Following their 4th straight loss to a ranked opponent, all in very winnable games, Auburn gets back on the road and finally plays a team without number next to their name. The Tigers will travel to Fayetteville, Arkansas to face some Hawgs that fired their coach after a 2-3 start.
Following Sam Pittman’s firing, the Razorbacks put an interim head coach tag on our old friend Bobby Petrino, and since then they’ve gone 0-2. However, this 0-2 includes a 3-point loss at #17 Tennessee and a 3-point loss to #3 Texas A&M. They’ve scored 31 and 42 points in those games respectively. That sounds scary.
Bobby Petrino wants to score 100 points in every game. I feel like he wants to double that against Auburn. I don’t know why. He had that one year as Auburn’s offensive coordinator in 2002 and left on good terms to be the head coach at Louisville, where he was good enough to get hired by the Falcons.
But that didn’t go well and he left the team high and dry for Arkansas. Then he had a motorcycle wreck and had to work his way back up, including another less-successful stint at Louisville, then Missouri State. But since then he’s only been an offensive coordinator.
He pushed hard to be named Arkansas’s interim head coach for the rest of the season, and he’s going to use the rest of this season as a job interview. He’s done his time in the court of public opinion and he’s ready to be a head coach at Arkansas again. He’s already been a head coach twice at Louisville. Why not two times at Arkansas? That would have to be a record.
Anyway, all that to say that being 2-4 is not going to stop Bobby Petrino from trying his absolute best to beat Auburn badly. Because to him he’s 0-2 with 3-point losses to pretty good teams.
But that’s where the matchups come in.
Arkansas is scoring lots of points. Auburn is not allowing lots of points. They have allowed less than the opponent’s average in every game this season.
On the other side, Auburn’s offense doesn’t score a lot of points, but Arkansas’s defense allows tons of points. Oh yeah, Bobby Petrino’s first order of business was to fire form Auburn linebacker, Travis Williams, who was Arkansas’s defensive coordinator. I’m telling you, he doesn’t like Auburn.
Unless the game goes into a million overtimes, somebody’s trend has to break, something’s gotta give.
Auburn is going to score points because Arkansas’s defense isn’t good. Auburn’s defense is going to be good enough to keep Arkansas below their scoring average.
Auburn has played well enough to beat four ranked teams. For various reasons (suspended officials, etc), they have not beaten any of them. The thing that some people can’t admit is that playing four ranked teams close means something. They keep saying it’s not that they lost, it’s how they lost. Yeah, they barely lost. That matters, too.
So now Auburn gets to play a bad team and all that adversity, all that negativity, all that almost will finally break. It has to.
Jackson Arnold throws two rainy touchdown passes. Jeremiah Cobb and Omar Mabson score one a piece. The defense gets a strip-sack touchdown.
The last time Auburn went to Arkansas they won 48-10. The rain will keep the points a little lower, but it’ll feel the same.
Auburn 31, Arkansas 17
