Inside the state’s borders, the bantering over who’s better – Auburn or Alabama – starts just about the time fans drive out of the parking lot, and then keeps going for another 364 days.

This year, most of the South joined the conversation early, too, because there was no doubt all summer long who the two best teams were in the SEC.

It was Alabama and Auburn. Or Auburn and Alabama, depending on your leanings.

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No one else was in the conversation. Both were ranked in the top 6 when the first national polls came out and both were considered SEC favorites. This is how it looked then, and it looked good.

Screen Shot 2015-12-29 at 5.30.50 PM That’s how good these two teams were supposed to be.

Emphasis on supposed to be.

Fast forward three months and Alabama is in the playoffs for the second straight year. Auburn, ranked No. 6 in the preseason and the media darlings of August, finished the season 6-6 and dead last in the SEC West. They won two SEC games. Two!

What the heck happened to the great Auburn Tigers?

Well, a whole bunch of stuff. Everything we thought about the Tigers we were dead wrong on. We expected good quarterback play, and it was awful. We expected Will Muschamp to turn the defense around but he just had one eye on the door all year long and he bailed as fast as he could.

And try as we might to make out Gus Malzahn for more than he is, that massive shadow of Nick Saban simply turns every little bad thing at Auburn into a huge hot mess.

What a journey it was. The Tigers play in the Birmingham Bowl Wednesday against a very good Memphis team and they need to win to avoid a losing season. They might not get it.

From No. 6 in the country to potentially seven losses. Ouch, babe.

Tigers fans aren’t going to want to reminisce along with us, but here’s the gory details of a 2015 season gone terribly wrong.

1. The wobbly start out of the gate

Auburn looked every bit like a top-ranked team through much of its season opener against Louisville in Atlanta. They were up 24-0 at one point and had a 31-10 lead in the fourth quarter.

But then they gave up two late touchdowns and had to survive an onside kick attempt to escape with a victory. It sent up a little red flag.

The big red flag came from quarterback Jeremy Johnson. He was supposed to be a star in replacing Nick Marshall but he threw three interceptions and had only 11 completions all day for just 137 yards. “I just made some mental mistakes,” Johnson said. “I’ll learn from it.”

But the following week got even worse against FCS school Jacksonville State. Auburn – a 42-point favorite, mind you – gave up 438 yards on defense and needed a last-minute TD with just 37 seconds left to force a 20-20 tie and send the game into overtime. Had it not been for a 17-yard JSU punt that set up the tying drive, Auburn would have lost.

They won in overtime, but the next week they dropped from No. 6 to No. 18 in the polls. The 12-spot drop after a victory was the largest fall in the history of the AP poll after a win.

Two weeks in, we suspected they were frauds.

Even Jacksonville State would tease Auburn later. It was the only game they lost all year and they will play for the FCS title on Jan. 9. So yes, even Jacksonville State could laugh at the Tigers.

2. The ugly losses in the SEC

Auburn would finish 2-6 in the league, with the only wins coming against a Kentucky team that would lose six of its last seven and a Texas A&M team that was on the verge of imploding. The six losses were one ugly beating after another.

They lost to LSU 45-21 on Sept. 19, giving up 228 yards rushing to Leonard Fournette and 485 overall. Jeremy Johnson lost a fumble, threw a pick and passed for only 100 yards. The offense was even worse a week later in a 17-9 loss to Mississippi State. Sean White replaced Johnson at QB but went scoreless in the first half (14-0) and could muster just three field goals in the second half.

They would lose a crazy four-overtime game to Arkansas, and a 27-19 decision to Ole Miss a week later when they gave up 558 yards. They were competitive in their final two SEC games, losing to arch rivals Georgia (20-13) and Alabama (29-13), but no one takes moral victories away from close rivalry games.

Losses are losses, and when they mount up like they have, they really hurt.

3. The horrible quarterback situation

It’s hard to say that either Jeremy Johnson or Sean White every really had a big game all year. White showed plenty of heart, playing with a gimpy left knee for several games, but he’s still young and inexperienced.

Johnson, though, was supposed to be something special but he never impressed. He was supposed to be game-ready after two years of prep work, but his mechanics were a mess and then his confidence was shattered. Malzahn had to admit his mistake and bench him.

Malzahn was wrong, and everyone else was wrong for presuming the hype.

“I don’t think I’ve seen a quarterback who you decide to put out there fail this quickly,” Jack Crowe, a former longtime coach and currently analyst told CBSSports.com’s Jon Solomon after Johnson’s benching. “Did they not scrimmage this guy? All of this had to be showing up somewhere. Since there’s so much contact taken out of early practices, they didn’t really know what this guy could do. It’s obvious now.”

Johnson had to play later in the season, and looked a little more comfortable after White’s injury, but there’s still serious doubt if he can ever play at a high level at Auburn.

4. Will Muschamp’s rotten defense

Muschamp cut his teeth by running great defenses. Even during his four-year failure as the head coach at Florida, the Gators’ defenses were still very good. He was supposed to bring that magic to Auburn, but the Tigers wound up at or near the bottom of several defensive categories, both in the SEC and nationally.

Simply put, Auburn couldn’t stop the run, couldn’t cover the pass and couldn’t get to the quarterback. Can you imagine Auburn not being able to disrupt a passing game? This is a school that’s always producing stud defensive lineman, but this year opposing offenses practically did whatever they wanted all year.

Muschamp was hired by South Carolina to replace Steve Spurrier as head coach. No one at Auburn is really shedding any tears. It was that bad this year.

5. The Nick Saban comparison factor

And lastly, there’s the never-going-away problem of being little brother to Nick Saban and Alabama. What the Kick-Six did in 2013 skewed a lot of perceptions, probably wrongly. Malzahn’s first season was shockingly great, taking a 3-9  team and winning the SEC and then almost beating Florida State for the national title.

But the worst thing that ever could have happened was people like radio blowhard Colin Cowherd going off on national radio about how Malzahn would be Saban’s worst nightmare and how Auburn would now beat Alabama every year.

“I think Gus Malzahn is going to be a real headache for Nick,” Cowherd said on Paul Finebaum’s show last year.  “I want all you Alabama fans, who love Finebaum and hate me, to know. Right now, you’re driving around and I’m here to tell you that you’re going to start to lose to Gus Malzahn. Next year, Auburn’s going to be better than Alabama. Auburn is going to go into Tuscaloosa and beat Alabama. They’re going to beat Florida State. They’re going to win back-to-back national titles.”

Perception and reality weren’t in the same ballpark.

So when Auburn crashed and burned this year, the critics – and there were a bunch of them, even rabid Auburn fans – suddenly wailed that Malzahn was in over his head. That’s nuts, of course, but it’s hard to put up much of a fight based on this year’s results. And Saban will always linger. He’s never going away, and Malzahn may not be ready for that big fight after all.

Malzahn has plenty to fix. But he did it once before. We’ll have to see if he can do it again.

And while Alabama readies for a playoff game, Auburn goes up the road to Birmingham for a lower-tiered bowl.

It doesn’t even feel like a bowl game for most Auburn fans. Birmingham? Come on.

Even loyal supporter Charles Barkley had to make fun of a Birmingham trip.

“Just to make it feel like a real bowl, I’m going to stay at a hotel,” Barkley said on WJOX-FM’s The RoundTable. “I’m not gonna stay at my house, that would be too humiliating. I’m gonna get me a hotel in Birmingham to help the economy because if you can drive to your bowl game from your house, it’s not a good thing.”