Director Michael Bay took the blunt of the blame for that horrible movie, mostly because people refused to admit the simple truth - there’s only so much that can be done with Ben Affleck as a starter. A coordinator can only work with what he’s given.

Borges’ critics write off the 2004 season as a fluke. They say Borges got lucky because he inherited talented players like Carnell Williams and Ronnie Brown.

In 1996, Michael Bay directed The Rock. It was the greatest movie ever made. Unfortunately, critics quickly forgot what Bay was capable of when given talent like Sean Connery and Nicholas Cage.

After directing the greatest movie ever made, Michael Bay was faced with a serious challenge. How would he follow up The Rock? Expectations were high. Too high. Another movie THAT great would be impossible to make. Even so, Bay did an admirable job with his next movie, Armageddon.

Ben Affleck was the star of Armageddon, but unlike Pearl Harbor, Affleck was surrounded by a great and experienced cast which included Bruce Willis, Billy Bob Thornton and Steve Buscemi. These guys carried Affleck and made him look great.

2005 was Borges’ Armageddon. Brandon Cox did excellent as a sophomore due to excellent coaching and a great supporting cast in Marcus McNeil, Devin Aromashodu, Anthony Mix and Ben Obomanu. I’d rather see Auburn win games than shatter rushing and passing records. As a sophomore, Brandon Cox won more games than Heisman winner Tim Tebow. That’s pretty good for a kid with a freakin’ muscular disease.

With Pearl Harbor, Ben Affleck was the only star and had to carry the rest of the cast. Michael Bay realized he was working with limited talent and was forced to go conservative and resort to predictable and boring plotlines. Critics bashed his decision to go conservative, but Bay had no choice.

Had Michael Bay took Ben Affleck and ‘opened up the playbook’, the results would’ve been disastrous. See Gigli for an example.

I hate to compare Brandon Cox to Ben Affleck, because Cox deserves to be thought fondly of. A better analogy would be in saying Al Borges was the Ann Sullivan to Brandon Cox’s Helen Keller.

That’s better. Helen Keller could beat up Ben Affleck any day of the week.

We’ll never know how Al Borges would’ve rebounded from his Pearl Harbor season. I’ll never understand how Bobby Petrino was able to get a head coaching job after losing four games (with Cadillac, Brown and Campbell), and Al Borges gets the boot after similar results with such a young team.

Thank you for all you’ve done for Auburn, Coach Borges. You deserved better.

War Eagle.



E-mail Mark at mark@theauburner.com

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