Latest Posts

  • What to expect from Auburn vs. Oklahoma

    What to expect from Auburn vs. Oklahoma

    The Auburn Tigers arrive in Norman on the 20th, as they prepare to take on the Oklahoma Sooners, in a game that will give one of these two SEC-schools their first loss of the season. The other will get a marquee victory, and remain undefeated, propelling themselves higher in both the rankings, and national conversation.

    It’s hard to say which of the two teams are more proven going into this matchup. For starters, both have a win against an out-of-conference power four opponent. Auburn traveled to Waco, TX and overcame the Baylor Bears. Oklahoma hosted Michigan, and dealt with the Wolverine’s five-star Bryce Underwood with little trouble. I would say Oklahoma’s victory is slightly more impressive, but Auburn’s road-victory is nothing to sweep under the rug either.

    Outside of their statement-wins, both teams handled their tune-up opponents. Auburn faced two G5-schools, both were convincing wins. Oklahoma claimed victory over one G5, and one FCS school, again convincing wins. Auburn rallies behind Oklahoma-transfer quarterback, Jackson Arnold, who has been the genuinely decent quarterback Auburn fans have begged for ever since Bo Nix left the program in 2021.

    The Sooners, meanwhile, brought in touted John Mateer, who has looked the part of a SEC-caliber quarterback, livening what was for all intents-and-purposes a dead offense last season. Mateer has gotten more national attention, but it’s worth noting that through three games Mateer has had two interceptions, Arnold has thrown none.

    On paper this is poised to be a competitive and tough matchup for both teams, and in games like this, turnovers are a team’s lifeline. A stray pass from either quarterback could change the momentum early, and in the face of a tough road-environment, momentum will be at a premium for the Tigers. Whatever they can do to stay ahead of the chains, and control the time of possession, the better off Auburn will be.

    Oklahoma meanwhile needs to stay composed, and play the game they’ve played all season. If they can avoid turnovers, and suffocate Auburn’s rushing game, it could be a long-day for Arnold and company.

    The common thread between both of these teams is finding a way to win. Auburn’s defense was gashed by Baylor’s passing-attack, and similarly struggled to contain the Jaguar’s offense in their game against South Alabama, but their offense, bolstered by conscious playcalling and mistake-free quarterback play, kept them in front consistently. Oklahoma battled through a special-teams unit prone to mistakes, but played lock-down defense, giving their offense time to find a way against Michigan.

    But, as is the case with all football games, both teams cannot find a way to win this weekend. One of them is going to inevitably be on the sharp-end of the sword.
    While I think John Mateer is an exceptional quarterback, generally I see Auburn as the greater offensive threat. In my opinion, the Tigers have one of the best offenses in the SEC. Regardless of whether the team is consistently getting receivers open, what they are consistently doing is putting up points, and finishing drives. Oklahoma meanwhile, has looked lack-luster in that regard. While the Sooners have an exemplary defensive unit, Auburn’s proven ability to attack a defense’s weaknesses make me doubt whether Oklahoma will stop them enough for their offense to find its footing.

    In this conference opener, I lean towards the Auburn Tigers controlling the time of possession, creating a much-needed turnover, and playing mistake-free football.

    35 – 20 Auburn

  • Friday Night Lights in Waco (Part 1)

    Everything is bigger in Texas, from the portion-sizes at the Barbecue, to the hundreds of miles of land that make up the Lone Star State. And never has this been more true in College Football than now. Between the Longhorns’ revival under Coach Sarkisian, and the long-awaited reinstatement of the Texas v Texas A&M annual rivalry, things have gotten all the more interesting, even more so now that Arch Manning has finally taken the reigns for the Longhorns as a Redshirt Sophomore, with Heisman and draft implications already the focal point of the conversation surrounding the program.

     

    And, as though the stars are aligning with Manning’s first season as the starting quarterback, their opening test as the #1 team in the nation is against none other than the #3 ranked Ohio State Buckeyes. Longhorn’s fans are either going to walk away from the game at an all-time-high, or calling for Manning to be benched at the first sign of trouble, a familiar refrain they sang for Quinn Ewers early in his tenure. 

     

    So, as the dedicated sportswriter I am, I decided to make the long twelve-hour drive to Texas. What— the Texas Ohio State game is in Columbus, Ohio, you say? Well yes, of course I know this! I certainly would be abashed to show up at Texas Memorial Stadium and find that I’m the only one who is cheering on a Texas away-game from their home-stadium. No, my destination isn’t Austin, it’s Waco, home of the Baylor Bears.

     

    So yes, while the rest of the country turns their attention to the Top 4 showdown up north, I find myself excitable as we drive due west to see two unranked non-conference opponents fare off underneath early autumn weather, and Friday night stadium lights, as the Baylor Bears prepare to take on my favorite team: the Auburn Tigers. 

     

    Now, as an aside, this particular article will be unapologetically Auburn focused. I’ll touch all of the bases, of course, and give a little story for both of these teams, but ultimately, I’ll be imparting my great wisdom on the Tigers team today. Do note, I will have a general post-week recap blog that will be up shortly, if it isn’t up already. There you can see a more general, and unbiased, overview on the sport as a whole.

     

    Now, back to this Auburn team…

     

    You can endure scarce more torture than being an Auburn fan, where wins feel seldom, and championships are a distant memory. The last three years the Tigers have had the distinct displeasure of boasting losing records, and one bowl appearance that manifested into an embarrassing loss to Maryland. Things haven’t necessarily been on the decline, they’ve reached rock bottom, and we haven’t seen the signs of them climbing out.

