Toilet paper flies, hopes soar that Auburn has turned the (Toomer’s) Corner

 

 

 

 

 

AUBURN — For the first time in a long time Saturday night into early Sunday morning, Auburn fans finally got to use toilet paper the way nature intended. They rolled the trees, power lines, manhole covers, parking meters and each other at Toomer’s Corner after 88,000 of them and their collection of pent-up, emotional wounds had come pouring out of the bleachers in Jordan-Hare Stadium and onto the field, as if the Tigers had won the national championship.

There’s no telling how they acquired the toilet paper at that late hour because most of them, if they were honest, didn’t have it stockpiled in anticipation of what happened. They didn’t dare think Auburn would beat No. 15-ranked Texas A&M 43-41 in what became a four-overtime furnace on a chilly night. Then again, it may have all been stored in a warehouse for the last few years, waiting to be flushed or flung. Who knows? Toomer’s Corner might have been rolled just because Alabama was humbled 24-3 by Oklahoma Saturday night at the same time the Tigers pounced from the underbrush to ambush the Aggies.

And now, we will wait to see what comes out of the crucible. Auburn could have melted after seeing a 21-0 lead thaw into a muddy puddle but didn’t. Afterward, coach Hugh Freeze and his players spoke of the victory as a breakthrough, hopefully as much for the fans as the program itself. Freeze has been increasingly beset with disdain among the same fans who are now toasting his name with whatever alcoholic beverage is handy and his players heard boos from those same people Saturday night as another winnable game appeared to be dissolving into defeat.

“Thank you, Lord,” a drained Freeze said afterward. “It’s been that kind of year where you just battle through and you fight through and you keep climbing cliffs.”

He didn’t jump off one, although more and more fans had their hands on his back pushing him to the precipice.

“Hopefully, it’s a sign of many to come,” Freeze said. “There’s a lot of recruits in that locker room and they need to come join us and help us continue to build our roster.”

If you had parachuted into Jordan-Hare Stadium and didn’t know either team’s record, you’d have thought you were seeing two good football teams with something to play for. To Freeze’s credit, his players didn’t give up on the season.

“The one thing that I’m so proud of is our locker room has continued to fight,” he said.

 

Waiting for the spark

 

Auburn fans, even the SEC as a whole, have been waiting to see if any sort of ember would spark to life in the soggy ash heap of the Tigers’ program. What happened on the Plains Saturday night might have been that moment and the fans and players rejoiced in ripping the bandages off the scabs and wrapping each other in toilet paper. Some of them resembled mummies as they frolicked under the trees that blossomed Charmin in the chill of autumn. What a Freeze frame. The empty cardboard tubes were scattered about the ground as spent rifle hulls after a battle.

To understand the oversized reaction that outsiders will surely scoff at, you must understand Auburn people were desperate to celebrate after more than a decade of mediocrity and embarrassment. Going into year II of the Freeze warning, the Tigers were 51-55 in the SEC since their national championship season of 2010 and, up until Saturday night, Freeze could claim national recruiting trophies but no demonstrable progress on the field.

That seemed to change in four hours of extended toughness on Pat Dye Field. The old man would have been proud.

“You hope this is a pivotal moment that we can look back on in two, three, four, five years and say, ‘Man, that was a big one for the program,’” said quarterback Peyton Thorne, who some thought had taken a wrong turn on Shug Jordan Parkway on his way to join the South Central Louisiana State University Mud Dogs, now coached by the legendary Bobby Boucher, and instead ended up in Auburn.

Thorne had come from Michigan State and said he was warned what he would encounter in the Deep South.

“When I came down here, somebody back up there was saying, ‘You don’t understand what it’s like down there,’” Thorne said. “‘You don’t understand why the fans are the worst ever to play for when things don’t go well.’ And I was like, it doesn’t matter. There are a lot of great fans here. There’s a lot of negative things said but there’s more positive things said and those aren’t really seen.”

