Don’t let the “18” on the helmet or the 5 stern statues alongside the Walk of Champions up to imposing Bryant-Denny Stadium idiot you. Alabama — mighty, title-laden, we-don’t-storm-the-field Alabama — completely dreads enjoying little ol’ Auburn.
It’s true. Alabama followers look ahead to the Iron Bowl the approach you look ahead to a dental cleansing. You understand it’s obligatory, however you’ve to do it anyway. Best-case state of affairs, you come out feeling precisely the identical; worst-case, you’re in for a full yr of ache. There’s no actual upside right here for Alabama, only a determined want to survive the week with out an excessive amount of bodily or psychological injury.
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Take, as an illustration, this yr’s recreation, scheduled for 7:30 p.m. Eastern — lengthy after sunset — this Saturday in Auburn. On its floor, this wouldn’t seem to be a contest; No. 10 Alabama is a robust, if sometimes erratic, offensive machine with a transparent path to the SEC championship recreation, whereas Auburn is 5-6, down a coach and unsure of its identification and its future.
But that is the Iron Bowl, and unusual issues occur right here. That’s why the line is simply 5.5 factors in Alabama’s favor, as opposed to, say, the 13.5 factors Georgia is getting towards a Georgia Tech group that’s way more completed than Auburn this yr. The mojo is simply completely different in the Iron Bowl, and that’s what has Alabama nervous heading right into a recreation the place, towards another opponent, they’d be extremely, even perhaps supremely, assured.
Alabama has received the final 5 Iron Bowls, however the two groups normally present loads of dramatics. (Jason Clark/Getty Images)
(Jason Clark through Getty Images)
Which brings us to Auburn’s emotions on the Iron Bowl, which might finest be described as, “Hell, let’s see what happens this year.” Auburn is faculty soccer’s chaos-bringer, a program that reeled off two of the biggest finishes in sports activities historical past in back-to-back video games, and in addition a program that’s wandered in the desert for the final decade, misplaced in a haze of coach-culture misfits. You by no means fairly know which Auburn goes to present up in the Iron Bowl, which makes this such an enchanting — and, for Alabama, terrifying — recreation.
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“We understand it’s going to be a great experience there, and it’ll be one where we’re facing a team that wants to knock us off of our goals and our hopes and all that,” Alabama head coach Kalen DeBoer mentioned earlier this week. “You’ve really got to simplify it down. You’ve got to prepare. Prepare for the noise, prepare for the emotions that come.”
Good luck. The cool, late-November night environment at Jordan-Hare Stadium has a approach of summoning up ghosts. Unheralded gamers step up to play the recreation of their lives. Balls bounce in unpredictable instructions. Field targets fly vast … or, in one memorable case, only a wee bit brief.
Few faculty soccer followers — and precisely none in Alabama — who have been acutely aware in 2013 will ever neglect the Kick-Six, the second when Auburn landed the most decisive knockout blow in the rivalry’s historical past. Auburn followers can recite the name of the late Rod Bramblett (“Auburn’s gonna win the football game!”) like the Pledge of Allegiance or the Lord’s Prayer. Here, let’s take pleasure in it as soon as once more:
(Sorry, Alabama followers.)
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In 2017, No. 6 Auburn knocked off No. 1 Alabama in Jordan-Hare. Two years later, in a shootout that featured a 48-point second quarter, No. 16 Auburn knocked No. 5 Alabama out of the playoff and a New Year’s Six bowl for the first time since 2010 with a 48-45 upset victory.
The downside for Auburn is that the two most up-to-date Jordan-Hare Iron Bowls have seen the ghosts flip towards the house group. In 2021, Alabama outlasted Auburn in 4 overtimes thanks to the miracle heroics of Bryce Young and John Metchie. Two years later, Auburn had Alabama pinned on fourth-and-31, and Alabama’s Jalen Milroe executed a play referred to as “Gravedigger” that gave the Tide a game-winning landing. The agony at Jordan-Hare on each nights was seen and palpable.
Time and the movement of faculty soccer have dimmed the Iron Bowl’s glow a contact; it’s now doable to lose the recreation and nonetheless win the nationwide championship. (See: 2017 Alabama, which might go on to beat Georgia for the title on Tua Tagovailoa’s miracle 2nd-and-26 play.) At 9-2, Alabama doesn’t fairly have the luxurious of taking an Iron Bowl loss this yr, as a 3rd loss virtually assuredly removes them from playoff competition.
You can debate whether or not Auburn-Alabama is the most interesting faculty soccer rivalry in the nation. Michigan-Ohio State has had extra at stake in latest years; Army-Navy has extra pink, white and blue custom. What’s indeniable, although, is that no rivalry has impressed fairly the vary of absurd, unhinged, even felonious conduct in its fan bases. (Nobody’s poisoning any bushes over, say, Notre Dame-USC.)
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“I don’t care where you live or where you’re from, you know about the Iron Bowl,” Auburn interim head coach DJ Durkin mentioned Monday. “Certainly, to this area, there is nothing bigger.”
The Iron Bowl additionally has the highest per-capita charge of named video games, matchups that you realize not by their yr or rating, however by the nickname that also hangs on them. There’s Kick-Six and Gravedigger, after all, and in addition Punt Bama Punt, the Run in the Mud, The Camback, Bo Over The Top … names that summon up days of triumph and futility, exultation and desolation, time and again.
Because that’s the coronary heart of the Iron Bowl, the approach that the followers in Tuscaloosa and on The Plains lock in for someday a yr, after which relive it for the subsequent 364. Perhaps Alabama will run away with this one and start wanting to the SEC championship recreation … however in all probability not. These video games have a approach of coming down to the last second.