Florida Thoughts
by Mark
10-15-06

I just returned from the doctor and I’m happy to report that the radiation exposure we received from being within a 20 mile radius of Tray Blackmon’s atomic tackles is relatively low and non lethal. Luckily, I’m a senior and won’t be exposed to near weekly shots of radiation Blackmon will be emitting over the next four years. I recommend you freshmen and sophomores out there to buy orange lead vests for future football games.

A person I wouldn’t want to be right now is Quentin Groves. It looked like he was having a great time devouring Chris Leak and Tim Tebow last night, but he’s going to pay later on as Leak and Tebow pass through his digestive track. I doubt he’ll be at practice Monday.

Speaking of indigestion, with the exception of Auburn, where else can you hear a head coach say “Good gosh! Where’s my toilet paper?” during a post game press conference? The answer is Penn State.




Tre Smith has a way of proving that I’m a huge hypocrite. After he recovered the blocked kick and did an unnecessary flip into the endzone, I thought “Wow, that was the coolest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.” I also thought it was Lee Guess who did this. After watching the clip on Sportscenter and realizing it was in fact Tre Smith who did it, I thought;

“Dang it Tre… that flip was unsportsmanlike! Shame on you!”

Still, Tre has the fetus goal line dive perfected.

I can be pretty hypocritical when it comes to football players. For instance, I usually think anyone who has a wardrobe consisting only of pink Polos is an idiot - yet I still think Kenny Irons may be the coolest person on campus.

ESPN GameDay came to Auburn Saturday. I’m glad they came, but I didn’t go and didn’t really care to. I went to GameDay when they came to the Auburn-Georgia game in 2004. I woke up at 6:00 that morning to meet Ryan get a good spot in the background crowd. I expected GameDay to be almost like a concert. It’d be a bunch of likeminded people grouping together to view people seen on TV perform in person. At concerts, the lead singer always yells into the microphone something along the lines of “[This city] ROCKS HARDER THAN ANYWHERE ELSE ON THE PLANET”.
Woah! Exciting!

The GameDay crew didn’t even attempt insincere gratefulness. Before the show started, Kirk Herbstrete stood before the crowd of Auburn fans and spelt out OU with his arms.

He didn’t do as a part of the huge ‘ESPN hates Auburn!’ conspiracy (they hate us because of our freedoms), he did it because he’s a pompous jerk who enjoyed getting a rise out of people. The GameDay guys spent much of the show discussing why Auburn didn’t deserve to be in the National Championship game. Why would I want to go back to that?

Still, I love ESPN. I think Lee Corso is great - having a rational and sane person hosting the show wouldn’t be nearly as entertaining. However, it’s ridiculous if they think they can set up shop in the middle of Auburn University for the day and ridicule Auburn. I don’t see why any Auburn person would want to watch that sort of thing unless they wanted to display their “Lee Corso is a Homo” signs (which I hear there was an abundance of).

So if ESPN doesn’t respect Auburn, why did they show our game in the primetime spot and offer ESPN "Full Circle" coverage?

Money - and I'm not talking about the hilariously lame gimmick within Bama's special teams. I talking about the kind we can barter goods and services with.

A game as big as Auburn - Florida would be certain to bring in a massive amount of viewers. Furthermore, since the game was shown with ESPN Full Circle, they knew they could have an entire digital channel dedicated to showing Al Borges and Al Borges only throughout the entire game.

By having this channel available, ESPN knew ratings from women between ages 14-49 would skyrocket since they’d be given a chance to watch Al “Dreamboat” Borges at work for four straight hours. It’s sad that even though he’s a genius, women only see him as a piece of meat.

The Borges channel was good for ESPN and Auburn’s reputation but bad for many students. The Borgcam was unfortunately placed on the exact spot many people from the ACSC sit, which forced them to fight the Baptists for seats. The resulting bloody battle was just as bad as the ones at Golden Corral when all area churches let out at the same time.

Shame on Jay Jacobs for allowing women’s lust for Al Borges to take precedence over student’s enjoyment of the game.

Now that Georgia lost to Vanderbilt, I’ve come to realize the Florida game was probably the last epic game I’ll ever see at Jordan-Hare as a student. I’ve been incredibly spoiled by fantastic football games in that place.

Mark’s All Time Record against Major Teams in Jordan-Hare

3/3 wins vs. LSU
1/2 wins vs. Georgia (most likely to be 2/3 by year end)
2/2 wins vs. Bama (4/4 overall)
1/1 win vs. Tennessee (3/3 overall)
1/1 win vs. Florida

Uhh... don't ask about Arkansas.

The history books will probably label the years 2002-2006 as “The Mark Paden Years of Auburn Football”. These have been very good years on The Plains; but please remember, much of the credit goes to the coaching staff and players.

WAR EAGLE!

E-mail mark at mark@theauburner.com

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