Obsessed??
The article is -- for Cecil "Chocolate Gay Cake" Hurt -- surprisingly fair and balanced.
My Thursday assignment in Hoover was to write about Auburn, a defending champion on the defensive.The focus was going to be "just" football. It's a fascinating storyline that the Tigers, just over six months after winning the BCS Championship, face the lowest expectations that I can ever remember a team on a 15-game winning streak facing. When the SEC media poll comes out later today, Auburn will almost certainly be picked to finish fourth in its own SEC West Division. I can never remember a defending SEC champion, much less a defending BCS champion, generating less buzz.That doesn't mean that Auburn is destined to fail. The SEC media members who take part in the pre-season poll - for the record, it's an exercise in which I choose not to take part - have been wrong before, although they tend to err more on the side of over-valuing defending champions rather than underestimating them. I don't think Auburn will win the West, either, but I don't think they will crash and burn like Alabama did in 2000, when it "defended" its SEC title with an unforgettable (in a bad way) 3-8 performance. In fact, I suspect Auburn will be good enough to have a chance to do at least as well as LSU did in 2008, when it followed up its BCS title with an 8-5 record, maybe better.Gene Chizik will be the fifth SEC coach in a row trying to defend the BCS title (if you count Urban Meyer twice). None have done it - it isn't easy, under the best circumstances. It would have been interesting to hear Chizik's perspective on how he might approach things differently than Meyer or Nick Saban or Les Miles. But the conversation in Chizik's media session didn't turn that way, at least not very often. Chizik did note that the "majority of the guys we have coming back, they know what great looks like." That can be a double-edged sword, though. Certainly, all of Alabama's players, coming off a BCS title and a two-year record of 26-2 knew what "great" looked like going into the 2010 season. The problem for Alabama last year, one which Nick Saban alluded to frequently last year, was confusing "knowing what great looks like" with actually doing the work hat being great requires.There wasn't much of that sort of talk on Thursday, though. As Chizik spoke in a lengthy opening statement - the Media Days' equivalent of running basketball's four-corner offense - it was obvious that there was an elephant in the room Not a Red Elephant, just an elephant. But it wasn't long before media members started asking about that elephant. After three innocuous queries to start things, almost half of Chizik's Q-and-A session was about lingering NCAA issues from 2010 and the recruitment of Cam Newton.Having covered three lengthy NCAA investigations in the past 20 years, I am not about to wade into covering a fourth, especially when it doesn't involve a team I cover on a regular basis. Based on past experience, I am very skeptical when anyone cites, quotes or paraphrases "the NCAA," or "NCAA sources." That goes for Danny Sheridan. It also goes for Gene Chizik, when he says that the NCAA "on more than one occasion has said that Auburn has done nothing wrong in the recruitment of Cam Newton." That might have been said in the context of the eligibility rulings that cleared Newton to play last year, but eligibility and enforcement are not the same branches of the NCAA. I doubt that Chizik is getting running updates from the Enforcement branch. If he were, he wouldn't have needed "clarification" - that was his word, not mine - from the NCAA's Vice President of Enforcement in Destin, and received the response - "we'll tell you when it's over, and it's not over" - that he did.None of that means Auburn is in trouble, or out of it. I have no knowledge of what will happen in the ongoing investigation, and I don't expect to have any until it comes to some sort of conclusion, for which I am perfectly willing to wait. It is entirely possible that the case will be closed and Auburn will be cleared, or, at the least, not convicted. Or it could go another direction. Neither of those statements is a startling revelation, because I don't have any startling revelations to make.I am curious how the lack of respect and the background chatter will affect Auburn this season. Will it be a distraction? A rallying cry? I have seen uncertainty wreck seasons, including more than one in Tuscaloosa. I have also seen adversity make a team stronger, if it had strong leaders. Which way will it go in Auburn this year? Unfortunately, I don't have a source that can tell the future, on the field or off it.
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