I know that a lot of you feel like our offense sucked enough this season to warrant the exchanging of coaches, and for all I know, it may be the right choice. But I see our fans becoming less and less loyal to their coaches and players. At this time last season, we were scared out of our minds that Borges was going to leave us to coach in California. One season later we drop him and all the fans rejoice. We can put a good bit of the blame of Borges for our less than stellar 4-loss season this year, with two of the losses being completely inexcusable, but we also have to give Borges his fair share of the credit for Auburn’s most dominant tenure in the team’s history. We love you Borges, you will be missed.

On a related note, I think we should send thank you letters to Bobby Patrino for being such a sleazy scumbag. Arkansas was just about to snag the man who kept our ship afloat this season: Will Muschamp. To be honest, it is only a matter of time before Muschamp leaves us for a head coaching job, he’s just too good of a coach. So our relationship with Muschamp has just been extended for at least another season (or will it?) and therefore another year of defensive dominance is still in tact, as well as cameramen accidentally picking up all of Muschamp’s obscenities on national television when walking too close to Auburn’s sideline. Thank you Bobby Patrino, now don’t make Arkansas too good before you leave them to coach the Charlotte Bobcats in 8 months.

Tony Franklin. My feelings toward this guy are the same as a parent’s feelings toward their daughter’s new boyfriend. He needs to impress me. The idea of a spread offense sounds pretty good on paper, but Auburn’s strengths in recruiting are runningbacks, offensive lineman, defensive ends and linebackers. All the good receivers in the south want to either go to LSU or Alabama where their running games suck enough to force the throw. Auburn’s running game has been so solid for the past… let’s say… EVER, that we always pull in the runningbacks (who want to go to the NFL) instead of receivers (who want to coach high school football). This may be a very interesting situation though, seeing how we seem to have too much depth at runningback and not enough depth at receiver.

Franklin’s style of spread offense (as far as I know) is to put four or five receivers on the field at one time, forcing the defense to put more people outside and “spread” themselves out, therefore putting a large emphasis on the defense to make more open field tackles. Franklin’s previous offense, Troy State, is 17th in the nation, while Auburn’s this season was in the triple-digits. And Troy DID face SEC defenses (Georgia, Florida, Arkansas), and actually put up more points on them than Auburn did in each of those games. This is how I see Franklin utilizing the talent we currently have to fit his system:

1) Fannin and Tristan Davis are now receivers. Tristan Davis, if he stays healthy, was born to play in this system. He can make defenders miss, and if there is green ahead of him, he’s GONE. He has the best breakaway speed of all our ball carriers. Mario Fannin, if he can get past his power running tendencies, could be just as dangerous a weapon. Franklin is going to have to teach him not to lower his shoulder in the open field though, even though it would be very beastly to see.

2) Ben Tate, is the single runningback. He’s deadly enough when there are 8 defenders in the box, how much better will he be when he only faces 6 defenders in front of him. Ben Tate will blow some people up this year. I watched the Iron Bowl (again) last night, and I don’t think Bama ever actually tackled him, the best they could do was to stand him up and wait for the ref to blow the whistle. Ben Tate has the strength of 10 Bammers, he’ll rack up over 1000 next year as the sole running back.

3) Kodi Burns will run the offense. Now all of Auburn’s quarterbacks are on a level playing field now that the old playbook is being thrown out the window. Blake Field’s Ace-in-the-Hole was that he knew the offense backwards and forwards, so now he pretty much doesn’t stand a chance of playing since he’s a quarterback who knows as much about the new playbook as I do. Burns needs to work on his decision-making, but I think he’s going to be our man next year. But he’ll bring more to the table than the others, he supposedly has a cannon. All this season I’ve watched LSU, Georgia, South Florida launch deep ones on us, and while the ball is in the air I think, why not us? I think we’ve only thrown the ball once for further than 20 yards this year, and it was Kodi Burns who did it.

4) Our Tight Ends will be a huge waste of talent. I don’t know where they fit into this new scheme, and it’s a shame because we got some beasts. Hopefully I’m wrong and the spread offense has a good use for tight ends, but I don’t know how well we can sell the play action this year when everyone is already outside the box on defense.

5) Tim Hawthorne, Rod Smith, and P-Rod (Prechae) will have their chance to shine, and also learn how to catch the ball. I say send these guys deep, let Kodi Burns (I like to call him Kaybles) scare them with a couple of deep passes a game. Please please PLEASE let us have a deep threat this year. Amen.

If this system works, and our defense is as good next year as it was this year (even though we’re losing Q, Eric Brock, and our corners Wilhite and Lee) and we actually have a functioning offense next year, expect dominance. I don’t know if we’ll be ready yet, but our second game next season is against West Virginia, which would be a serious statement early in the season for people to start taking us seriously. Franklin, I want to love you, but you’re going to have to earn this broken heart’s love.

War Eagle!

E-mail Ryan at ryan@theauburner.com

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