The fans weren’t sure what they were seeing early on with Thorne behaving as if the gods of the passing game had touched him instead of slapped him. Before they could settle into the cold aluminum bleachers with their apprehensions, Auburn had a 21-0 lead in the second quarter and they suddenly had a quarterback who didn’t throw interceptions and brushed people back off the line of scrimmage with a deep threat. Thorne completed 7 of his first 8 throws for 190 yards, including the unfurling of a 63-yard touchdown pass to freshman Cam Coleman, who showed up against a quality team for the first time.

“I thought the ball was in the air for like 15 seconds,” Coleman said of the long one. “It was a good feeling — white and blue flashing lights. It was an electric atmosphere.”

And it wasn’t Alabama A&M or Louisiana-Monroe that Thorne and Coleman were neutering. Thorne finished 19-of-31 passing for 301 yards and two TDs to Coleman, who had seven catches for 128 yards.

“I think they’re a top-10 team,” Freeze said of the vanquished Texas version of A&M. “Roster-wise, they’re really, really talented and really good and I give them a lot of credit for fighting back.”

And for accepting the Tigers’ largesse from false starts and shanked punts and an interception and balls being thrown into empty air. You could feel despair sweep over the crowd and not just because the stadium had sold out of popcorn by halftime.

 

The Last Request

 

But with the Tigers’ heartbeat fading, Thorne applied the defibrillator paddles, leading a 74-yard drive in the final 2½ minutes — with no timeouts — to force overtime on Ian Vachon’s 29-yard field goal. With his back pressed to the wall, Thorne scrambled 23 yards on fourth-and-3 from Auburn’s 37 and suddenly the quarterback few wanted was turning the game over to the kicker who had no home after Birmingham Southern closed and who wasn’t sure he had his coach’s confidence. Vachon had missed wildly from 40 yards in the third quarter and the paranoia of the reaction to losing a 21-0 lead and possibly the game gripped Freeze in its icy fingers.

“It was an awful pass at the ball,” Freeze said. “I don’t know why but I said, ‘Dude, that was the worst pass at a kick I’ve ever seen you make.’ And he just shook it off. God, what a bounceback. Football gets canceled at his college. We get him out of the classroom and here we are with a guy hitting some really critical kicks for us.”

Vachon went on to kick a 41-yard field goal in the second overtime.

Ultimately, Thorne’s winning pass to Keandre Lambert-Smith from the 3-yard line in the fourth overtime wasn’t the Prayer in Jordan-Hare; it was more of a last request.

Thorne’s floated throw into the middle resembled more of a corkscrewed Nerf ball as it entered restricted airspace. Smith, who is one inch taller than the covering Jayvon Thomas, made a subtle cut to gain himself a sliver of maneuvering room but the ball was thrown behind him and Thomas was so close that he’d have been considered a conjoined twin or a close relative. Somehow, Smith rose, reached back and sucked in the pass at its high point just as Thomas hooked one arm between Smith’s and yanked on his pants with the other hand to wrench the ball loose. As they tumbled to the ground in front of the goalposts, Smith clutched the ball to his body as if he was safeguarding the antidote to every known disease on the planet.

The pass from the Michigan State transfer to the Penn State transfer might have been the cure for an ailing program, for Smith also saw the victory as a turning point.

“I feel like it is against a big, quality team,” he said. “It was one of the wins that we knew we were capable of. We took a lot of the SEC teams to the fourth quarter this year. It definitely gives us a sense of confidence and kind of a boost.”

Smith said the Tigers ran the winning play earlier in overtime but Thorne had to throw it away under pressure.

“I was low-key pitching for them to call it,” Smith said. “We came back to it and I’m like, ‘P, just throw it, it’s just like practice, just throw it and I’m ready to catch it.’”

Moments later, Jordan-Hare Stadium’s bleachers emptied when Amari Daniels dropped Marcel Reed’s reverse pass on Texas A&M’s two-point attempt.

