Andrew Gribble
Auburn University Beat Reporter

Here’s the kicker

How do you take the focus off an offense that has struggled all season, a defense that has given up 59 points in its last two outings and a team that has either tied or been outscored in seven of eight second halves this season?

Open up the kicking job, of course.

Tommy Tuberville said today that he has reopened the competition for Auburn’s field-goal duties. Current starter Wes Byrum is 8-of-14 on the season. Last time I checked, that average only flies in baseball. He’s had at least one miss somewhat affect the outcome in three of Auburn’s four losses, the most recent coming Thursday at West Virginia. The sophomore shanked a 44-yarder that would have tied the game, 20-20, early in the fourth quarter.

The surprising twist on the entire shakeup? Punter Clinton Durst will be joining the fray.

Here’s what the head coach had to say about it:

We’ve got to start making field goals. It’s just become a point now where somebody’s got to step up and do it. We’re getting better in a lot of areas. That’s just one area that we just haven’t had any consistency, so we’re trying to adjust that.

On Durst
He messes around with it. He doesn’t do a whole lot, but just talking to all the guys, he’s pretty much a natural, kicking the ball, punting it. Kicking off. He’s had a bum leg most of the year, but it’s gotten better to where we think we can kick him. He did good today. He made 2 of 3. I think Wesley was 3 out of 3. And Hull was 2 of 3. We’ll put pressure on them all week long. It was against a live rush.

On Byrum’s confidence
I mean, you’ve got to be productive. And he has before, he’s just lost his confidence. He’s got to get his fundamentals back. If he kicked like he did today, he’d be the starter, because he kicked pretty well. But you’ve got to carry it to the game and he knows that. He knows he’s had a rough time, but he’s the most mentally prepared guy that we’ve got.

In other notes of interest, Tuberville said that he had so many hurt players, he wasn’t going to bother running down the list. Banged up corners Jerraud Powers (hamstring) and Neiko Thorpe (ankle) both practiced minimally today, but could potentially both miss Saturday’s game at Ole Miss. If that’s the case, true freshman D’Antoine Hood will get the start, defensive coordinator Paul Rhoads said.

OK, newspaper work calls. They still do print those things. Tomorrow’s notes today will be up shortly.

Andrew Gribble
Auburn University Beat Reporter

Rank ‘em, Dano

Sad news to report today. Auburn is nowhere to be found in either the AP, USA Today coaches’ or even the ESPNU fan poll. No votes were thrown Auburn’s way, either. Troy picked up five in the AP poll.

The BCS standings are due out soon, though, so there’s still hope.

But hope has and continues to dwindle here on the Plains. Auburn is 4-4. It could easily be 4-5 after Saturday’s tussle at Ole Miss. That would force Auburn to win at least one game against No. 8 Georgia or No. 2 Alabama to just be eligible for a bowl no one envisioned the Tigers to play in at the start of the season. Yikes.

Well, it likely won’t be all gloom and doom when we get Tommy Tuberville in an hour or so. The players, who have had a few days off to blow off some steam, will also be talking.

Stay tuned and keep the hope alive. The two college football bigwigs at ESPN.com still have Auburn playing somewhere in December, so that’s gotta mean something.

Andrew Gribble
Auburn University Beat Reporter

Hanging on the telephone

This blog update couldn’t have come much later, but the duties of the print world—and the circumstances of the travel world—caused the delay.

(Side note: Though this blog was delayed because of it, I have to admit how cool it is that in the span of 24 hours, I covered Auburn-WVU with 60,000 fans in attendance and a preps game tonight with a couple thousand. The noise at both was equal.)

Sandwiched in between there, I was able to listen in on Tommy Tuberville’s teleconference, post-WVU meltdown.

The pain was still there, Tuberville said. This was an interesting Tuberville on the other end of the line. He admitted that he didn’t know what was going wrong with his team, particularly in the second half. The Tigers have been outscored 90-46 in the second half this season and have outscored their opponent only once in the final 30 minutes.

Here are a few other things Tuberville touched on during the brief tele-convo.

