Haha. Haha. Hahahaha.
Isn’t it a great day?
Maybe you have to grow up in it. Maybe you get it passed on from your
parents. Maybe it’s the result of just
one too many unfriendly playground encounters.
Maybe it’s in the water.
Whatever. There’s something very
special and very deep-seated about an in-state college football rivalry. People who don’t have this life experience think
they understand about “bragging rights”.
They have this idea that means that when your team wins, you get to walk
up at any time to a fan of the other team and say things like “29-13” real
quiet-like and then just go on with your day and you feel better and they feel
worse. Or that you get a new t shirt with
a funny cartoon and the score on it that you wear every Saturday all winter no matter
how cold it gets. Or maybe you get a new
bumper sticker for your car. (Or maybe
you get one and put it on someone else’s car, maybe late at night. We’ve just heard about that. A friend of ours knew someone who did that, ok?) Or maybe it’s as simple as
you get to say something like “nah nah nah nannnah our team beat your team so
hahahahaha.”
Of course, all that’s true.
But if you grow up like we did, the real bragging rights are not what
you say out loud, they are what you carry inside. You can wake up on a crummy morning, the
weather is cold and wet, somebody left the toaster setting too high and your
last Pop Tart gets burnt to a crisp setting off the smoke detector, then the car
won’t start…. And just as you are about
to get really upset, frustrated at the world, you can take a deep breath, relax
and say, yeah, well, today isn’t too good, but we at least we beat the
stuffings out of [fill in name of your own mouth-breathing, slope-headed, Neanderthal
rival]. Things just seem better. Those are bragging rights.
Thanks, Commissioner, for documenting this win. And thanks for your insight about the game
that made it seem even sweeter than it seemed in real time. We don’t know about you, but down here at the
Tire Store we can get pretty enthusiastically upset, even when the team is actually
doing fairly well. One yard rushing in the
second half? Seriously? We’d have guessed pretty wrong. Those Grades are excellent and the reasons
for them even better.
Regular readers know that we rarely pick out individual players
to talk about, but I think we all owe a great big thank you to Adam Griffith,
and the head coach who decided to stick with him as he struggled early in the
season. The Commissioner already did an
excellent job of reporting on exactly what he did, but his kicks on Saturday
covered 215 yards, not far off the 260 that the Auburn offense covered on
Saturday. As you might recall, we are
big fans of kicking off the football into the dadgum end zone. Check that box for young Mr. Griffith, too. Who would have thought, two games into the season,
that we’d have a deadly sharpshooter at place kicker by now? Well done.
Auburn Being Auburn: You really wouldn’t put something on
the playing surface to gain a footing advantage, would you? That’s the sort of bush league, hicks-in-the-sticks
foolishness that’s pulled by teams who try fake punt catches, or turn around to
the line of scrimmage and snap it in two seconds, or play music and noise over
the loudspeaker system while the other team’s offense is over the ball, or
light up their gigantic Cattle-O-Tron in blazing colors in the opponent’s
faces, or so lose control of themselves that their assistant coach’s mouth
costs their team 15 yards, or they hide a little player behind a big offensive line
so maybe the defense won’t see him….
Those aren't the tactics of a SEC contender; more like some cellar dweller
with a high school-level coach. It does make
us wonder, though. I’m pretty sure you
can major in growing grass at Auburn, so you’d think their field would be one
of the best in the conference.
Officiating: As soon
as we first saw Tom “Tex” Ritter’s pasty complexion on camera we knew it was
going to be a long evening of peculiar, inexplicable calls. His crew did not disappoint. Ritter himself was giving the signal that means
a passed ball has been touched by a defensive player and that pass interference
rules do not apply. Problem was, he was
giving that signal on a kickoff, when
in fact the replay showed the ball had not been touched. We think it so confused Mullaney that he
picked up the ball and ran it out of the endzone when if he had just touched it
and taken a knee, Alabama would have had the ball at the 25. Or that’s what the rules say, who knows with
these guys?