“I did not know if they were going to storm the field or not and I turned around and some fan was smacking me in the head,” Thorne said. “It was awesome.”

It shouldn’t have been the first time for Thorne but the Gravedigger play in last year’s Iron Bowl denied him the pleasure.

“Last year, we were one play away from probably a field storm,” he said. “It’s something that you deal with the whole offseason and guys talk about. So, to finish that one the right way and then to have that experience is something that you can look back on when you’re 90 years old — if you’re fortunate enough to make it to 90.”

 

Iron Bowl shapes the future

 

Ah, Alabama, which is what Auburn fans think about as much as their own team. For much of Saturday night’s game, there had been no public announcements of the plight of the Tide, which was getting run over by a bunch of prairie dogs in a covered wagon out in Oklahoma. But with 1:54 to go in regulation, in the middle of the Tigers’ tying drive, the largest videoboard in college football — Auburn’s only true distinction in recent years — showed the Sooners celebrating their 24-3 win and the fans erupted in glee.

And now the Tigers could go to 6-6 and become bowl eligible with a win over Alabama this week, which wouldn’t erase but would avenge the Gravedigger loss on this field last year.

Saturday night’s stunning and simultaneous turn of events also shifted the bizarre yet entertaining arguments of which team has the worst coach and worst quarterback from Freeze and Thorne back to Kalen DeBoer and Jalen Milroe. It’s getting hard to keep track of but Milroe has gone from Heisman frontrunner to chief blunderer to the One Who Will Win the National Championship and now presumably, as Thorne was thought to be, the quarterback his coach is stuck with until he no longer is.

“There’s been a lot of ups and downs this year for me,” Thorne said, “a lot of struggles between the white lines and doing everything I can to show up and give everything I’ve got and make sure that I look back and have no regrets. And I feel like right now, I’ll be able to do that.”

Freeze preferred to stay in the moment rather than contemplate what a win over the Tide would mean.

“Oh, man, I just want to enjoy tonight right now,” he said. “The atmosphere tonight and us playing against a top-15 team with all the recruits that we have here that we want, that’s really the momentum. We’ve had one top-10 class in my time here and we’re on our way to number two.”

It’s also obvious Thorne and his young receivers are getting better. Thorne is taking better care of the ball. Then, there’s this:

“Our kids have started playing with more of a will to win and believing that they can,” Freeze said. “I’m not sure exactly what caused that. I’d love to play some of those games over. I think we could be sitting here with one or two losses and feeling quite pretty good about the season. We didn’t get it done but we did tonight against a really good football team.”

Questions remain, of course. What sort of measure is Texas A&M? Is a team that’s good enough to rally from a 21-0 deficit bad enough to fall that far behind to Auburn in the first place? Is it because, as Nick Saban asserted earlier in the day, that Jordan-Hare Stadium is haunted? Or was the game another sign that the SEC is cannibalistic and even the best teams will have a missing hand or foot?

“I told them at halftime that that easily could happen,” Freeze said of losing the 21-0 lead. “I don’t know if y’all are watching this league but it’s pretty brutal. It’s a tough league to play in and there’s no game that’s over.”

Freeze cannot escape the fact that next season is the do-or-die year for him and his program and it doesn’t matter that he must develop a new quarterback.

But for now, the current quarterback hopes to be a Thorne in the Tide’s side. The Tigers have been blown out in Tuscaloosa ever since their historic 28-27 Camback of 2010. Thorne isn’t going to win the Heisman like Cam Newton did that day but neither is Milroe. Neither team is going to win the national championship but, more importantly, what happens at Bryant-Denny Stadium will be a one-game season that will shape the destinies of both rivals.

Less than 24 hours after Toomer’s Corner was buried in Angel Soft and Quilted Northern, there were no vestiges remaining of the toilet-paper blizzard, as if it never happened. We are about to see if the result that started the storm will have a similar fate or if its effects are permanent.