The Tony Franklin Era at Auburn was expected to begin with "shock and awe" -- offensive fireworks produced by the new offensive coordinator's spread offense.

But the Tigers proved that a good ground attack and rock-solid defense can serve the purpose Saturday night at Jordan-Hare Stadium, as Auburn rode its running game and defense to a 34-0 victory over Louisiana-Monroe.

Tiger running back Ben Tate rushed for 115 yards and Kodi Burns, who started the game for Auburn, added 69 yards rushing before leaving the game in the third quarter with a cut on his leg.

"We knew we could run the ball," Auburn coach Tommy Tuberville. "We played pretty good defense. If the defense and special teams play well, you can win ball games. We need more consistency with the throwing game."

The Auburn passing game especially was expected to be transformed with its variety of short, controlled passing mixed with the run.

But the Tigers passing game never materialized.

"The offense stunk, and it's my fault," Franklin said. "I saw it coming three days ago. There's a lot of blame to go around, and, if it's anyone's fault, it's mine."

Auburn managed only 24 yards in the air in the first half as neither Burns nor Todd could generate a passing attack.

The Tigers' final passing numbers were 85 yards on 13-of-27 passing with one interception and a touchdown.

"I've had a lot of ugly games in my life and a lot of ugly halves. This was an ugly half," Franklin said. "We played a little better in the second half, but the defense played lights out. Hats off to them."

ULM had a little success moving the ball early in the game, but Auburn's defense kept the Warhawks off the scoreboard.

ULM coach Charlie Weatherbee said he felt the Warhawks gave the Tigers 21 of their 34 points with turnovers and special-team mistakes.

The Tigers took a 17-0 lead into the locker room because of big plays by the defense and special teams.

Auburn's defense and special teams both out-scored the highly-anticipated new offense as it failed to develop a rhythm or sustain a drive against the suspect ULM defense.

The Tigers generated only 150 yards total offense during the half.

Burns and Todd alternated possessions during the half, but neither could ignite the spread passing game.

Burns finished the half with four completions in eight attempts for a meager 15 yards, while Todd had only two completions in seven attempts for nine yards.

The running game was better, with Ben Tate running for 74 first-half yards. He fueled the offense's only scoring drive of the first half, culminating in Wes Byrum's 33-yard field goal with 1:16 left in the second quarter.

By then, both the defense and special teams already had scored touchdowns.

The defense scored Auburn's first touchdown on ULM's first possession.

Tiger defensive end Antonio Coleman blindsided Warhawk quarterback Kinsmon Lancaster and forced a fumble that fellow defensive end Michael Goggans picked up and returned nine yards for the score. Byrum's kick gave Auburn a 7-0 lead with 12:08 left in the quarter.

Most teams facing Auburn this year will have to adjust to first-year offensive coordinator Tony Franklin's spread offense.

Louisiana-Monroe isn't one of those teams.

The Warhawks have played against Franklin's offense the last two years while Franklin was Troy's offensive coordinator.

Despite losing both games, Louisiana-Monroe's defense played respectably, surrendering 24 points in each game.

Last year the Warhawks shut out Troy's offense through the first half. The Trojans' lone score came on an interception return late in the second quarter. The Warhawks held Troy 10 points below its season average last season.

"The key is not giving up the big play and being patient -- keeping the play in front of you," Louisiana-Monroe head coach Charlie Weatherbie said during his Monday morning teleconference.

In other words, Weatherbie's defense will likely try to play soft coverage. Louisiana-Monroe will attempt to make Auburn sustain long drives and won't worry about a few first downs.

Remember how Auburn used to play against the Steve Spurrier-led Florida teams under Tuberville? Expect Louisiana-Monroe to follow that blueprint.

Weatherbie knows what to expect. He just wants to defend against the game-changing plays.

"(Franklin) loves to throw the ball," Weatherbie said. "Of course, they're a team that's going to throw ball 70 percent of time or more. They love the quick game and bubble passes and they throw the ball down field as much as they can. They pick times to do that. He does a great job with it."

Louisiana-Monroe's defense had more success against Troy than the three SEC teams the Trojans played.

Against SEC foes Arkansas, Florida and Georgia, Franklin's offense at Troy scored 26, 31 and 34 points.

Louisiana-Monroe's defense also held Alabama's offense down during its 21-14 upset win last year at Bryant-Denny Stadium.

Franklin knows how hard it can be to find big plays against the Louisiana-Monroe defense. The Warhawks changed defensive coordinators, but Franklin expects their scheme to be similar to the past two years.

"They're very sound," Franklin said. "They play hard. They run hard to the ball. They're tough, and they were very well coached. Both years, it's been a struggle. We struggled with them both years at Troy."

Auburn head coach Tommy Tuberville is hoping Franklin can solve his Louisiana-Monroe problems now that he has SEC players.

"This is a pretty high-powered offense now," Tuberville said. "You can score. That's the reason that we went to this, to try and have more big plays. You can have big plays against good defenses."

The offensive players are confident as the season-opener approaches.

Running back Ben Tate predicted that Auburn would "put up a nice amount of points."

Receiver Rod Smith said Louisiana-Monroe's success against Troy shows the defense has some talent, but it doesn't mean anything this weekend.

"They may play us differently with us being an SEC team and probably having better athletes, not to take anything away from those guys," Smith said. "They'll probably play us a little different.

"We saw a lot of great things that we can run against those guys."

Antonio Coleman says he is a changed man.

