Auburn gymnastics looks to snap 96-meet losing streak to Alabama

By Andrew Gribble
Auburn University Beat Reporter
Published: February 26, 2009

Pictured above is your Auburn gymnastics coach Jeff Thompson. He likes graphs. We’ll get to that soon.

Earlier today he spoke with a handful of reporters about tomorrow’s mega-huge meet at No. 11 Alabama. No. 5 Auburn has lost 96 consecutive meets to the Gym Tiders. That’s a lot.

Anyways, Thompson went to the trouble of breaking down Auburn’s and Alabama’s scores throughout this season. He even crunched the numbers and averaged out the scores. They came out exactly equal.

I’m kind of a math geek. Kind of a dork. So I put all their scores in. I put our scores in and their scores in. And then I just clicked “line graph.“ It’s kind of funny that the Auburn graph came out in blue and the Alabama graph came out in red. I didn’t set that up, I promise. But you can kind of see the trend how we’re going up here and they’re headed down.

Yes, Coach Thompson is this geek.

If that’s so, consider us big fans of geeks here at Fourth and Blog. We appreciate Thompson’s affable nature and seemingly care-free attitude toward a subject that might elicit awkward silence and angry stares from others in the coaching world. He even offered us a replica copy of the pictured graph. We declined. The picture more than sufficed.

As for tomorrow’s meet, which we will be attending, it doesn’t appear that Auburn will ever get a better chance to snap the uber-streak.

The Tigers have been rolling of late and have shown stready improvement from meet to meet. The Gym Tiders, meanwhile, have gone through an uncharacteristic swoon. They’ve lost their last two meets, in which they failed to record a score of 196 or higher. Alabama coach Sarah Peterson isn’t exactly used to this kind of adversity and has made it very clear that Alabama has been handicapped with injuries and youth this season.

Thompson could care less about Alabama’s alleged struggles.

Coaches have different personalities. I guess when you have a 30-year streak going and it might come to an end, you would want people to think there was a good reason. We’re going to put our best kids out there, they’re going to put their best kids out there and hopefully the judges decide we’re the better team.

(Photo credit: My BlackBerry)