Playing Dirty: Auburn

It’s Auburn, it’s 8 pm in Tiger Stadium, it’s what we wait all offseason for. Here to help us preview a critical matchup for the Good Tigers is Jack Condon from our sister site College and Magnolia.

1. Auburn’s losing streak in Tiger Stadium is now old enough to buy alcohol. Since Tiger Stadium is best enjoyed while drunk, do you think this will help Auburn finally enjoy a trip to Baton Rouge for the first time since 1999?

Well, if you were an avid fan of VH1’s Behind the Music and happened to enjoy the Bon Jovi episode the most, like I did, then you’d know that this makes perfect sense. When they were recording “Wanted Dead or Alive” they couldn’t get it right, so their manager took them all out to get wasted. They went back to the studio hammered drunk and the version you know and love today is what was recorded in one take. Now that Auburn’s losing streak in Baton Rouge is legally allowed to drink. We’re always such good rule followers (except when it comes to buying JUCO quarterbacks from Texas and paying refs), so no underage consumption for us.

However, now that we’re fully matured and ready to cut loose, you can expect us to get more out of line than a freshman with a fake ID at Sky Bar. Pregame diet? Nothing but Long Island Ice Teas. Is that Gatorade in those coolers? Allegedly. And when Auburn breaks the streak the celebration won’t have anything to do with cigars on the field, but a classy brandy while wearing smoking jackets and scoffing at the Jack Dawsons of the world like we’re Billy Zane.

2. Chances are LSU transfer TJ Finley will be starting for the visiting Tigers. Do you think his prior experience helping LSU lose to Auburn is what makes him a popular candidate to start?

Now, I just happened to finish reading the book about Donnie Brasco infiltrating the mob and how he did it. Somehow, he planned careful incompetence so that he’d never really be responsible for anything super illegal or bad happening, but he did it in a way that the mob only sort of suspected him. Obviously he got away with it. What you don’t realize is that TJ Finley was our Donnie Brasco. Don’t know if you saw his recent quote about why he chose Auburn, but he said that “God told me that this was where I need to be”. LSU can’t possibly be stirring anything up with God before this game, so it’s basically a done deal in terms of fate.

However, Finley absolutely knows that the perfect recipe for beating the Bayou Bengals is to just ship over a copy of Pitch Perfect so that the LSU team gets lost in the scenery and the music and doesn’t prepare for the game. It’s what happened to him last year, and Bryan Harsin put him in the game over Bo Nix due to Finley’s victorious riff-off this past Friday night.

3. After three excruciatingly close losses in a row, Gus Malzahn finally got a win against Ed Orgeron in 2020! What will he have to do to get consec- *holds earpiece* Huh? What the hell is a Bryan Harsin?

I present Exhibit A, likely the only piece that you’ll need. We’re only four games in, man, we’re still not really sure what we’ve got yet.

4. While many members of college football Twitter watched last week’s Georgia State game in anticipation of an upset, Auburn fans are used to the close call against a G5/FCS team. Where does last week rank on the panic meter relative to the close wins against Utah State and Jacksonville State in 2011 and 2015 respectively?

Let’s lay this out...

• Utah State 2011 - Auburn’s first game after winning a national title. The Tigers trailed 21-7 midway through the second half, and 38-28 with a little more than 2 minutes to play. We scored a touchdown, got the onside kick, and scored the game-winner with 30 seconds left.
• Jacksonville State 2015 - Auburn trailed at halftime 10-6, then needed a Jeremy Johnson touchdown pass with 39 seconds left to send the game to overtime. Auburn won when Peyton Barber scored in the top half of the extra frame, and then the defense actually stopped JSU.
• Georgia State 2021 - Auburn trailed 24-12 at halftime, then needed a 98-yard drive and a 4th and 9 touchdown pass with 45 seconds left to take the lead (after the starting quarterback had been benched).

Quite honestly, I never really thought we’d lose to Georgia State. I figured that we’d win in the dumbest way possible and get to talk about it all week leading up to LSU. I didn’t think that we’d lose to JSU either, because we didn’t know that Jeremy Johnson was broken yet. I figured he was injured or something but that we’d pull it out. I absolutely thought we were losing to Utah State. They had Robert Turbin and Chuckie Keeton in the backfield, and had already scored pretty easily throughout the game. I didn’t think we’d be able to stop them and then we needed an onside kick to win too. That was the most unlikely comeback, and it would’ve been the worst purely because I was a decade younger and my happiness was much more closely tied to Auburn football success then. Plus, it would have been so Auburn to win the national championship and then turn around to lose to Utah State.

Maybe we should have lost those games, because losing to Troy didn’t seem to hurt LSU in 2017 when we showed up in Baton Rouge.

5. Say something nice about Bo Nix. Nobody else is, so why don’t you do it.

One of our writers charted all passer ratings from the new millennium to now for Auburn quarterbacks, and it turns out that Bo Nix’s rating in 2021 matches exactly the combined passer rating of all Auburn quarterbacks from 2000-2020. So, we at College and Magnolia have decided that he’s the perfect Auburn quarterback. Legacy, super up and down, can bring the big wins or the really hilarious losses, and is literally the exact average of every Auburn quarterback this century. The more you know.