     

    In my first blog, I wrote about the story line that is sports…. The one that forms from following a team year-to-year, seeing both the good and the bad, the triumphs and heartbreak. This is very much applicable to college football, where every Saturday is another chance for this wild sport to surprise you. But, in the worthwhile stories, you have a share of both conflict, and the act of overcoming the conflict. In Auburn, this has not been the case. Since their memorable 2019 season under freshman(now NFL starter) Bo Nix, they’ve endured five years of conflict, with little in-between the struggle to keep optimism high. They’ve turned over two coaches, and the seat is hot on their third. Where’s the light supposedly at the end of this tunnel?

     

    To be sure, it has not been all bad. Between the back-to-back losing seasons that has opened Coach Hugh Freeze’s tenure at Auburn, behind the scenes he has slowly rebuilt the ghost of a roster that Bryan Harsin left behind. His greatest accomplishments on the recruiting front is two-fold: the premier receiving core in the trio of Coleman-Singleton-Simmons, and repairing the Tiger’s pitiful Offensive Line which had been ailing Auburn for over a decade. Outside of that, it’s been two straight top-ten recruiting classes overall, and the team acquired a crucial piece in Deuce Knight, the talented five-star Mississippi quarterback recruit that has the makings of the next Auburn legend.

     

    But Deuce is clearly the Tigers’ future, not their present. As exciting as the 2019 season was, Auburn’s last true-freshman quarterback experiment didn’t lead to the greatest result on the field, and if you are Hugh Freeze, you can’t risk hedging your bets behind Knight, when you are in a must-win-now mode.

     

    So the answer was obviously the Portal. And so Auburn reached their hands into the cookie-jar, and pulled out two quarterbacks to fill out their backfield: Ashton Daniels, brought in as more of a depth-piece(expected to be listed behind Deuce in the depth-chart) and Jackson Arnold, once a five-star highly touted high school kid, whose time at Oklahoma had come to a rocky finish. Entering fall-camp, the general vibe around the program, and fan-base, was that the team was talented, but nothing about our guys behind center were giving any confidence that Freeze is going to post a respectable record this season.

     

    This roster around the quarterback should be enough to win ball games. Now, the story of this season—and perhaps of the Freeze era—rests on whether Jackson Arnold and the play-calling can find that breakthrough. The goal is clear: to finally climb from the melancholy of mediocrity to the triumph this program is searching for so desperately. It all starts tonight, under the lights in Waco.

  • The Story of Sports

    The Story of Sports

    Sports.

    The old-fashioned, tried and true, infallible method of distributing pride. Where grit, heart, and passion is put on the line between chalked lines, and underneath stadium lights. Where thousands look on to see which group of men can excel at an arbitrary rule-set the best, as a crew, most of the time in black and white, corral concerningly competitive representatives of schools and organizations, as they compete in what is called a ‘sport’ but a more accurate name might be a ‘delusion’.

    But dammit if that delusion isn’t the most thrilling waste of time I’ve ever had the pleasure of watching. And double-dammit if I’m not willing to become emotionally dependent on which school or organization I’ve decided is my life and death, year after year.

    In college football, over one-hundred teams compete for a singular trophy, and dozens of teams enter the fray in battle for the World Cup. Professional football and baseball offer the best odds, but even then you’re still guaranteed to end up disappointed most years. And yes… moral victories are a real thing, and count! But unless you are a once-and-a-decade team, you’re guaranteed to have those hallmark let-down moments: a last second field goal cementing your team’s defeat, or a walk-off homerun that undoes a masterful performance on the mound. And so that begs the question: why do we— I —subject ourselves to such certain torture? Perhaps my own personal hobby gives me a unique perspective, and a worthwhile answer.

    I am a writer, or more optimistically, an author-to-be. Most of my time, for better or worse, is spent hovering over books— more accurately, stories. There are many skills involved in being a writer, but perhaps the most challenging is imagining the story itself. It’s perfectly well to figure out where your book is taking place(its setting), or what brooding trauma-driven antagonist will push the plot forwards… but the actual story? The nuts and bolts that hold these various elements together, and get them clicking and turning like gears in a box? That is an art form on its own, a very intensely difficult art form.

    Why is this so challenging? In school you are taught a story is very simple: an exposition(establishing your story), the rising action(now your story is developing!), the climax(self-explanatory), and then your conclusion. But the truth is— stories are not quite this simple at all. What makes a story memorable is its originality. Where does it differ from this archaic formula? Where does it shake up the expectations of storytelling? Originality makes a story seem real. It does the dirty-work transforming fiction into something that feels closer to a biopic, because the lines begin to blur between a crafted story and something that actually happened.

    But with sports— there are no lines to blur. With sports, the story isn’t written, but seen. It isn’t fiction, nor a biopic, it’s the closest thing humanity has come to giving us the drama, conflict, and climax that before only artificial stories could ever give us.

    That which gives writers sleepless nights— writing a story —is done effortlessly.

    In college football, when these one-hundred thirty-six teams take the field underneath early autumn weather, that’s the exposition. You know the stakes, the players’ names, the preseason polls, the team you are rooting for— and then with one fateful kickoff, all of that is meaningless to the story that is about to unfold. You enter a world where the tenacity of student athletes define a week’s worth of pride and pity. Where the storyline you are about to follow doesn’t align itself to some set-in-stone formula, but is the wildest, most unimaginable, and yet most authentic story ever told.

    And yes, that story comes with its share of heartbreak, leading to nights wallowing in self-pity, as you sit there in your post-game clarity wishing you had never attached yourself to such a volatile unforgiving protagonist within this equally volatile arena you call your favorite ‘sport’. But then, when the conflict is finally overcome, the trials lead to hard-won euphoria… you remember why you opened up this book to begin with. It’s one messy, passionate competitive game, wrapped into a season-long storyline, where every season you find yourself falling in love with it once again. That’s the story. That’s Sports.