The closest win in Vigor’s dominant season came on Aug. 13, when the Wolves beat UMS-Wright 30-14. Ironically, that game was also the most lopsided loss of the season for UMS-Wright.
Now, the Region 1 rivals get another shot at each other with a place in the Class 5A semifinals on the line. Kickoff from Vigor on Friday night is at 7 p.m.
Read MoreBruce Pearl opened his Wednesday afternoon press conference with a puzzling stat as Auburn basketball prepares for the Maui Invitational next week.
The SEC’s success in Maui, for as long as the tournament has been in existence, is minimal. In fact, it’s been a while since an SEC team has won the tournament. Vanderbilt won it in 1986, and Kentucky did it in 1993.
In Auburn’s first Maui experience back in 2018, they went 2-1 defeating Xavier in the first round and Arizona in the third-place game.
The Tigers fell to Duke in the semifinal round that year and Bruce Pearl spoke on how dominant ACC programs are in that tournament.
“That tells you how hard it is to win. The ACC’s won it 11 times, or something like that. The Big Ten won it eight times,” Pearl said. But our teams have not had a ton of success out there.”
“The way I look at it is we have a chance to play three great teams on a neutral site, and really find out where we’re at, but also, potentially, help our NCAA Tournament resume, if we can be competitive.”
Ironically, the last time Auburn played in this tournament they made it all the way to the Final 4 in 2019.
Auburn starts this year’s tournament with No. 5 Iowa State and a victory will see them play No. 10 North Carolina or Dayton in the semifinals.
On the other side of the bracket, back-to-back national champions No. 3 UConn will matchup against Memphis and faces the winner of Colorado and Michigan State.
“It sort of reminds me a little bit about the road to the Final Four in 2019, and we looked at that as, ‘Man, somebody’s got to beat Kansas, or North Carolina, or Kentucky along the way,’” Pearl said. “You know, somebody’s got to beat Iowa State, or North Carolina, or Dayton, or UConn, somebody along the way. That’s just how we approach it. So, I’m kind of looking at it as one game at a time.”
Peal compared tournaments like this to the NCAA Tournament in March with the scheduling of all the games. However, the depth of his roster and rotations will look different with the return of Ja’Heim Hudson and Jahki Howard in the lineup after serving team suspensions.
“Because we have three games in three days, it’s a little bit like an NCAA Tournament weekend. Two games in three days in the tournament,” Pearl said.
“I think one thing that should serve us well is our depth. The fact that we’re playing, the first few games we played 11, the last couple games we played nine. I think that that helps you on the back-to-back-to-backs. I know our coaches will have great preparations.”
Senior Chad Baker-Mazara voiced how excited this opportunity is for the team. Already averaging 10.5 points per game shooting 52% from the floor, he wants to use the Maui stage as a place to show the world who the best team in the country is.
“We’re really looking forward to this. It might help us become No. 1 in the nation,” Baker-Mazara said. “That’s a goal that I personally want for us as a team, to reach No. 1 and be at the point where it’s like, OK, we’re the best. Hopefully we can hold that throughout the season.”
The Tigers open the Maui Invitational Monday, Nov. 25. with its matchup against the Cyclones and the game will be televised on ESPN U. Tipoff is scheduled for 8 p.m.
Read MoreThis is an opinion column.
Let’s start this by saying Warde Manuel is in an impossible position.
The Michigan athletics director is also the College Football Playoff Selection Committee chair, so like his predecessors, he’s subject to the November Tuesday night walks of shame.
The CFP loves a good sacrifice.
So, the guy who professionally defended Jim Harbaugh is appropriate in this case.
Nevertheless, this is not about Manuel’s day job. We’re here to talk about Tuesday Night Manuel and the dirty work he has to do for the CFP committee — the faux transparency of the sport’s secret judge/jury.
Because this is about TV ratings. It just is. The Tuesday night rollouts of preliminary rankings and how they’d fit on pretend 12-team brackets isn’t doing much to inform the public.
If anything, we’re left more confused and further in the dark.
And Manuel’s role as a spokesperson explaining the thought process certainly isn’t helping lend any real insight to the deliberations. Again, this is the way it’s designed and the committee chairs who came before him were just as maddening in the lack of substance provided.
The stakes are just heightened in Year 1 of the 12-team bracket. There are more mouths to feed this fall, and everyone goes to bed hungry every Tuesday night.