On the game as a whole:
Twenty hours after the last game, we don’t feel any better than we did last night. We didn’t play very well, didn’t coach very well. I thought we looked much better and improved on offense the first half. It kept us in the ballgame. Defensively we never matched up on them very good. They kept us on our heals. We missed assignments, we missed tackles, we took bad angles and it just wasn’t a very good night on defense. It’s one of those you always dreaded that would happen.

On Jerraud Powers, who, from the sounds of it, won’t be playing next week:
He’s struggling. He struggled last night. Obviously he hasn’t practiced on it a lot and we didn’t want to play him as much as we played him last night, but we lost Neiko Thorpe (ankle) and we had no choice.

He persevered but he was playing on one wheel for most of the second half. They took advantage of it. That goes a long way but his effort, believing in his team, there’s not a better guy in terms of wanting to win games. He did everything he possibly could and was limited.

On Auburn’s 21,321st offensive philosophy this season:
We’re getting better at running the ball. And you’ve got to be able to run it before you throw it. We were the other way around when we were running the spread, but we don’t have a big-play guy on offense in terms of getting the ball to and breaking it 80 yards on a 4-yard pass.
On the guy who most closely resembles that, Mr. Kodi Burns:
I thought as the game went on Kodi played smarter, he played more aggressive.

I’ll tell you, the kids work at it hard, and I’m proud of Kodi, because there’s a lot of pressure on a quarterback, and going into last night, he handled it well. There were some situations that three weeks from now, he’ll do much better, but that’s because he wants to do it and he wants to work at it.

On how tough this stretch has been:
It’s all the same. My job here is to win football games and be a positive example to 120 young guys. They watch how I handle winning and losing also. We all take it tough but you’ve go to drop it and go to the next game win or lose.

When you can’t find the answers and you know they’re there, that’s what gets to you more than anything as a coach.

Andrew Gribble
Auburn University Beat Reporter

Tuberville: ‘We had a lead there, but we were just holding on’

That pretty much sums it up. Now I know why everyone thinks Tommy Tuberville is made for TV. That’s the perfect analysis for yet another ugly, but not really shocking anymore, loss for the Auburn Tigers.

Yes, the defense was gashed, gassed and flat out bad in the second half against the speedy Mountaineers. But the offense didn’t help. Seventeen points sure seemed like it would be enough to win this game between two teams in desperate need of a confidence boost.

But Auburn needed more. This wasn’t the 2008 version of West Virginia. This was the same attack that blitzed through the Big East last season—with the exception of that ugly Backyard Brawl loss—and torched Oklahoma for 525 yards in the Fiesta Bowl.

The defense didn’t get it, of course, and here we are. The Tigers are 4-4 with four games to play. They need two wins just to be bowl-eligible. Unless something wildly dramatic happens to everyone’s favorite team on the Plains or its remaining four opponents, the Tigers will be underdogs in all but one of their remaining contests.

Something needs to change, both on offense and defense, before this team wins again. (OK, they could stick a few club lacrosse players on the offensive line with the tuba player behind center and still squeak out a win against UT-Martin, but that win needs to be convincing heading into the Georgia game and the Iron Bowl.)

Here’s what Tuberville, defensive coordinator Paul Rhoads and a few downtrodden Tigers had to say after this latest meltdown.

Tuberville:
The key to the second half is we just didn’t do anything with the ball the first few times we had it and put our defense in a bind then it got away from us.

On West Virginia:
They did a good job mixing it up throwing the quick passes on the outside. Pat White is as good as you will see now. The kid can play. It is hard to put a guy on Pat White and then put one on Noel Devine and then try to one on one tackle them. It puts you in a bind. I am proud of our guys with the effort that they
gave.

In the second half, it looked like we got stunned a little bit on the first two drives on offense and we just never recovered.

On Mr. Kodi Burns:
I thought Kodi did a lot better. The key for Kodi in what he is going to do for Auburn the next few years is he is going to give you that extra run down the field and that extra guy. We haven*t had that. This was the first game. I think he had (82) yards with the ball in his hand. We didn*t give him a lot of time when he was in the pocket. He made a couple of pretty good throws and had one dropped there at the end. We played with a lot of passion the first half and Kodi was a part of that because he was making plays in there.

