IRON ROLLED: Rough season ends in a thud

TUSCALOOSA — Week by week since Tony Franklin’s dismissal, the talk about Auburn’s offense, specifically quarterback Kodi Burns, was optimistic. Improvement, coaches said, was being made every game.

Day by day since Auburn’s surprising loss at Vanderbilt, the Tigers defense has talked about getting healthy. Just wait, players said, when the whole unit is back to full strength.

After Saturday’s 36-0 Iron Bowl blanking by No. 1 Alabama, Auburn will have more than nine months to think about what could have been of a season that started with a No. 10 ranking and a projected spot in the SEC Conference game.

More importantly, though, the focus will steer toward how it can prevent 2008 from ever happening again.

“In this conference and in college football, you’re going to have up and down years,” said coach Tommy Tuberville, who lost just his third Iron Bowl and first since 2001, snapping a six-game streak. “I have total confidence that I can get this thing turned around.

“It was my fault that we got it this way in terms of our offense.”

Saturday’s Iron Bowl blowout — the most lopsided on Auburn’s side since 1962 (38-0) — and the Tigers’ 5-7 season as a whole was about more than just a lousy, unidentifiable offense.

It was about a team, on both sides of the ball and special teams, that couldn’t put together an entire game from start to finish.

It was about a team that didn’t make the few plays it did last year just to go 9-4, a major contributor toward the Tigers’ bloated preseason expectations.

And, excuses acknowledged, it was about a lot of injuries.

“Throughout the season, we were a better football team than just winning five games,” Tuberville said. “We just found ways not to win a couple of games. We found ways not to push forward.”

Auburn found every way Saturday in the 73rd Iron Bowl to lose a game few thought it would win.

The end result just wasn’t supposed to be this ugly.

Not once, from opening kickoff to Alabama’s final kneel-down, did Auburn ever have a whiff of optimism against the only undefeated team in a BCS conference.

Few have, but Auburn didn’t do itself any favors.

“We just never got any kind of momentum at all,” Tuberville said. “We just kind of shot ourselves in our foot.”

The foot-shooting kicked off early, as Auburn failed to capitalize on generous field position throughout the first quarter.

Kodi Burns saw pressure he hadn’t seen all season, and it was apparent from his first throw of the game.

When he was rushed, Burns rifled his passes, which usually sailed well over his receivers’ heads or directly at the ground. When he had time — an extremely rare occurrence on this day – Burns waited, and waited, but rarely found anyone open.

“I didn’t think Kodi played very well today, but I didn’t think any of them did,” offensive play-caller Steve Ensminger said. “There’s a lot of improvement that has to be made by
everybody.”

That improvement, Auburn’s catalyst since Franklin’s departure, vanished once Alabama began doing what it’s done all season: running behind its massive offensive line.

Glen Coffee’s 41-yard, second-quarter touchdown run put Auburn behind 10-0, the largest deficit it had seen since Nov. 1 against Ole Miss.

Auburn allowed 234 rushing yards on the day, but it wasn’t what ultimately killed the streak.

“The thing that can’t happen to you on the road, happened to us,” Tuberville said. “We turned around, and we turned it over.”

The Tigers dropped the ball twice on back-to-back possessions in the third quarter, once by Brad Lester and once by Burns. The Tide promptly turned the turnovers into two, knee-clubbing touchdowns. 

One more Mark Ingram touchdown run with 2:10 to play in the third quarter capped a 19-0 Alabama quarter, in which Auburn gained just 29 yards of offense and had the ball for just 4:32.

“They just got the best of us, basically,” cornerback Jerraud Powers said.

Even if Auburn had brought its absolute best, it wouldn’t have necessarily translated into a seventh straight Iron Bowl victory. It just might have made the end result a little more pleasing on the eyes.
Alabama was the better team Saturday and the better team all season. For that, the Tide has an SEC Championship game next week against Florida and a potential national championship to
ponder.

Auburn, meanwhile, has 280 days to think about what went wrong before it can try to make things right in 2009.

“It’s hard to take what we went through this year, but sometimes it makes you even hungrier when you go through something like this,” Tuberville said. “We might’ve needed a setback, we might’ve needed an adjustment because we’ve been awfully good for a long time.”