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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.
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.
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?
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:
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?
