Auburn feels uniquely ready to navigate unusual season

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Auburn feels uniquely ready to navigate unusual season

By Tom Green | tgreen@al.com

6-8 minutes

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Navigating the challenges presented by attempting to play football in the midst of an ongoing pandemic is something Auburn has been dealing with for more than five months now, dating back to the original suspension of on-campus team activities in mid-March.

There’s one thing No. 11 Auburn couldn’t prepare for then, however — the idea of prepping for a season in which it didn’t know who it would play or when until there were fewer than six weeks to go until the season opener. Teams typically know their schedule months in advance — and, in the case of nonconference games, oftentimes years in advance. All that changed at the end of July, when the SEC announced a decision to delay the start of the 2020 season and move to a new, 10-game, conference-only format.

After an offseason in which Auburn’s coaches undoubtedly spent time scouting the likes of Alcorn State and North Carolina — the Tigers’ original Week 1 and Week 2 opponents — as well as its originally scheduled league opener against Ole Miss in Week 3, all that was thrown out the window as SEC teams awaited to find out the two new opponents on their slate, as well as the order in which that new-look schedule would shake out.

“This is a year about adjusting,” Auburn coach Gus Malzahn said last Monday, just hours before his team learned of its schedule. “The teams that adjust, they’re going to have an advantage. It is what it is…. Our coaches will start working extremely hard as far as that goes behind the scenes on off days just to get prepared. Usually, you go into the season and you’ve got the first three opponents broken down. So, we’ll be playing catch-up really fast, along with everybody else in the conference the next few weeks.”

The SEC finally unveiled its newly formatted schedule for this fall last week, hours after most of the conference’s teams held their first practices of fall camp and a week after two of Power Five conferences — the Big Ten and Pac-12 — canceled the fall season altogether. In other words, much of the league took the field on Day 1 of practices without the slightest idea of who they’d be preparing to face when the season began Sept. 26 and with ongoing uncertainty of whether the fall season would actually happen.

“You know, the thing about it, we’ve been talking for about five to six weeks about just controlling what we can control, and not getting caught up with the ups and downs and everything that’s going on outside,” Malzahn said. “So, that’s way we take it, day by day and week by week. We’re just concerned about us. As of right now, we’re getting ready for the season and that’s our mindset. We can’t get distracted. The teams that don’t get distracted with all this stuff is going to have an advantage.

“That’s one of the things we’ve been really working hard on. What are the advantages that we’re going to have? And not being distracted is one of them. And our guys have done a good job with that.”

All that, of course, was after spending the prior week and a half of pre-camp activities with walkthroughs allowed, capping what was an extended and somewhat surreal offseason that offensive line Brodarious Hamm said was admittedly difficult to navigate given all the uncertainty.

“I feel like kind of going into the summer, we’ve kind of been stuck and had a bunch of questions, not knowing exactly what was going and things like that,” quarterback Bo Nix said. “So, having a schedule kind of reinforces the fact that we will have football.”

While the SEC is still taking a measured approach to the season — assessing things day-by-day, as they relate to COVID-19 and the threat presented by the spread of the coronavirus — the season, for now, forges on.

Auburn found out its full schedule for that season a week ago, with the Tigers drawing Kentucky in Week 1 at home on Sept. 26. That will be followed by a Week 2 trip to Georgia, for the earliest-ever rendition of the Deep South’s Oldest Rivalry, and then a home game against Arkansas and road trip to South Carolina (one of the two new cross-division opponents on the schedule). Auburn will then travel to Ole Miss in Week 4 before hosting LSU on Halloween before a bye week.

The second half of Auburn’s schedule starts off with a trip to Mississippi State, followed by a home date with Tennessee (the other new opponent on the schedule) before closing the season with the Iron Bowl at Alabama on Thanksgiving week and then a home finale against Texas A&M on Dec. 5.

In all, Auburn’s schedule features five home and five away games, though the Tigers do not have back-to-back home games set. They also benefit from having an off week to prepare for Mike Leach’s Air Raid offense. The overall schedule also includes games against five teams ranked in the preseason AP top 25, as well as the game against Kentucky — which would ostensibly be ranked 25th in the nation if the preseason AP poll only accounted for teams whose seasons have not yet been canceled, as opposed to including those from conferences like the Big Ten and Pac-12.

Auburn is accustomed to playing one of the nation’s toughest schedules on a yearly basis, just based on the nature of the SEC West and having Georgia as a permanent cross-division opponent, so the Tigers feel uniquely prepared to tackle a difficult 10-game SEC slate. As offensive lineman Brodarious Hamm put it last week, “it’s nothing new” for Auburn — even if the amount of time the team has to gameplan for that new-look schedule is significantly shorter than any other year.

“I feel fine about it; put me in a parking lot with bears and I’ll go out there and play,” linebacker K.J. Britt said. “It don’t matter. So, I feel fine about it. Ten games, all SEC, you know, we can’t fear nothing that we haven’t seen before. I believe that our schedule has been preparing us since I’ve been here for a season like this. We have been going week in, week out, year in, year out of tough schedule to tough schedule.

“I believe this right here is what Auburn is used to. Ten games, all SEC — I believe everybody is going to be ready to play, everybody is going to be ready to fight, everybody is going to have something to prove. That’s going to be the biggest thing — people playing with a chip on their shoulder and having something to prove. I believe that will be the biggest thing that helps separate us.”

Tom Green is an Auburn beat reporter for Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @Tomas_Verde.

[CleCoTiger 1,957]

3 hours ago, aubiefifty said:

The overall schedule also includes games against five teams ranked in the preseason AP top 25, as well as the game against Kentucky — which would ostensibly be ranked 25th in the nation if the preseason AP poll only accounted for teams whose seasons have not yet been canceled, as opposed to including those from conferences like the Big Ten and Pac-12.

Interesting choice of wording there...