A long read, but pretty good. Man alive, I am getting freaking restless for this game to be on.
Eagle5
AuburnSports.com Fan Correspondent
Faith, guts, and love fueled the # 1 ranked Auburn Tigers' return to glory in 2010.
On an unseasonably cool Father's Day morning last June, a text message from Auburn defensive assistant coach Tommy Thigpen popped up on my phone, which read, "Happy Father's Day!" I grinned proudly as I replied in kind to a coach who, like the entire Auburn coaching staff, is as fine a human being as he is a football coach.
A second text followed, and I peered down at the four riveting words from "Coach Thig" that awoke the echoes in my Auburn football memory like a double shot of game day adrenalin. "Glory days are ahead."
At that moment in June, I thought it gracious to let the now eerily prophetic message rest in its ambiguity, fighting off the giddy urge to press Coach Thigpen to pinpoint the timetable implied by the word "ahead". I assumed he meant some amalgam of the wild success of Tiger Prowl, Big Cat Weekend, and the recruiting success by this staff was laying a foundation to win big by 2011 or 2012. Recruiting hauls almost always bring glory in victories.
But I hoped he meant that coaching evaluations of our 2010 team were leaning rosy. In either case, I was simply happy that a salt of the earth man like Coach Thigpen would use the word "glory", whether that meant now, or 2012.
Last summer, the nine to ten win season mark was a reasonable par for the 2010 course being set by most rational Auburn fans, and in any given year, ten to eleven wins is hardly a "fair" expectation for any SEC program. Just ask Florida and Alabama in recent years, with Florida's BCS national championships both bearing the stain of regular season losses to Auburn and Ole Miss.
And let's be candid, in June, the devout Auburn fan had mainly a stockpile of hope for a memorable 2010 season, based on the potent offense Gus Malzahn fielded in 2009, a bevy of talented wide receivers, and the potential of newcomer Cameron Newton. But hope was also tempered by the reality - at least on paper - of relying on youth to field the defensive depth required to run the brutal SEC schedule gauntlet.
In June, recall, there remained the residual doubt from the Auburn spring A-Day game about starting quarterback Cameron Newton's throwing accuracy, as the memory of a badly overthrown ball to a wide open Jay Wisner in the south end zone lingered. There were practice reports in August of Cam struggling with intermediate route accuracy, an Internet rumor which has now taken up residence under the same rock as the airport heckler from Coach Chizik's hiring.
There was simply no way to envision in the summer of 2010 how this Auburn Tiger team would explode onto the scene in America as not only a champion, but a team which would bust any number of myths about how to win games in the SEC.
A team that is rebuilding and is trying to learn how to be closers in big games and make clutch plays needs confidence as its primary resource. This team would get minimal help from the outside in building the swagger of a champion, and as the team's adopted song, Lean On Me, suggests, they would have to cultivate it from within.
Against a backdrop of the summer, 2010 release of the sports film bust, Game Changer, and unanimous media forecasts of a Crimson Tide repeat championship, no small amount of doubt swirled in the air about the odds of Coach Chizik winning the SEC West in his second season as Auburn head coach. He was, after all, going against all odds to merely win the state of Alabama championship - or so the pandering in-state media trumpeted. The Florida versus Alabama game of the century was being promoted with the requisite description of the SEC as "Alabama, Florida, and everybody else."
Teams of lesser guts and character would have buckled under the pressure of the hype, and suffered damage to their swagger from the confluence of Alabama hype and Auburn second guessing.
In a twist of Shakespearean irony, one of the very few national pundits who peered into the crystal ball and saw the assets in Auburn which could land the SEC West title was the pundit Tiger fans most loathed from 2004, ESPN's Kirk Herbstreit. Not surprisingly, Herbstreit would later steal a page from presidential candidate John Kerry, voting for Auburn before he voted against them as the season progressed.
There were precious few observers who looked deeper than the 2009 Auburn depth chart, understood Gus Malzahn's genius, and analyzed game film of Cam Newton from the Blinn JUCO national championship run in 2009. With a veteran offensive line, outstanding receiving corps, and potential phenom at quarterback, some (including this writer) saw the possibility of the team pulling the football equivalent of an inside straight in poker.
Coach Chizik set the table with high expectations of the team, adopting the goal of "good to great" for the 2010 season. What seemed a hollow clich?o some at the time now reveals the leadership excellence of the Auburn head coach, because his staff went meticulously about the small details, hard work, and week to week improvement to the point of greatness which was on display in the dismantling of South Carolina in the SEC Championship game.
This would not be a season of dominance from start to finish by a team who outmanned every opponent - it would have to be a season of winning in a dozen different ways. Not just offense, or dominant defense, but as Trooper Taylor whimsically described it in yet another "Trooperism" on a sports radio interview prior to the Ole Miss game. "We don't care how we win," said Taylor, "or whether it's a big special teams play, our offense helping our defense by outscoring people, or our defense making a clutch play to win the game. We don't win with offense or defense, we win with "WE-fense".
The "how" in winning never mattered to this team. The "what" was simply scoring more points than each opponent, every week, critics be damned. Along the way, as the wins came, an unexpected and magical thing happened. The Auburn Tigers were proclaimed to have the single best offensive player in America in Cam Newton, and the single best defensive player in America in Nick Fairley. When Cam Newton turned a simple middle run against South Carolina into an ESPN highlight reel play, leaving behind the Gamecock defensive backs and diving in from the six yard line, everything changed. And when Nick Fairley became an offensive line's nightmare, everything changed.
