re: The ultimate last day of a bye week topic: your Auburn prognosis

Even though Alabama has a winning record (5-3) in JH in the last 16 years, including the last two.

That’s with a tight Coach Saban. IMO, DeBoer is fearless which hopefully will be transmitted to the players. Doesn’t mean they can’t lose but it’s less likely and less likely to be spooky stuff.

There's obviously no way to measure or quantify this but I've gotten the sense for years and years that for some weird reason, Bama always seems to play really tight/tense when we play the Aubs at JH.

I wouldn't say "afraid" of the Aubs. Just making mistakes they normally don't do (e.g. repeated false starts, receivers dropping passes they ordinarily catch 99 times out of 100, boneheaded penalties, etc).

Obviously, it's a huge game for the program but I'm hoping CKD can instill in the team a quiet confidence and a calmness in the team that we're gonna go in there and steadily grind Auburn down.

Auburn’s problem is that they are a very poorly coached team overall and especially, offensively - this excludes the defense. Freeze could not identify, develop and/or attract even a decent QB. Then they had the stupid play-calling structure.

I’m guessing that despite protests to the contrary, it was hard for a meaningful segment of the players to truly respect Freeze. The players don’t have to like you, in fact, even if they do like you, they must respect you in order to put forth the effort to succeed at this level.