Thursday, never looking back

By Andrew Gribble
Auburn University Beat Reporter
Published: October 30, 2008

Bonus points for anyone who knows the song from which that headline originated. Gold stars all around if you can name the band, too.

With it being a Thursday and all, and with the Tigers holding their standard brief practice, there’s not much news to report today. Actually, if you’re looking for hard news, I’ve got none.

But, when Tommy Tuberville speaks, it’s always news, right? Here are a few of the highlights.

Will he and his staff do anything differently at halftime Saturday?
We might go scrimmage at halftime…There’s really no answer to it other than the fact we need something good to happen to us when we first go out there. We’ve gone back and looked and it looks like we’re waiting for things to happen instead of making things to happen – coaching and playing. We’ve got some things in mind that we want to try to do if the situation arises.

There’s no miracle formula. We’ve just got to go out and play better and play for four quarters and coach better and coach for four quarters. 

Is Ole Miss’ Wildcat formation similar to what Houston Nutt ran at Arkansas?
Yeah, pretty similar…There’s not a lot you can do with it. You can do a lot out of it, but it takes away from your other offense. It just gives you a change of pace and gives your quarterback a little bit of a break, puts it in the hands of another guy who might be a little bit more dynamic of running the quarterback draws and things like that. It changes your mindset on defense. It’s just kind of a change-of-gear formation and you have to have a couple ways to play it so if one doesn’t work you can go to the other.

You’re 4-4, Ole Miss is 4-4. It seems like the end of the world here. They’re having a great time in Oxford. Go.
I don’t think they’d won a conference game for a while, for a couple of years. Their last winning season, 2005?

It’s all relative to what you’ve done in the past and what you’re doing now. Everybody looks at us saying something’s wrong that we’ve lost four games. You look back and we’ve won 50 games in the last five years.

It’s hard for us to take. You think the fans it’s hard to take. It’s harder for the players and coaches to take it than it is for the fans. It eats at us because we know we’re better than how we’ve played. We know we played a lot of good teams.

I put them in a bind in the middle of the year. I told everybody that. We should be a lot better right now but we’re kinda in the third or fourth game of the year instead of the eighth game in terms of what we’re doing now on offense and defense.

As he said Wednesday, the only player certain to miss Saturday’s game is cornerback Neiko Thorpe (ankle).

More to come later.