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 Wow. I had no idea that you Barners were so feisty. How could I, really, when your team, players and coaches alike, rolls over like a bored hooker at the start of every game and takes it for 4 quarters with a resigned, lifeless expression on their slack-jawed faces? How appropriate that your team is most easily compared to a hooker. Bought and paid for by "Reverend" Chette, a despicable pimp, it's once promising program sagging in the gutter after years of self abuse and neglect, your football team causes respectable members of the SEC to avert their eyes in shame whenever present. Just like a hooker at her high school reunion, you are the source of embarrassment for everyone around you.
That metaphor really is spot on. You were never the pretty girl, you see. Not in high school, and certainly not now that you've whored yourself out to the snake oil salesman that is Tommy Tubberville. You were a plain, serviceable girl, part of a respectable middle tier of SEC teams that, tragically, could not accept her position beneath the truly special members of your class. The elite one, the standard bearer, the Homecoming Queen, Alabama, and her court of Georgia, Florida, Tennessee and LSU, were never going to socialize with you, were never going to pretend you were their equal, but neither were they going to humiliate you for what, let's face it, is a long laundry list of pathetic shortcomings: your backwards, agricultural roots, your national irrelevance, your childish traditions involving toilet paper, fire hoses and the buying out of superior opponents, your racist undergraduate population, your Napoleonic complex... but more on that later.
You could have remained the plain, irrelevant girl had you stayed quiet and, most importantly, known your place. Everything would have been fine. You would have won your 5 to 7 games a year, gone to some perfunctory bowl and lived in suitable anonymity. The teams that matter would never have taken notice of you and, as is obvious now, it would have been so much better for you if they hadn't.
But that wasn't good enough for you. You had to dream big. Who told you to dream, you wretched little hicks? Who led you to believe you could be anything other than ordinary? Worse, how could you have been so stupid as to have believed them? It’s so sad.
So what did you do? What any base whore does when her situation inevitably becomes desperate. You spread your legs for Tommy Tubberville and let him do anything he wanted so long as he promised to make you a star. Let me ask you Auburn... how pretty do you feel, right about now?
Tommy brings in the pimp Reverend Chette, and Chette starts to sell Auburn, quite literally, to the highest bidder. The silence that met his outrageous conduct was deafening, and should tell you everything you need to know about yourselves as a fanbase: you lack the class or the morals or the heart to do what is right, and so everything you support is doomed to go wrong, and every insult is earned a hundred times over by your cowardice and your failures.
Sure, for a few years your willingness to sell yourselves paid dividends on the field... you got a few victories that Auburn in its natural state would never dream of achieving... but do you think anyone was fooled? Could you be that delusional?
Think about 2004, you simple minded fools. It was as if the hooker that you had become had pleasured a Hollywood Powerbroker and reached the zenith of her career, an Oscar nomination. Think back and ask yourself, were you welcomed to the ceremony? Were you hailed as the new star on the scene, and showered with the praises that are heaped on Alabama each and every time she rises to national prominence?
Or did everyone look the other way, ignore you and shunt you off to the side, pretend you weren't there and rid themselves of your presence at every opportunity? Of course they did. They knew why you were there in the first place. They knew you didn't deserve your 'success'. They knew what you had done, and what that made you, and they were ashamed that you were breathing the same air. You were a joke, and you were treated as such, the whore that thinks she's a princess.
You see what you get when you dream too big, you hillbilly farmers with your blue jean shorts and your chewing tobacco? Did you really think that Auburn University, formerly Alabama Polytechnic Institute, belonged in the big-time? Because no one else did... and they never will. You can put lipstick on a pig, and by all accounts that is a favorite pastime for your undergraduates, but that pig is never going to be the Homecoming Queen, the elite... the One.
So your big night came and went, and instead of finally getting what you so coveted, the spotlight that you watched Alabama bask in all through high school, you got a first row seat to your own humiliation, the public outing of Auburn University as an irrelevant, unwanted blemish on the national football landscape. The descent from there was steady and sure. Your riverboat tricks began to dry up, and the gambler quickly noticed that the silicone wonder he had created was beginning to leak at the seams. Do you ever wonder why Tommy Tubberville is so anxious to leave that little dirt farm you call a village? Because the smoke is drifting away, the mirrors are all broken and he's forced every morning to roll over and look at the nasty, ruined face that is Auburn Football, briefly and artificially made to look pretty but now bearing the scars and wreckage of its whoring ways on every line of its puffy, bloated face.
Do you sometimes look in the mirror and wish with all your might that you hadn’t sold yourself? That you had been content to be the plain girl in the background? Do you regret your unfounded hubris? Do you see what happens to those who have ambition, but no ability?
Which brings us back to the Napoleonic complex I mentioned. It originates in the fact that your numbers are populated by the rejects and outcasts, those whose social skills or intelligence or physical beauty or moral fiber are not of sufficient quality to allow them to interact and compete in the real world, forcing them to migrate to the protection and lowered standards of that island of misfit toys you call a university. There, where you do not have to confront your superiors, you can entertain delusions of grandeur despite your meager status. How easy it must be to think yourselves special, when you are surrounded only by common things! And how intoxicating it must have been, after decades of irrelevance, when you sold yourself to Wingnut and briefly drank the tainted wine of stolen success.
But now your pathetic dream is dead, and what is most sad is that, for a brief time, you all believed it was real. You believed you deserved to be listed alongside those so clearly your betters. That must sting, knowing how badly you wanted to prove your worth, and how completely you failed. How bitter must be the thought that, had you resigned yourself to your station in life as a respectable afterthought, you would never have suffered the humiliation that your classless grasp for power has brought you, the unending mockery of those, like Alabama, who understand exactly what it takes to be elite, and has understood from the start that the plain girl from high school was never, ever going to be anything else.
This Saturday, as Alabama completes her ascendance to her rightful place atop the SEC and Auburn completes its fall into the gutter, don’t think of it as an end of an era for Auburn, but rather the resumption of reality, and the restoration of the natural order. It’s time for Auburn to return to the background, to the shadows... and if you have a shred of decency left, you will do so with the quiet humility that has been so strikingly absent these last few years. It’s simple really. Keep your mouths shut and your eyes down and your heads bowed, and we will know that you finally get it, that you finally understand what we’ve known all along…that you’ve finally remembered your place.
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