After Manuel’s appearance on ESPN, he heads to the phone where the pack of hungry wolves dressed as reporters are waiting. Though I’ll never say we need less time questioning those in power, these become pointless exercises if nothing insightful can be squeezed out of well-conceived questions.
When the committee won’t even disclose the strength of schedule ranking from which they base some percentage of their decision-making process, this is practically the only way to probe the hive.
Take the first question Manuel received in this Tuesday’s teleconference for example. It was about the gulf between No. 3 Texas and No. 10 Georgia in light of the Bulldogs’ 30-15 win in Austin and the fact the Longhorns don’t have any top-25 wins.
“Well, obviously Georgia has a very good win at Texas,” Manuel said, “but as the committee analyzed the body of work of Texas versus where Georgia is at the present time with two losses, even to top-25 teams, we came out that Texas was still a very strong team deserving of a 3 seed. They have a top-5 defense. Quinn Ewers is leading one of the top passing offenses in the country. We just looked at them and thought — and came out, I should say, with them at 3,”
Stated a few facts but essentially said we just think Texas is good and deserves to be No. 3. The word salad continued without anything other than we think Texas is good.
“It’s nothing against Georgia,” Manuel continued. “Georgia is a great team, but they did struggle against Ole Miss at Ole Miss but had a great win this past week against Tennessee. We will continue to monitor both teams and see how it goes in the next few weeks.”
Facts, but nothing a scoreboard couldn’t tell us.
Asked next about Georgia and the fact it moved up just two spots after beating previously No. 7 Tennessee, Manuel said they had “a long debate” and “intense conversations” about the placement of Georgia, Mississippi, Miami and Alabama.”
“… And there was a lot of consideration about where teams were ranked and why and a lot of conversation about it,” Manuel said. “It was very, very thorough. We’re dealing with very small margins in terms of the different things that we’re looking at and comparing, so I can assure you the committee went through it intensely in the last couple of days.”
Words. Words. Words.
What was discussed? What were the small margins?
We’re just saying they may have had lively discussions in the suburban Dallas hotel boardroom but these are the rankings and that’s all you’re getting.
An answer about BYU dropping after its loss to Kansas was especially fun after listing off a few wins and the end to the unbeaten run Saturday.
“Look, we give a lot of credit when teams win, and so we don’t penalize teams for winning close or winning too big in other words, but we do value wins, so that’s where we saw BYU,” he said.
Huh?
“But given some of those games that they played and the close wins that they had, it just was an indicator that some of the teams that were below them in the rankings last week should move ahead of them is how the committee assessed BYU.”
So they don’t penalize teams for winning close games but BYU won a few games that were close so the teams below them moved past the Cougars.
Got it.
Indiana is quite the story as the No. 5 Hoosiers emerged from the cornfields as the great disrupter to the natural order of things. They’ve beaten everyone but played nobody entering Saturday’s trip to No. 2 Ohio State. Manuel was asked what the committee will be watching anything specifically when ranking the winner and loser from this surprise top-5 matchup.
“We’re looking at how the offenses play, how the defenses play, what are the strengths, is there dominance in one half versus another,” Manuel said. “We are taking a look at the entirety of the game and the performance. We will then get together and assess and have conversations about what we saw in the outcome of the game, no matter who wins or loses, and assess then how to rank the teams. The team particular to the question who loses and how that impacts the rankings for next week, that is to be determined.”
They’re going to watch the offense and defense and determine if there was dominance and then look at the whole game and then get together to discuss it. Interesting.
Maybe Manuel is too nice and feels like he has to say something when nothing is really fine. Because those sentences are as hollow as they come. Impressive, in a way.
But we’re no closer to knowing anything tangible about what the committee is thinking outside of just the raw 1-through-25 ranking they release.
Why is No. 11 Tennessee the fourth of four two-loss SEC teams when it beat No. 7 Alabama?
“They have great offense, great defense. They play hard,” he said. “The committee just had a hard time. You’re talking about four really good teams, when you look at Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and Tennessee. I think the committee, we debated it, as I said earlier, quite a bit as it came down to how we saw those teams.”
It just came down to how they saw it.
Just what they think.
“It is close,” Manuel said. “There’s a lot of conversations. We’ll continue to monitor the performance of all these teams as the season progresses towards the end.”
Indeed they will.
They will discuss.
They will rank.
They’ll shove Manuel in front of an ESPN camera, then a phone call.
And then they’ll leave us to our imagination for how they came up with a final product.
Michael Casagrande is a reporter for the Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @ByCasagrande or on Facebook.
