I'm pretty tired of this up and down shit.
I don't understand how a team with this much supposed talent can look like a herd of brain damaged doofuses on offense.
But we've seen it. We saw it in 2012.
Then one piece -- a renovated juco cornerback under center -- the next season and we're playing for the national title. Most of the same people doing the same things but suddenly it was magic.
I know what a team struggling for its identity looks like. I saw that in 1984 and a little bit in 85. I saw it in 2003.
I know what clusterfucks look like. I saw them in 1976, 1977, 1980, 2008 and 2012. This season feels clusterfucky as hell.
But you know, in retrospect even 2008 wasn't a complete clusterfuck. That team tried like a motherfucker, but it didn't get any help from the right coaching decision but the wrong implementation (Tony Franklin instead of say... Malzahn... with the Tuberville defense) and a sense that AU admin was just waiting to pounce and change the regime.
Through my entire life the one thing I've known is that no matter how tough things look, Auburn men will find a way to fight through it. We don't quit. We wrestle with the angels. We rub some dirt on it and fight back. We're tough. We're mean. We might lose, but we'll make sure you know you had to fight us to the end for it. Or we did. We were.
We're not that any more. We don't have that grit. I don't know if it's fancy-pants Jacobs and his corporatization of all things Auburn, if it's just that we've hired softer coaches, if it's because all the old traditions and habits (from where to park, to how to dress, to what you can and can't do) have been erased as the "Auburn experience" becomes more sanitized and phony...
Whatever it is, we're not the same kind of men that laced it up in 1972. Or the 80s. Or even 2006. The hardest hitting game I've ever seen in my life was AU-LSU that season. I was sore for two weeks after that just from watching people get after each other.
We don't pressure the quarterback. We don't have any swagger.
I don't know what it is, but I don't like it.