AUBURN NOTEBOOK: Tuberville still looking for answers

Twenty-four hours later, the pain hadn’t gone anywhere and Tommy Tuberville was still stumped.

How can a team that has looked so good in most of its eight first halves look so bad in the final 30 minutes?

The head coach will have to get back to you on that one.

“We’ve got to find some answers there,” Tuberville said Friday in a teleconference. “They’ve got to be there somewhere.”

Don’t get Tuberville wrong. He has a few ideas, and this week won’t be the first time he and his staff will try to figure out what goes wrong after halftime.

But if the preceding weeks’ letdowns were a tap on the shoulder, Thursday night’s meltdown at West Virginia was an uppercut to the jaw.

“We’re more physical in the first half then we are in the second half,” Tuberville said. “We didn’t block very physical, we didn’t run the ball as physical, we didn’t tackle the same way we should have.

“But again, West Virginia had a lot to say about that.”

The Tigers’ defense looked completely flat from the middle of the second quarter until late in the fourth quarter, when scatback Noel Devine ran 30 yards into the end zone untouched to cap the Mountaineers’ 34-17 victory. The unit surrendered a season-high 445 yards of total offense, 398 over the final three quarters and “tackled horrendously,” defensive coordinator Paul Rhoads said.

The Tigers have been outscored 90-46 in the second half this season. Auburn has outscored just one team in the second half this season, Louisiana-Monroe in the season opener.

One hunch Tuberville said he had was that, because a number of players are inexperienced, the veterans are trying to do too much. The trickle-down effect results in a situation where nobody fulfills their personal responsibility and the unit, as a whole, feels the wrath.

Obviously, before next Saturday’s clash at Ole Miss, that has to be fixed, Tuberville said.

“Mentally and physically, we don’t play as tough. We don’t play as reckless,” Tuberville said. “When you start losing your confidence, things kind of go downhill.”

Burns is the word
It was Kodi Burns first start as the full-time quarterback and just Auburn’s second game running the offense under Steve Ensminger, according to Tuberville.

Both drew the coach’s approval, but there’s still work to be done.

Tuberville was particularly pleased with his sophomore quarterback, who was asked the majority of the time to take a backseat and simply hand the ball off. During Auburn’s record-setting 20-play drive in the first quarter Thursday, Burns was asked to throw just three times.

“I thought he handled the offense very well in terms of what we were doing,” Tuberville said. “Again, he has a lot of room for improvement, which gives us a lot of hope.”

Auburn racked up 17 points in the first 20 minutes before it hit a wall. The Tigers mustered just 82 yards in the second half.

“We’re trying to find somehow, some way to put four quarters together,” Tuberville said. “It looked like (Thursday) when we were fresh, we were able to do that, then we just kind of ran out of steam.”

Powers outage
Jerraud Powers wasn’t himself Thursday night.

The junior cornerback, back for his first action since the second quarter against Vanderbilt on Oct. 4, was noticeably slower and was picked on throughout the Tigers’ loss. Powers injured his hamstring against the Commodores and had been held out of practice until three days before Thursday’s kickoff.

The rust certainly showed, and complications were compounded when his backup, freshman Neiko Thorpe, went down with an ankle injury.

“He persevered, but he was playing on one wheel for most of the second half,” Tuberville said. “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.”

Tuberville wasn’t sure if Powers would be available next Saturday at Ole Miss.

Hard times
Tuberville has lost three consecutive games on just three separate occasions in his 10 years with the Tigers. He’s two losses away from matching the five-game losing streak that struck right in the middle of his inaugural season at Auburn.

So is this, losing at Vanderbilt, at home to Arkansas and at West Virginia, the toughest moment of his career to date?

Yes and no, Tuberville said.

“It’s all the same,” Tuberville said. “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 got to drop it and go to the next game, win or lose.”

“It’s tough. It hurts, as hard as you work and you know how many people are counting on you every game.”

Though it may not be the toughest, per say, it could be the most frustrating. Not being able to put all three phases of the game together in one effort has bothered Tuberville.

“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,” he said.

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