Auburn football plans to raise the bar in 2010

HOOVER – Throw away the “Do What We Do” T-shirts. There’s a new motto for the 2010 Auburn Tigers.

Eight ain’t it.

“Eight ain’t it because eight (wins) ain’t going to get you nowhere,” senior linebacker Josh Bynes said Friday during Auburn’s rotation on the final day of SEC Media Days. “It will get us back to the Outback Bowl or the Champs Sports Bowl, something like that. That’s not what our plan is this year.”

For the 2009 team, led by first-year coach Gene Chizik, eight wins and an Outback Bowl victory against Northwestern was a sign that Auburn, post-Tommy Tuberville, was ahead of schedule. It was a team with just 75 scholarship players, after all, and it was a team that often couldn’t afford to give its best players a snap off from time to time.

Those same variables aren’t at play this year.

A stacked, nearly 100-percent qualified freshman class promises to fill the gaps on the depth chart, especially on defense. Chizik is in his second year – a year when Nick Saban, Les Miles and Urban Meyer won at least 11 games with their respective teams — and is the only coach in the conference to retain his entire staff of assistants from 2009.

Before this season, Auburn’s five fifth-year seniors were the only players who played for the same coordinator in back-to-back seasons.

“At this time last year, we were trying to figure out who are football team was,” Chizik said. “We were trying to break the huddle.

“Now, we’re trying to really focus on being a great football team.”

That’s why the Tigers, who were projected by the media to finish third in the SEC West — two spots higher than they were slotted in 2009 – faced a significantly different array of questions Friday.

“Rebuilding” was replaced with “building off the freshly-laid foundation.”

“Reviving the Auburn fan base” was switched out for “living up to Auburn fans’ sky-high expectations.”

“Bottom line, we’re in a day and age where everybody wants to win,” Chizik said. “That’s not going to change.”

But it has, Bynes said.

Sure, Auburn’s players and coaches said winning the SEC is the goal every season, regardless of the mitigating circumstances. But when players said it before the 2009 season, they were merely repeating the default answer programmed into their competitive brains, Bynes said.

“We were more saying it than feeling it,” Bynes said. “This year, since the spring, I told coach that I’ve got a feeling this is going to be the year. It’s a great feeling, and we know what we’re capable of doing. We have the ability, the talent, players at the right position.”

Senior left tackle Lee Ziemba represented Auburn’s offense Friday, while the questionable, yet still veteran-heavy, defense was dually spoken for by Bynes and six-year senior Aairon Savage. Bynes and Savage had many more questions to answer about a 2009 unit that ranked 68th in total defense.

Bynes, who played nearly every snap in 2009 on the way to a team-high 104 tackles, has a few more friends in his position meetings these days. The influx of 31 freshmen (four linebackers) will be especially beneficial for him and Craig Stevens on a unit that truly did not have any reliable back-ups in 2009.

“We’re going to close that gap tremendously,” Bynes said. “It all starts with what we do from Day 1 at camp when we get these freshmen
involved.”

Ziemba, meanwhile, served primarily as Cameron Newton’s press agent.

With the projected starting quarterback absent from the media circus, Ziemba fielded numerous questions about Newton’s potential, the added contributions he would bring to Gus Malzahn’s fast-paced offense and everything else outside the cereal he eats for breakfast.

“There’s obviously been some big expectations,” Bynes said. “And the way he’s handling all them, the way he’s not just living by the hype but working hard, being an example to the rest of us is pretty special.“

When Auburn won the SEC and eventually finished the 2004 season undefeated, it did so after the media projected Georgia to win it all that year. When Auburn was projected to win the conference in 2003 and 2006, it didn’t make the championship game either season.

Certainly, anything can happen this season. But for one day, anything was possible in the world of Auburn football.

“I’ve been on championship teams. I’ve been on undefeated teams,” Chizik said. “And I think it’s kind of like the perfect storm.”

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