Read MoreDEAR MISS MANNERS: Our town is a typical suburb of a large city. It was originally settled by German farmers, but over the years, it has become an affluent sprawl of subdivisions and strip malls. Many of the original family farms have been honored in various street names.
Lingering descendants of the families, or those who knew them, adhere to the original pronunciations, but the majority of the community no longer does. For example: Old-timers insist that Mueller Street should be pronounced “Miller,” not “Mew-ler.” This is just one of several examples.
The thing is, I have lived in this town since the early 1970s, and never heard anyone refer to that street as “Miller.” If someone gave me directions and said, “Turn on Miller Street,” I would have bypassed the “Mueller” sign and kept looking.
I feel that naming a street after a family is lovely, but that the family’s right to police pronunciation is limited. The whole point of naming streets at all is to make navigation easier. If the community at large has tacitly agreed to call a street “Mew-ler” because that is the more intuitive, contemporary interpretation of the spelling, then that becomes the correct way to say the street name.
Those who pronounce these streets “wrong” are being told, on social media, that they owe it to these families to adopt the “correct” pronunciation. This seems unnecessary to me — and I have a Dutch last name that no one can pronounce without guidance.
GENTLE READER: Snapping at people to do something that has not been done in decades is unlikely to be effective. Far better to use one of the few advantages Miss Manners sees to social media — which is that people can opt out of group conversations about such issues, rather than feeding the flames by continuing to argue about them.
Please send your questions to Miss Manners at missmanners.com, by email to [email protected], or through postal mail to Miss Manners, Andrews McMeel Syndication, 1130 Walnut St., Kansas City, MO 64106.
Read MoreThe updated A-List of the best Class of 2025 high school football recruits in Alabama shows a changing landscape in state recruiting.
With two weeks left before the early signing day, Auburn is set to ink its best in-state class in years. Nine of the 15 players on the A-List are committed to coach Hugh Freeze and the Tigers. Two are committed to Ohio State, two are uncommitted and the other two are set to sign with Texas and Alabama.
Read MoreDEAR ABBY: I have been friends with a couple for 30 years. Both are alcoholics. They function, work at farmers’ markets, are sociable, have a house and pay their bills. Yet, at least once, maybe twice a month, they get totally wasted and the wife calls me and rambles on incoherently. I suspect they get drunk even more frequently, but, thankfully, I don’t get a call every time they are on a binge.
I have been in terrible relationships in which I drank too much to numb myself. Thankfully, I have been out of such toxicity for years. But I’m having increasing difficulty dealing with these drunken phone calls. I suspect I’m the only person my friend calls because she knows few others would understand her slurred babble. I’m weary from these calls. How do I deflect them? — TIRED EAR IN ARIZONA
DEAR TIRED EAR: Put an end to those calls by being frank with your friend about the effect they have on you. Do this while she is sober. Tell her you do not want her calling you after she has been drinking because her speech is so slurred that you can’t understand what she’s saying.
Say if it happens again you will hang up the phone, and if it does, follow through. Let her calls go to voicemail. If you would like to maintain any sort of relationship with this couple, see them socially only when they are (reasonably) sober.
Read more Dear Abby and other advice columns.
Dear Abby is written by Abigail Van Buren, also known as Jeanne Phillips, and was founded by her mother, Pauline Phillips. Contact Dear Abby at www.DearAbby.com or P.O. Box 69440, Los Angeles, CA 90069.
Read MoreThe group Clean Up Alabama is calling on Fairhope city officials to withhold $250,000 of capital money from the Fairhope Public Library and are urging for the immediate resignation of the library board’s chair.
The concerns from the nonprofit group stem from what they say is an inappropriate position taken by Anne Johnson, the library chair, in defense of books on display at the Fairhope Public Library.
Read MoreFairhope author Leslie Anne Tarabella’s encounter with a pushy attendee at the 2015 “Lighting of the Trees” celebration sparked a blog post, media attention including articles in AL.com at the time, and a slogan that continues to resonate and inspire nine years later.
“People of all age, all over town, were calling out to me, ‘We don’t push in Fairhope!’” Tarabella writes in her new book, released on Oct. 8 and which can be found at numerous booksellers in the area and at leslieannetarabella.com.
Read MoreDEAR ABBY: Is there any way I can help my 55-year-old daughter, who has just embarked upon yet another no-doubt doomed relationship? She is quick to cohabit with these men, usually after less than two months. Then my daughter reinvents herself to appeal to HIS ideal. Each time the relationships have ended, it has come at great cost to her and negatively impacted her now-grown kids.
