Everything is bigger in Texas, from the portion-sizes at the Barbecue, to the hundreds of miles of land that make up the Lone Star State. And never has this been more true in College Football than now. Between the Longhorns’ revival under Coach Sarkisian, and the long-awaited reinstatement of the Texas v Texas A&M annual rivalry, things have gotten all the more interesting, even more so now that Arch Manning has finally taken the reigns for the Longhorns as a Redshirt Sophomore, with Heisman and draft implications already the focal point of the conversation surrounding the program.
And, as though the stars are aligning with Manning’s first season as the starting quarterback, their opening test as the #1 team in the nation is against none other than the #3 ranked Ohio State Buckeyes. Longhorn’s fans are either going to walk away from the game at an all-time-high, or calling for Manning to be benched at the first sign of trouble, a familiar refrain they sang for Quinn Ewers early in his tenure.
So, as the dedicated sportswriter I am, I decided to make the long twelve-hour drive to Texas. What— the Texas Ohio State game is in Columbus, Ohio, you say? Well yes, of course I know this! I certainly would be abashed to show up at Texas Memorial Stadium and find that I’m the only one who is cheering on a Texas away-game from their home-stadium. No, my destination isn’t Austin, it’s Waco, home of the Baylor Bears.
So yes, while the rest of the country turns their attention to the Top 4 showdown up north, I find myself excitable as we drive due west to see two unranked non-conference opponents fare off underneath early autumn weather, and Friday night stadium lights, as the Baylor Bears prepare to take on my favorite team: the Auburn Tigers.
Now, as an aside, this particular article will be unapologetically Auburn focused. I’ll touch all of the bases, of course, and give a little story for both of these teams, but ultimately, I’ll be imparting my great wisdom on the Tigers team today. Do note, I will have a general post-week recap blog that will be up shortly, if it isn’t up already. There you can see a more general, and unbiased, overview on the sport as a whole.
Now, back to this Auburn team…
You can endure scarce more torture than being an Auburn fan, where wins feel seldom, and championships are a distant memory. The last three years the Tigers have had the distinct displeasure of boasting losing records, and one bowl appearance that manifested into an embarrassing loss to Maryland. Things haven’t necessarily been on the decline, they’ve reached rock bottom, and we haven’t seen the signs of them climbing out.
In my first blog, I wrote about the story line that is sports…. The one that forms from following a team year-to-year, seeing both the good and the bad, the triumphs and heartbreak. This is very much applicable to college football, where every Saturday is another chance for this wild sport to surprise you. But, in the worthwhile stories, you have a share of both conflict, and the act of overcoming the conflict. In Auburn, this has not been the case. Since their memorable 2019 season under freshman(now NFL starter) Bo Nix, they’ve endured five years of conflict, with little in-between the struggle to keep optimism high. They’ve turned over two coaches, and the seat is hot on their third. Where’s the light supposedly at the end of this tunnel?
To be sure, it has not been all bad. Between the back-to-back losing seasons that has opened Coach Hugh Freeze’s tenure at Auburn, behind the scenes he has slowly rebuilt the ghost of a roster that Bryan Harsin left behind. His greatest accomplishments on the recruiting front is two-fold: the premier receiving core in the trio of Coleman-Singleton-Simmons, and repairing the Tiger’s pitiful Offensive Line which had been ailing Auburn for over a decade. Outside of that, it’s been two straight top-ten recruiting classes overall, and the team acquired a crucial piece in Deuce Knight, the talented five-star Mississippi quarterback recruit that has the makings of the next Auburn legend.
But Deuce is clearly the Tigers’ future, not their present. As exciting as the 2019 season was, Auburn’s last true-freshman quarterback experiment didn’t lead to the greatest result on the field, and if you are Hugh Freeze, you can’t risk hedging your bets behind Knight, when you are in a must-win-now mode.
So the answer was obviously the Portal. And so Auburn reached their hands into the cookie-jar, and pulled out two quarterbacks to fill out their backfield: Ashton Daniels, brought in as more of a depth-piece(expected to be listed behind Deuce in the depth-chart) and Jackson Arnold, once a five-star highly touted high school kid, whose time at Oklahoma had come to a rocky finish. Entering fall-camp, the general vibe around the program, and fan-base, was that the team was talented, but nothing about our guys behind center were giving any confidence that Freeze is going to post a respectable record this season.
This roster around the quarterback should be enough to win ball games. Now, the story of this season—and perhaps of the Freeze era—rests on whether Jackson Arnold and the play-calling can find that breakthrough. The goal is clear: to finally climb from the melancholy of mediocrity to the triumph this program is searching for so desperately. It all starts tonight, under the lights in Waco.
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