SAD NEWS: After quarreling with the head coach star player makes shocking announcement today….
This is the time of year to be optimistic. So far, nobody has won — or, more importantly, lost — a single college football game in the 2024 campaign. If you want to shoot for the moon with your preseason expectations, go for it.
Let me take you behind the curtain a little bit: I don’t ever want to lie to you: the reader, the listener, the subscriber.
I don’t want to inflate your hopes and dreams for your favorite team, because disappointment is going to be inevitable at some point in the season.
(That even goes for teams that are juggernauts.) These are sports played by people in their teenage years and their early 20s.
There’s a major element of uncertainty baked right into the product, good or bad.
But I also want you to be excited about the upcoming seasons for both Auburn football and Auburn men’s basketball. I want you to look forward to the fall and beyond.
If you’re not, you probably aren’t going to want to read or listen to anything about these teams — unless you just like having a misery outlet. (Sometimes, I think some of y’all are just built that way.) Optimism is simply better for business.
I say all of this because this has been a pretty busy week for an Auburn football team desperate to break a rough streak of three straight losing seasons.
The Tigers had clear needs in the transfer portal and addressed them by signing three new defensive linemen and a former No. 1 wide receiver from a strong Power 5 program.
By all means, be happy with the pickups.
and his coaching staff didn’t have the Year 1 they wanted on the field, but they’re doing a much better job in the talent acquisition department than their predecessors.
On paper, Auburn is bringing in players and building a roster that is closer to what it’s expected to do as a perennial force in the SEC, like it was for large stretches of the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s and 2010s.
Yet I’ll always encourage fans to ride the hype train responsibly.
I’ve seen and heard fans who have taken the news of the week and pushed themselves towards predictions of double-digit wins for Auburn football this fall.
Pump the brakes some. This is still a rebuild, and it’s not going to happen quickly.
Auburn is a more talented team than it was this time last year. But while talent acquisition is a prerequisite for being a top team, it’s by no means a guarantee.
Just look at Texas A&M over the last few years. Or Florida. Or Miami. Shoot, Auburn is a clear example of a Blue-Chip Ratio team that has fallen well short of contention.
