Week 12 - Samford

This weekend was Homecoming at Auburn, and it actually was a pretty well-designed Homecoming match-up. The coach at Samford is Pat Sullivan, who was Auburn's first Heisman Trophy winner back in 1971.  So, for the 40th anniversary of his Heisman win, he got to come back and coach on the Auburn visitors' sideline.

The bad news is that he almost embarrassed his alma mater.  Auburn ended up winning 35-16, but that's just because they decided to play decent football in the fourth quarter.  Samford outplayed them the rest of the game.  I still love my Tigers, but I'm tired of being nice.  This game was really frustrating for me.  Not only did they refuse to show up and play football last weekend at Georgia, but they appeared to be half-heartedly going through the motions for most of this game.  They gave up three fumbles, all of which were recovered by Samford.  Yes, one fumble was given up by our true freshman backup quarterback, but the other two were by experienced players.  And could we not hustle enough to recover even one of them?

I know Auburn has a very young team, but they can't use youth as an excuse for this game.  They have played much better than this (and much better than they played against Georgia) earlier in the season.  They're supposed to get better as the season progresses, not worse.  I don't know what's going on down there, but they'd better get something fixed before next weekend, or they will be thoroughly embarrassed.

Now that I'm over that tirade, I can talk about some of the good/weird (as opposed to bad) parts of the game. 

Good:  My boy Craig Sanders got a 9-yard punt return!  He's always on the punt coverage team but very rarely gets to actually make the returns.  Good for Craig!  Also, Mike Dyer rushed his butt off and moved into the top 10 Auburn rushers of all time.  As a sophomore.  I think he'll make it to the top of that list in the next couple of years. 

Weird:  Neiko Thorpe completed a pass, and Barrett Trotter made a tackle against the Samford offense.  Why is that weird?  Neiko Thorpe is a Safety, and Barrett Trotter is a backup quarterback.  Actually, he was our starting QB for the first half of the season.  WTF is going on?  Well, because the game was on PPV, I "watched" the first quarter and part of the second on the ESPN play-by-play page until I could find a radio station broadcasting the game online.  Apparently ESPN is stupid and doesn't recognize that some players wear the same number (they are on opposite sides of the ball and, thus, aren't on the field at the same time).  For example, Neiko Thorpe is # 15, and so is Clint Moseley (our QB).  So it was actually Moseley completing that pass.  And Barrett Trotter's tackle?  It was actually made by Erique Florence, a defensive back, who shares # 14 with Barrett.  Get your shit together, ESPN.