Joseph Goodman: For Auburn, the horror of rock bottom is here
Auburn football is a tomb of the tedious in these days before Halloween.
Boring. Without. Signifying nothing. Devoid even of sound, but the cause of all fury.
Make it stop, please, this forever place between the living and the dead that Auburn now occupies like a ghoul as it free-falls downward into the dungeons of the SEC West. What did we learn about Auburn on Saturday that we didn’t already know? Arkansas’ 41-27 victory proved that even a perpetual bottom-feeder of this league can suddenly walk into Jordan-Hare Stadium and embarrass the Tigers.
Former Auburn quarterback Bo Nix went 6-0 combined against Ole Miss and Arkansas in his three years on The Plains. In back to back games, Auburn lost to both. Mississippi State is next up, and then it’s Texas A&M.
Those used to be easy wins for Auburn. Now the games don’t even matter and it’s still October.
RELATED: Auburn throttled by Arkansas in fourth straight loss
RELATED: Auburn finalizing deal to make John Cohen next AD
RELATED: Deion Sanders says he’d entertain offers from other teams
It can’t get any worse than this. That is the only ray of sunshine anyone at Auburn has left to offer its fans after what was witnessed on Saturday — that and maybe the future of the quarterback position. Robby Ashford had a decent game, throwing for 285 yards and a touchdown in addition to his excellent rushing, but yet his team still had no chance.
Auburn’s defense is a rotting pit of sacrificial decay. Arkansas had 520 yards of offense, and quarterback KJ Jefferson looked like Cam Newton.
They used to throw toilet paper into trees here after victories. By the fourth quarter, I wanted to wrap my head in Charmin like a mummy.
Bring me back from the dark side when it’s 2023.
What is life without hope? What is existence without meaning? In the SEC, it is Vanderbilt football always. For at least a little while longer it will be Auburn, too. That’s the state of Auburn while the school plays out this nightmare of naught. It hurts, but there is pain now so there will be no poison tomorrow. That is my hope anyway.
For now, though, there are only the final days of a terrible mistake. A zombie walks the sidelines of Jordan-Hare Stadium where the ghosts of greatness linger in sadness, and the zombie’s name is Bryan Harsin. In the role of Auburn football coach, he is a dead man walking.
“Physically, we just got beat,” Harsin said.
Fire the guy already.
Allow Auburn to wipe its memory clean of these last two years. Harsin had his introductory news conference on Christmas Eve. Release this shadow of a coach on All Hallows’ Eve.
“How would I summarize the season so far?” Harsin said when asked that very question.
“Yeah,” he said.
He did not answer, as usual. He did, however, change out of his Auburn-branded apparel before his postgame news conference, so that was good to see.
The good teams of the SEC run headlong into November with dreams of playing for a national championship. At Auburn, a headless team without life drags itself aimlessly towards nothingness and worse, the bottom of the SEC West standings.
Auburn’s only win in its last eight conference games was against Missouri. The Tigers are 3-13 since the loss last season to Texas A&M. It’s so bad. Arkansas 41, Auburn 27 was like witnessing the slow torture of friend. Oh, the horror. Even Colonel Kurtz had a plan, though. This is a new dimension of nope.
Harsin was asked what was wrong with his team.
“We can’t put our finger on it,” he said before deciding it was as simple as Auburn “not playing good football.”
We have passed through the event horizon, and where we are going you do not want eyes.
Courageously proud, the Auburn fan base remains resilient and strong, but even the loyalists had seen enough against Arkansas. The upper decks were thin at the beginning, and then empty by the end of the third quarter. Auburn trailed 17-13 at the end of the first half, but allowed 21 straight points after the break.
Thankfully, there are signs that the struggle of this exercise in self-harm are coming to an end. During the game, there were reports that Auburn was finally making progress in its search for a new director of athletics. John Cohen, the current AD at Mississippi State, is the name, and, having been raised in Tuscaloosa, he should be well familiar with Auburn.
Did he grow up an Alabama fan?
It’s a frightening thought, but nothing could be scarier than Auburn’s current reality.
Joseph Goodman is a columnist for the Alabama Media Group, and author of “We Want Bama: A season of hope and the making of Nick Saban’s ‘ultimate team’”. You can find him on Twitter @JoeGoodmanJr.