It’s made us value each other, made us value life more,” (freshman Treyvond) Moore said. “We look at those pictures and we’re like, ‘Man, that could’ve been us. But it wasn’t. It’s just brought us together as a team. I feel like can’t nothing divide us.”

The local story, with another incredible picture of the bus that carried 62 people:

We have about 10 helmets left,” (head football coach Don) Lee said. “We lost jerseys, camera equipment, shoulder pads, everything. Right now, we’re trying to figure out what we need and where to get it from.”

Lee said he had received a call from Dallas County High School, which offered some shoulder pads to the program, but that won’t be enough to meet the demands of a college program scheduled to play its next game Thursday. Concordia College-Ann Arbor in Michigan has also called and offered aid.

“We are still going to play Thursday,” Lee said of the Hornets’ scheduled game in Livingston against the University of West Alabama. “UWA has been great. Their coach called me Saturday afternoon, while we were still on the side of the road, asking if there was anything they could do.”

Deadspin examines Sports Illustrated’s Oklahoma State story and their ultimately thoughtful critique can be shared in one concise sentence:

At the exact point where the hard work started, SI stopped.

Time: Little Boy To Kenya Gunman: ‘You’re A Bad Man’

And from the campus blog:

Want to be a freelancer?

“If a bot can write the story better than you, let it

And now back to that computer. And the newspaper. Here’s to hoping it won’t be a 3 a.m. kind of night.