On a critical down we caught them in a substitution tangle. They had 12 on the field on defense. They did realize it and one of their players tried to get off the field, but didn't make it before we snapped the ball. That foul is illegal substitution and carries a five-yard penalty. In this, case however, I guess the guy figured, what the heck, in for a penny, and tried to help defense they play. That's different. That's illegal participation and carries a 15-yard penalty. It was a complete mess and Ritter's clue was running around like the Keystone Kops trying to figure it out.
There were gaffes and miscues
all evening long. It’s reaching that
time of year when we feel like we ought to send apology emails to schools who
are going to bowl games excited about playing an extra game, end up
with a SEC officiating crew, and spending the whole night wondering about the bizzaro
stuff they have to deal with.
Broadcasting: CBS,
are you guys really trying anymore? Gary and Verne are the face/voice of their programming,
but our dissatisfaction goes far beyond these two. Sure, they screw up the names even though
they’ve done 6 or 7 of our games this season.
And sure, Gary talks waaaaayyyy too much. They don’t make the production decisions,
which are regularly awful.
Just a few “for instances”.
We very much agree with the point that Alabama’s offensive performance
was hindered because Drake was not available.
But to illustrate the point, wouldn’t it be better to show a couple of
highlight runs or catches from him rather than super slo mo repeats of him
breaking his bones playing football? Just
a thought, unless you just like the agonizing stuff better.
We hate it when we have to “go up to the booth” meaning that
we see Verne and Gary’s grinning mugs instead of the action on the field. We don’t think they like it any better than
we do. Some producer/director sure does,
though.
We are quite sure that Tim Cook’s teenage nephew is a “nice
young man”. Did we really need to see
and hear about that on the sideline in the 4th quarter, rather than
action on the field or sideline? If we
recall correctly, Denzel Devall had been helped from the field at that
point. An injury report would have been
nice. Imagine, something related to
football.
And if you were playing that drinking game where you take a
drink for every time they referred to or showed video of the “Kick Six” you
probably missed the entire fourth quarter and still have a headache.
As to a new and irritating line of coverage from V&G, begging
the Auburn coaching staff to call a time out late in the game and then making
some remark like “oh, thank heavens” when they finally did, sounded just a tiny
bit biased, didn’t you think? What’s the
difference between that and saying “Lane, please give it to Henry here” and saying
“great” when he got a first down?
Given the number of commercials they air and therefore the money they make unnecessarily turning college football games into 4+ hour marathons, you'd think they could do better. Silly you.
We were excited after CBS picked up the Mississippi State
game because we knew CBS had used up their allotment of times to show
Alabama. However, they paid off ESPN or
someone so they could have an exception for this past weekend’s game. And now we get them again this Saturday. Wonder if Vegas is offering a prop bet on how
many times we hear the name Tebow?
Deliver me. Maybe we’ll send Pee
Wee over to Verne and Gary’s houses next Friday and have him take out their
valve core stems so they can’t make it to the airport.
That said, if you haven’t heard the Auburn Radio Network
announcers’ discussion of the late hit/ out-of-bounds penalty and the succeeding
Muschamp head explosion it’s worth listening to; well, if you are the kind of
person who slows down to look at auto accidents it’s worth listening to. At one point, one of them (don’t remember if
it was Laurel or Hardy) “defies” you to name a year that Alabama was penalized
more in the Iron Bowl game than Auburn was.
If you selected either “this Saturday” or the dim, hazy olden days of “2013”
you’d be successful. We are pretty sure
towards the end you can hear the sound of a Kleenex being pulled from its box
in the background.
Enough of that. A great
victory, though in some ways it was just processing another opponent with a
lousy conference record (2-6 this year, 4-4 last year, if you are counting)
standing between this Alabama team and one of its very significant goals,
namely an appearance in the SEC Championship Game. (While we are at it, a special Thanksgiving
thought to that fellow over at Arkansas who threw the ball backwards over his
head in over time).
Let’s all turn our thoughts to trying to win back-to-back
SEC Championships, a feat which hasn’t been achieved since 1997-98. Otherwise, we know all about Coach Saban’s
24-hour rule, but in this case, he’ll just have to cut us some slack. Because we’ll think about this last game at
least all year long. That’s just the way
it is.
Roll Tide, everyone.
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