Through all of this, my daughter has remained employed, though four years is a long time in one position. I’m afraid the latest move will limit her employment options once the work-from-home trend has softened. Is this like dealing with a drug addict or an alcoholic who must realize on their own to seek help? This roller coaster has taken its toll on me, too. — MOM ON THE SIDELINES
DEAR MOM: You can talk until you are blue in the face — and I am assuming that you have tried more than once — to get your middle-aged daughter to realize that what she has been doing hasn’t worked for her. She is not an “addict,” but she is desperate to find a partner.
When your daughter finally realizes that she doesn’t have to twist herself into a pretzel to please a man, and that she’s fine just the way she is — a successful parent, self-supporting and worthwhile on her own — she not only may feel better about herself, but also have better luck in finding a partner.
Read more Dear Abby and other advice columns.
Dear Abby is written by Abigail Van Buren, also known as Jeanne Phillips, and was founded by her mother, Pauline Phillips. Contact Dear Abby at www.DearAbby.com or P.O. Box 69440, Los Angeles, CA 90069.
Read MoreWith two wins in two games needed for Auburn to make a bowl game, the improbable, but not impossible task starts with a home game against Texas A&M, its final game at Jordan-Hare Stadium in 2024.
It’s a rematch of Auburn’s 27-10 loss in College Station last season, but against a different-looking team with a new head coach and a lot more to play for.
The game is a must win for Texas A&M just as much as it is for Auburn, with the Aggies looking to keep their SEC Championship hopes alive.
Here’s a closer look at Texas A&M:
As mentioned above, this year’s matchup with Texas A&M comes against a new head coach as Mike Elko will lead the Aggies into Jordan-Hare Stadium on Saturday.
He spent two seasons as Duke’s head coach prior to getting the Texas A&M job, following four seasons as Texas A&M’s defensive coordinator under Jimbo Fisher. Hugh Freeze mentioned earlier in the week that he is relatively unfamiliar with Elko, meeting him for the first time last spring.
The biggest connection between the two coaching staffs is Auburn defensive coordinator DJ Durkin, who spent the 2022 and 2023 seasons in College Station before leaving for Auburn after Jimbo Fisher was fired.
Texas A&M comes into the Auburn game 8-2, still in contention for a spot in the SEC Championship game. Its lone conference loss came three weeks ago against South Carolina and its 5-1 conference record ties Texas A&M with Texas atop the SEC.
The Aggies’ two best wins on the season were home contests against LSU and Missouri, both top 10 teams at the time, but LSU is now unranked, and Missouri sits at No. 23.
What stands out most about Texas A&M is its rushing attack, but that took a significant hit in the loss against South Carolina. Star running back Le‘Veon Moss suffered a season-ending leg injury in that game, taking away the Aggies’ leading rusher.
They still rushed for 209 yards as a team in the one game since losing Moss, but that came against an overmatched New Mexico State team.
Texas A&M has other weapons in the run game, but Saturday’s matchup with Auburn will be the first time its run game without Moss will be put to the test since his injury.
With Moss now out of the picture, the two biggest names to watch on offense for Texas A&M are quarterback Marcel Reed and running back Amari Daniels.
Even when Moss was healthy, Reed was one of the focal points of Texas A&M’s run game, carrying the ball 72 times this season for 375 yards and six touchdowns. Reed and Connor Weigman have both featured at quarterback for the Aggies this season, but Reed seems to have taken the job full time since leading a comeback win over LSU.
Daniels will likely be the feature back alongside Reed in the backfield against Auburn. While not being the leading rusher, he has put together an impressive 2024 season, rushing for 550 yards and seven touchdowns through 10 games.
With the offense focused more on the run game, no Texas A&M wide receiver has more than 27 catches this season, but Noah Thomas and Jabre Barber lead the way for the Aggies in the receiver core.
Whenever Freeze was asked about Texas A&M’s defense leading up to the game, one of the first things he’d often mention was the length in the secondary.
With corners Will Lee III and BJ Mayes and safeties Marcus Ratcliffe and Bryce Anderson all over six feet, they have the ability to cause problems and make plays in the secondary.
Up front, Nic Scourton is the standout player, leading the team with five sacks and 30 total pressures, according to Pro Football Focus.
Peter Rauterkus covers Auburn sports for AL.com. You can follow him on X at @peter_rauterkus or email him at [email protected]m
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