Rhoads
The effort was good. The fitting, for the most part, guys were where they were supposed to be. But I believe we tackled horrendously.

On those two fast guys from the Mountain state:
A lot of credit goes to Noel Devine and Pat White and trying to tackle guys like that. He looked like a greased pig a couple of times. We had four or five guys with arms around him and couldn’t bring him down.

Burns
On the first half:
It looked real good in the first half. We came out with fire in our eyes and intense and we did some really good things in the first half and obviously we fell short in the second half and we lost so we really have to get a lot better finishing ball games.

...and the second half:
We are just not executing. We had many plays and many opportunities to come away with field goals or touchdowns and we didn*t do either of it. We scored 17 points in the first half and we didn*t put up any points in the second half. Obviously, we have to get a lot better finishing the second half.

Cornerback Jerraud Powers
It’s real tough. Anytime you lose it’s tough, no matter what game you’re playing or what level it is. When you lose it’s tough. Coming in here to Morgantown, we really thought we had a chance to get a big victory on the road and boost that confidence by getting back in the win column. To come in here and get a loss is real tough.

*The blog will be driving through the wilderness and 5,000 feet in the air for the better half of tomorrow. Check back later in the afternoon for some follow-up.

Andrew Gribble
Auburn University Beat Reporter

“The Pick” (and other excruciating Auburn-WVU minutae)

MORGANTOWN, W.Va—Mountaineers pull it off 20-17 in overtime.

With that out of the way, it’s about two hours from kickoff and Milan Puskar Stadium is slowly filling up with bundled-up, yellow-shirted, West Virginia co-eds. The difference between the MPS and Jordan-Hare Stadium? Those students are perched in the upper deck, mostly in section 208, directly facing the press box. I lack binoculars, but what from what I saw on the drive in, I’m betting the majority of them are quenching their thirst out of bottles previously shoved into their socks.

It’s a different looking stadium, a bit 70s-looking, but it should be a good atmosphere. Plenty of Auburn fans here, as mentioned in the last post. Saw two No. 34 Bo Jackson jerseys on my way in, so it’s safe to say these are your true Tigers fans in attendance.

And, before I do work on the pre-game spread, here’s plenty of excruciating gametime minutae to think about, mill over or completely disregard.

- Auburn is one of just 10 teams that has not allowed more than three rushing touchdowns this season.
- Dating back to 2005, WVU has 125 rushing touchdowns. That’s an average of 3.3 per game.
- The Tigers have put up 401 yards of total offense in their last two games. West Virginia has been good for 601.
- This is Auburn’s latest non-conference road game since Oct. 27, 1979, when it traveled to Wake Forest.
- This is the farthest north Auburn has traveled since 1941, when it flew (I’m assuming, if not horse-drawn carriage) to Philadelphia to take on Villanova.
- This is the Tigers’ first non-conference road game since 2003. That one was against Georgia Tech.
- Auburn is 5-2-1 all-time against the teams that currently comprise the Big East. Tommy Tuberville is 1-2, the most recent loss coming last year against South Florida. West Virginia, meanwhile, is 21-17-2 against the SEC but is currently riding a four-game winning streak.
- West Virginia’s senior class is 37-7, on pace to be the best in school history.
- ESPN’s Rece Davis, Dr. Lou Holtz and Mark May will be on announcing duties tonight. Erin Andrews will be manning (or is it womaning?) the sidelines, likely covered head to toe like that kid from “Christmas Story.“ If you can’t spot Tuberville, he’ll be the only one looking warmer than Andrews.
- Pat White needs 356 rushing yards to become the all-time leading rushing quarterback. Don’t expect it to happen tonight, as Auburn allows 107.9 yards per game on the ground.
- West Virginia is 36-94 against ranked teams.
- Four West Virginia players (White, his brother Coley, Ellis Lankster and Trippe Hale) were born in the Yellowhammer State.
- Ben Tate needs 172 rushing yards to become the 13th player in Auburn history with 2,000 for his career.
- Auburn is 68-9 when scoring more than 20 points under Tuberville.
- West Virginia State Police troopers Glenn Doyle and Randy Schambach will be manning the sidelines of Milan Pusker Stadium tonight. Countless others will be guarding the town’s furniture.