Malzahn had a weapon now, an "eraser" as Coach Lolley would call Newton capable of creating scoring production that would allow the Tigers to win games even when the defense yielded 24 + points as the secondary developed. Ted Roof had a weapon in Nick Fairley. Suddenly, the Auburn Tigers were - where it counts, on the field - game changers. If you can dominate the middle of a defensive front, and force double teams, you can completely disrupt what an offense plans.
If you can create such a threat in the quarterback position that defensive coordinators describe their task against Malzahn's Auburn attack as "choosing their poison", you can destroy record books. And that is exactly what happened in 2010.
The historic 13-0 run would not be a simple matter of beating tough SEC opponents on Saturdays. The Tigers would face an inexplicable, relentless national media assault swirling around the eligibility of Auburn Heisman Trophy winner, Cameron Newton.
History will ultimately sift the villain from the victim in the whole tired saga, but there is a growing body of evidence - shared by the NCAA - which points to a cynical, bloodthirsty media and other adversaries of both Auburn and the Southeastern Conference as the likely villains.
And so it went, with a perfect storm forming which set the table for a cohesiveness and "us against the world" psychology for the 2010 Tigers. And make no mistake, the "us" from start to finish included not just the Auburn football team and coaching staff, but the entire Auburn Family who like no season in memory united in a common purpose against unjust attacks on the program and on Cameron Newton. The legendary Tiger Walk tradition and Jordan-Hare stadium electricity reached levels witnessed in 2004 and late in the LSU game, 1989.
The Auburn Family was as Coach Chizik asked, "all in", and of that the team had no doubt. The Auburn student body and fan base embraced the 2010 team, performed as game day fans at the same high level as the team, and at critical home games, willed the stadium to adrenalin levels which helped the team be unfazed by 17 point deficits.
The result on the field, thirteen delicious wins, has been nothing short of spectacular. An Ohio State, Alabama, Oklahoma, or USC in most years would have been aided and abetted by the media in their championship run. Not the Auburn Tigers. And it is not a martyr complex to observe that the Auburn Tigers have made their run in spite of the media plots to undermine the efforts of a very deserving group of players and coaches.
Along the way, the attacks from the outside served only to strengthen the bond of love between team members, coaches, and the adoring fan base.
"During the Georgia week," Cam Newton would recall, "it was a very hard week for me to get through, but there were a lot of people on my side - team members, coaches, and my family who helped me stay focused on the game. There were a lot of rumors that were untrue and media slandering my name. But my point to the team was that they - the media - can say anything they want during the week, but when that football comes off the kicker's foot, they can't stop us because we're going to be like an untamed gorilla. What I wanted the team to know, and our enemies, was simply, 'We Comin'."
In the post-game victor's locker room of Bryant-Denny stadium on November 26, 2010, Coach Chizik made an astute observation to the team. "There's a lot of love in this room," said an emotional Coach Chizik, "and there is no way we could have overcome what we did today without it. You will tell this story your whole life. You fight it when it doesn't look good, and you keep fighting it, and sooner or later you're gonna win. We've been down 14-0, 17-0, and now 24-0 this year, and nothing is keeping the Auburn Tigers from wearing that frickin' ring."
When this lightning in bottle called the 2010 Auburn Tigers explodes before a record national televised audience on Monday night in Glendale, Arizona, it will hardly be a subtle exclamation point on a magical undefeated season. It will be a rocket shot in one glorious display of Coach Gene Chizik's "good to great" mission which he adopted, sold, and one brick at a time this season built for an Auburn Family that is as deserving of this reward as any in memory.
And in a season sadly littered with injustice on numerous media fronts, this sweet national championship will be a "just" reward. It will be a huge "I told you so" to the doubters from a team that was beautifully tone deaf to the prognosticating morons who in the heat of summer assigned Auburn four or five losses. It is the in-state rival who occupies the SEC West fourth place, not the Auburn Tigers.
Having already claimed an eternal place in the hearts of Auburn faithful, this remarkable team stands a mere four quarters from completing the most captivating championship run in Auburn history. The Auburn trophy room is beautifully covered with the bling of the champion's hardware and the accolades that are so well deserved.
And for a program which has had its share of "desert experiences" in broken dreams over its history, it is only appropriate that this special team has sojourned to the Arizona desert to lay it all on the line for the ultimate validation of a proud program, the crystal football. If ever destiny was a factor in outcomes, the stars over the Phoenix desert have aligned for the orange and blue, and no amount of quacking is likely to alter that reality.
Auburn has endured a crucible of challenges both in-game and off the field to get to this point, and if you survive it, you are battle ready. Oregon's impressive run has been far simpler.
When the dust of the biggest college football game in memory settles, and a star-studded national signing day ends in February for the Auburn Tigers, I have a promise to keep. I'll be taking Coach Thigpen on a well deserved freshwater stripe fishing trip. At some point in the day, I'll ask Coach Thigpen about the "glory days are ahead" line.
And if I were Coach Thig, I'd say with the confidence of Cam Newton or Nick Fairley, "Of course I meant this season, brother!"
The wait is over, Coach Thigpen. Glory days are here.
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