TigerHorn

His feet tell the story. He's not constantly shuffling around because he's afraid the OL will collapse at any second. Even his footwork when he throws on the run is vastly better. Two of the highlights in your link showed that off.

Seemed like we were in every game those years save for TO's. Stan White was an INT machine. When he wasn't throwing picks, we were fumbling and muffing. As Dye would say though, those years built the foundation for '93. I hope we have a better record this year than those years, but I fully expect to lose the next three.

Fratness? Did you used to hold a prominent marketing position at Anheuser-Busch? Emphasis on "used to"........

I think he's a lawyer, which means someone else has to do most of his typing for him. And he gets paid by the word. 😉 OP still made a quality point though.

Within 11 months, I had cash flow+, first three months in the company's history. We had a turnaround plan centered around an attractive acquisition that we could have bought with their own cash flow. The other company's CEO and I hit it off, and the plan was for him to be the strategic vision guy for product and brand, while I would run the overall business and get things made, delivered, etc. Well, COVID hit in the midst of a leadership transition at our parent company, which promptly panicked, and set out, axes in hand, to cut expenses $3B worldwide. Our modest little turnaround plan was a rounding error. The acquisition target got PE backing eventually, carried out the original CEO's vision that I was onboard with, and now is 5x their original size. I wound down the division at the end of '21. And managed to pull that off 35% under budget, mostly by selling more stuff than they thought I could and negotiating better exit deals with suppliers & creditors. 😟 I got them to take a portion of the budget underrun and use it for severance for the remaining staff. They hadn't planned to give any, but that's an Asian (non-Japanese) company for you.

Great analogy! But paragraphs are your friend. 😁 I took over a failing division of a large international conglomerate a few years back, so your experience resonates. It was a freestanding entity that had a completely broken management team. One of the guys who stayed through it, a VP, would later confide that "It took me several months to get used to working with an ethical CEO". Your post brought back a lot of those memories, and my trial might be even more reflective of what CHF took over, in that the prior CEO made almost all decisions without consulting anyone, and then just rolled them out by surprise at the 11th hour. He was very detached, as we have heard CBH was. It takes a while to right a ship like that, and neither you or I had to deal with NCAA limits on how much time we could spend with our people, which must make things 10x harder. On top of all that, CHF has 40-odd "new employees" to work with, and lost a chunk of his experienced leadership to boot. I really don't think we can get things fully together until maybe LSU or so. It would be great to make enough progress to go into College Station and steal one in two weeks, but that will be a herculean task. If CHF even pulls that one off, he's a candidate for SEC CoY. I do think we should progress enough to take the next four after LSU though, if we have what we think we have in Jimmies and Joes.

I've lived in a lot of places and have traveled extensively worldwide for business - where you really get to know people and customs, as opposed to tourism - and while I can argue with some of your original points, you are spot on that AU utterly fails at promoting its brand. AU has plenty to crow about in multiple fields, and has had for decades, yet for years our AU commercial featured the friggin' pavement research institute! No offense to the civil engineers, but that presents only slightly better than the "watching paint drying institute". We've moved on from that, but our commercials still are spotty at best. UAT runs rings around us in marketing and hype, with a reality that has far less to sell beyond football. Back circa 1990, I developed a close relationship to some senior executives at the largest aerospace company in the world, who I worked for. I gained access to their internal rankings of universities for engineering grad caliber, based upon decades of experience with their performance for the company. There were four tiers of schools they recruited. Tier 1 had about five schools in it, the usual suspects, including Cal Berkeley. Tier 2 had maybe two dozen schools, all of which you will know if you're in engineering. Cornell, Michigan, Rensselaer, GT, Texas, ATM, UCLA, etc. AU was in Tier 2! Tier three had a lot of schools considered decent, and they would take a few exceptional students from them. Tennessee was in Tier 3. Tier 4 schools were where they went for non-engineering positions, if they really had to. All that to say, AU has needed an attitude adjustment for a very long time in the way it presents itself. I hit one of the alumni development people with this point some years back, and she lamented that we seem to have an attitude of "We're jus poor li'l ol' Auburn, and we just can't say things like that." Even if, and especially if, it seems, UAT does say them.

The politicians of this state have done whatever UAT wanted since before Bear. Take a look at the way their BOT is appointed - it is an entirely opaque process run by the BOT itself, in direct contrast to how AU's BOT is selected. Their budgets are similarly dark to the public. AU, OTOH, is being foolishly overly loyal to their mission and all but discourages the best out of state talent from attending. You don't have to go full UAT to give a OOS kid who wins scholarships in-state tuition. Attracting that level of future alumni is good for AU and the state in the long term. As an example that I know personally, one kid got the Presidential Scholarship to AU, the other got the scholarship that is the next level down. With OOS tuition, their cost of attendance was significantly more that staying in Texas and going to ATM or UT. UAT would have essentially paid either one to attend. AU should make itself a bargain for that caliber of kid for it's own long term good.

