Adversity. Coaches harp on it all the time.
Teams must go through it, something akin to metals being purified in fire. You don’t know what you have — what the finished product is — until a football team goes through a little bad.
For the first time in 25 games under Gus Malzahn, Auburn is facing some adversity.
Now we get to see how it will respond.
There is some heat surrounding the program, mainly the defensive play, but things aren’t rosy on the Plains right now.
Fans may wish this week’s opponent was Samford. Auburn’s final non-conference opponent provides a chance for the Tigers to rest guys offensively, while looking to shore up many holes on the defense.
Not those inside the program, however.
They want Georgia.
Last week’s aberration wasn’t a cause of “overlooking” Texas A&M. The Tigers don’t want to win this week more than they did last week. Auburn simply was beaten. It played poorly and got beat, which can happen weekly in the Southeastern Conference.
Lest we forget these guys are coaches and football players. They want to win. I never played collegiate athletics, but even reaching back to my fleeting time as a high school athlete, we treated each game equally. We wanted to win every time we stepped on the field.
This notion that college football players and highly-successful coaches need motivation to win a game is ludicrous.
Now, it’s completely fair to question how Malzahn’s team will respond this week. Auburn’s goals of an SEC championship and College Football Playoff berth are not mathematically impossible, but they are a little farther out of reach.
Still, the Deep South’s Oldest Rivalry carries weighty implications on both the SEC West and SEC East this week.
Georgia needs to win out to keep its Eastern Division hopes alive. Auburn must win out to have any semblance of hope of making it to Atlanta.
This team still has plenty for which to play, but this week marks the first time in a long time the Tigers are coming off a loss and enter the game as an underdog.
Leadership, both on the sidelines and on the field, will prove important this week in Athens as the Tigers look to rally around each other.
Malzahn has said his staff has responded well this week to the setback and the challenge Georgia presents.
The Tigers are on the ropes and this weekend’s contest between the hedges will show how this team deals with adversity. Auburn’s margin for error is minute.
This team can finish 10-2. But it just as easily can finish 8-4.
After living in Birmingham, Ala., Jordan left the ground zero of SEC Nation to head south to Florida to tell the unique stories of the renowned tradition of SEC football. In his free time, his mission is to find the best locales around.
