re: Why UA, AU, and MAYBE LSU fans should be happy about football...

Last year's auburn team was an incredible story. They had a ton of heart and won some incredible games. And they were oh so close to a national championship.

They also beat UGA on pure luck. They got manhandled by LSU earlier in the season. If you want to set aside the LSU game and talk about only the end of the season, then in the last four games it was pure luck (UGA), an impressive upset of Bama but it took quite a few breaks, a solid handling of Mizzou, and a close loss to FSU. Very impressive for an underrated team. Hardly impressive if you claim to be the best team in the nation.

And that's the catch-22 of auburn's season last year. You have to do some mental gymnastics to call them the an elite team, one to compare with recent championship teams of Alabama and LSU. If you want to look only at won/loss, and say "great teams find a way to win" and ignore the details, then you have two losses. If you want to look at the details and look deeper, then yes - auburn played toe to toe with FSU and damn near won it all, but they also got their arse handed to them by LSU, had a miracle tip against UGA, and needed our kicker to melt down and then the famous kick 6 to beat Bama.

Put another way: If Alabama was the nation's best team in the Iron Bowl as their ranking indicated, then auburn's scrappy performance is to be admired and respected. If you want to make the case that auburn was the best team in the nation last year, then the Alabama game was nothing to brag about, and you have some explaining to do about UGA, LSU, and FSU, as well as a stinker against Mississippi State.

You can't be both the dominating champion and the scrappy underdog at the same time. You have to choose one or the other.