AU shockingly finished #9 with that 10:30 ET timeslot on ESPN with 2.23M viewers. Testament to our fanbase. Texas/bammer was #1 with 8.76M on ESPN, Colorado/Nebraska was right behind (Deion effect + Nebraska's huge following + being available over the air and cable to more households) with 8.73M. The Texas/bammer numbers I think is ESPN's highest since 2015 or so. Both are considerably behind big games from the recent past that were available on major networks (ie, over the air vs subscription cable/streaming like ESPN), such as last year's Michigan/tOSU which pulled 17.14M. This sort of illustrates the potential for financial disaster with ESPN's sports contracts that Clay Travis wrote about last week. Here are the collective ratings

I think the real contrast is Squirrel McCaleb. Battie's not Ontario like we were all hoping, but is probably closer to Grant and Davis. Grant got a shot in the pro's because he had both size and speed IIRC, he's a good bit bigger than Battie or Ontario.

The article linked below lists all the defensive grades from PFF for AU, what it leaves out is that Donovan Kaufman's grade was #1 in the nation! AU PFF Defensive grades Fifty, if you want, drop this article into your daily digest, which is always a good read. I thought the DK ranking deserved its own thread though!

That's the logic, but I've been to a couple of ATM games, and I've never found that crowd to be all that rowdy or intimidating. Too much structure to their cheering.

It wasn't a workplace. It was a stadium with an average BAC of, oh, maybe 0.15, in an intense game. False analogy. I bet you've never said anything at all hurtful or derogatory in your entire sainted life, especially while drinking too much, have you?

I did not approve of the racist aspect of the taunting. So long as boys have hormones, they will question each others sexuality. I'd wager your paycheck that those Longhorn players had equally derisive things to say about the taunters. If I run into them in the next few weeks, I'll ask them what they were singing about. I'm sure virgin ears such as yours will be appalled. Your second sentence requires belief in a fictional term to address, so I won't, and you still avoided addressing your own hypocrisy.

Nice job saying things I didn't say, but that seems to be where you are. I also note that you studiously avoided your own position on the banner at Cal.

Texas players took it as they should have, proud of them for that. Scoreboard baby. As for the sexuality reference, of course its derogatory, that's the point of taunting. If you're going to take an extreme position on this, then you have to take the exact same position on the banner at Cal. To do anything else is definitively hypocrisy.

LOL, you're right, but in today's world, that behavior often causes a firestorm. Just look at the X meltdown that has brewed up over some drunken UAT boys yelling at Texas players. Even Tigerdroppings is referring to the video as "problematic" for UAT, and most of it is some guy with a not-from-Alabama accent questioning the sexual orientation of the UT players. I couldn't make out everything being said, but in the new link above I can hear the racist comments better. I think everybody needs to chill out over equating words with "violence". EDIT: Actual video posted while I was typing. I don't hear a Southern accent in that taunting, I do hear a "You guys" in place of Y'all. A lot worse gets said in the stands and on the field.

Several forums have "Where were you and what were you doing?" threads for today. Your heartfelt post seems like a good place to start one here. Hopefully others will share too. My experience: I had just gotten to work, we had a ton of visitors in from Hyundai (Seoul) and GM (Detroit). One of my colleagues walked in and asked if I had heard about the plane hitting the WTC. I said "Man, some ATC is going to be in trouble today!" as I was thinking of the B-25 that hit the Empire State building back in the late 1940's (I'm a history buff). Then I realized the internet was slowing to a crawl, and that never happened at a major R&D center like ours, we had the biggest pipe technology could provide. Then the second plane hit, and we knew it was on. The major news sites were locked up solid, CNN.com just had a blank page with a pic - or maybe a very slow video - of the first tower that was hit. Our Korean visitors, who have no concept of the size of the US (50% of all Koreans live within 50 miles Seoul's center) were terrified. Our GM guys wound up being stuck with us for a week or two before renting cars and shift driving to Detroit. Within a few weeks, my wife, who was in a critical medical position at a big city trauma center, was issued a garbage bag full of everything from nerve gas antidote to antibiotics. The assumption was that they were for me and the kids, so that she would not feel compelled to leave her position in the hospital should another attack happen. My wife and the rest of the staff would be expected to sleep at the hospital for the duration. Some may recall that everyone feared the terrorists had gotten hold of non-nuke WMDs in the collapse of the Soviet Union. The people I knew in the State Department from both sides of the political aisle viewed it as a certainty.

Cal and Stanford are in nice parts of town. Downtown SF was headed for a train wreck when I was there regularly 7 years ago, and friends who live there now tell me it's far worse. You should expect any campus with as much alumni and tax money as they have - vastly more than AU - to be first rate. If you want to see a progressive wasteland, it's right down the road and across the bay from Cal. I didn't go to the game, but thought about it. Been there enough times that I know where to go. I was surprised to see one of my favorite haunts, Fish Grotto (aka The Grotto), made it onto the game broadcast.

Ah, gotcha. Yeah, I actually kind of liked the idea of Caddy as HC too.

He's not young. And he's in poor health. The rest yeah, but let's see how long he stays with it after his son graduates.

Well, I am, but I'm also a Texas fan, so there's that......

Spun the rusher around. That will get the call 9 times out of 10

SEC refs mad 'cause they couldn't be there to save bammer

It's worse than you think. I co-founded a company HQ'd in San Diego. I was out there monthly at times, never less than quarterly for the better part of a decade. It always wore me down, and I was a lot younger then. You just hit a wall at night IF you have a full daily schedule. If you have decent amounts of downtime, you can adapt a little better. My biggest problem was sleeping until a reasonable hour in the AM. I always woke up at 4 AM PST whether I wanted to or not, which left me running out of gas by a late dinnertime.