Franklin: Auburn offense 'so close'

Tony Franklin knows what it’s like for his spread offense to struggle.

He’s seen it before. Early in his first year at Troy in 2006, Franklin’s system wasn’t doing much. Actually, he said, it looked a lot like his Auburn offense did this past Saturday at Mississippi State.

“I think against North Texas (while coaching at Troy) we had 30 or 40 yards at half and we finished the game with maybe 100-and-something. Maybe,” Franklin said reflecting back to the 2006 season at Troy. “The defense played exactly the way ours did (Saturday vs. MSU) — made every play you could possibly imagine and figured out a way to win the ballgame.”

It was something Franklin probably would have liked to forget, but Sunday, when he got back from Starkville, Miss., the Auburn offensive coordinator had some help remembering.

“… I keep going back because a lot of my friends have sent me messages or called me or whatever — some of the guys that were with me at Troy, they go back to a couple of games that we had at Troy,” Franklin said. “… Those guys were just reminding me of how ugly it was. It was a lot uglier then, and we got it fixed. We figured it out. We had great unity and we fixed any problems we had in the chemistry part of making sure we had people in the right places doing the right thing. We did all that stuff, and it worked.

“We just kept winning ugly. We won ugly the whole year. We didn’t beat anybody bad until the bowl game, but we won. Hopefully, we’ll do the same thing here and I think we can.”

Franklin also knows that Auburn can’t wait for a bowl game for its offense to start clicking. If that happens, there might not be a bowl game.

But, he says, it shouldn’t take that long. And he’s hoping it’ll start today against LSU.

“We’re so close,” Franklin said. “It’s scary how close we are. We’re so much closer.”

Senior right tackle Jason Bosley agrees.

“If you watch the film, it’s frustrating because we’re right there,” Bosley said. “We just have to go back to work on Tuesday, stay positive, get after it and try to get better.”

So how do you get there?

Once again, Franklin goes back to his time at Troy.

“We probably had some chemistry issues that we fixed,” he said. “Second of all, we had way too much in our playbook in what we were doing. We fixed that, too. We’re going to do the same things here. I feel like we have the same issues here.”

One issue Franklin said he’s never struggled with has been red-zone scoring. Currently, Auburn is last in the SEC in the red zone, scoring just 69 percent of the time (9-for-13). The Tigers have scored five touchdowns (four rushing) and are 4-for-6 on field goals.

“That’s new for me,” Franklin said. “I’ve never been bad in the red zone before. More than likely, it’s two things. One is mistakes. Two is me.

“I’ve not done a good job in the red zone. I need to do a better job of going back to my feel and my instinct versus probably more game-planning. I’ve done more game-planning here. I’m going to go back to feel and instinct more than game-planning.”

Basically, Franklin said, he’s thinking too much.

“I’ve called more stuff off a script in the red zone than I ever have before,” he said. “I don’t need to do it. I need to go back to gut instinct and feel. I’m better at that.

“For me, it’s that I’m trying to make an adjustment to different talent, different types of players, different offensive linemen. Sometimes, I forgot that they still outnumber you even though you have really good O-linemen. When they outnumber you, sometimes you have to do something different than what you wrote down on a piece of paper.”

The good thing, says Franklin, is everything is fixable. Just like they were at Troy. And, of course, playing bad and still being able to win sure helps a lot.

“We went through the same growing process at Troy,” Franklin said. “It was ugly there. I didn’t expect it to be this ugly here.

“The bottom line is that, as ugly as it was, we won. If we can be ugly and win or be pretty and lose, I’ll take ugly and win every time.”

mszvetitz@oanow.com | 737-2513