The Auburn defensive end typically isn't one to back away from a preseason practice brawl, but he now is trying to keep his temper under control with the season starting Saturday.

Coleman knows the penalties could be harsh if he loses his cool and engages in a fight in an actual game.

"I've just been chilling," Coleman said. "I've got to cool down from that because if I fight Saturday, I'll probably be suspended, and we can't have that. I just have to bite the bullet."

Coleman was involved in two offseason practice scuffles this year that drew media attention: The first was in spring drills with offensive tackle Lee Ziemba and left Coleman with a sprained neck; the other was toward the end of preseason camp with offensive tackle Ryan Pugh.

Blame went around in each case, but Coleman said he plans to turn the other cheek if a similar situation arises in a game -- even if it's out of character for him.

"It's hard for me. That's why I got in so many fights," said Coleman, a junior who turns 22 Monday. "I injured my neck, and any time a hand gets around my facemask or something like that, I just snap. But I learned to control it because the season's starting and we can't have no fights because they need me out there on the field."

Instead, he would like to channel that anger into his on-field performance. Maybe a little healthy competition might help him do that.

The second-team preseason All-SEC honoree joked that he and fellow weakside defensive end Antoine Carter plan to wager on who might accumulate the most sacks this season, although they'll probably wait until after Saturday's opener against Louisiana-Monroe to finalize the terms.

Coleman led the Tigers with 8.5 sacks last season, while Carter totaled 1.5 in spot duty as a true freshman. Each is sure to rank among the team's top sack men this year.

"They're probably our two best, so there's a good chance you could see them on the field at the same time during certain situations," said Auburn defensive ends coach Terry Price.

Coleman came into last season as the backup to Quentin Groves and with little hype after a quiet redshirt-freshman season in 2006. That changed in the fourth quarter of last year's season opener. Coleman recovered Kansas State quarterback Josh Freeman's fumble after Groves' crushing sack and returned it 34 yards for a win-sealing touchdown.

That play set the tone for Coleman to start eight games in place of the ailing Groves. Coleman finished fourth in the Southeastern Conference with 18.5 tackles for a loss and fifth in sacks (8.5).

Auburn head coach Tommy Tuberville said Coleman was overlooked by not being named an all-conference performer, but Coleman won't have to worry about anonymity this season. And, true to form, he doesn't plan to back down from the extra attention he likely will receive.

"Even if they're aiming for me, I can still get out there and make plays," he said. "It's no big deal to me. It don't scare me. When you get on the field, you'd better bring it, because I'm coming 110 percent."

Since I already got a couple of comments about it this morning, I guess now's as good a time as any to say farewell. Today's my last day covering Auburn. I accepted a job as sports editor of the Athens Banner-Herald and will start there on Friday. I'm a bit nervous about moving into a management position, but it will be beneficial for me professionally and financially. Probably personally, as well, because I felt like I'd been in a bit of a rut lately.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who sent encouraging e-mails and posted comments. The vast majority of folks have been excessively nice to me and I enjoyed interacting with most of you, as well as the kids on the football team. I think they're going to be very good this season.

If you're ever so inclined, you can catch me at the Banner-Herald's Web site in the future. I'm sure I'll be doing some form of a blog at onlineathens.com with general musings. Would love to hear from you.

Thanks again for reading.
dc

* Lead story on Auburn punter Clinton Durst. (It's split into two pages. If you like it well enough to want to keep reading, there's a next button toward the bottom of the first page. That little blue button seems inconspicuous to me.)

* Seconday story on Auburn's first depth chart.

Some really interesting depth chart stuff today, leading with the beat writers' conversation with Clinton Durst, who just might be the starting punter Saturday. He literally just started punting a year ago after playing soccer in high school. That's amazing. And he's a fantastic quote. I have a feeling you'll be reading Clinton Durst's thoughts on the quarterback situation, Clinton Durst's thoughts on the freshman defensive backs, Clinton Durst's opinion on whether Paul Rhoads should rock the full beard or the goatee...pretty much whatever subject somebody needs a good quote on, it appears as though Durst might be the man. He apologized as he walked away from the pack, saying he was sorry if he wasn't good enough as an interview. I was thinking, "I don't know how you'll ever be any better."

I'll drop some highlights of that interview later, but I've got to write the story for tomorrow's paper first. Quickly, here are the big things from the first depth chart released today for Tommy Tuberville's presser:
* No change at quarterback, although my personal opinion after listening to Burns and Todd today is that Burns is going to start. Everyone continues to say no decision has been made and I believe that's likely the case. I'm just basing my opinion on body language and the way they're talking about where they are. I might be completely off base.
* Because he is "in the doghouse," Robert Dunn is currently listed as the fourth-string H receiver behind Terrell Zachery, freshman Darvin Adams and Mario Fannin. Dunn is still listed as the starting punt returner. Tuberville said he will play, but he hasn't been consistent enough at receiver lately.
* Raven Gray is going to redshirt. Tuberville said the knee simply hasn't recovered enough.
* I'm betting the same thing is in the works with Chaz Ramsey, although Tuberville didn't go that far. He just said he's still struggling.
* There are eight freshmen listed on the depth chart (Philip Pierre-Louis, Eric Smith, Adams, Derek Winter, Vance Smith, Christian Thompson, D'Antoine Hood and Neiko Thorpe). Nine if you count Harry Adams, who is listed on the second-team kickoff return unit. I'm pretty sure the first eight, plus Jomarcus Savage, will play. Not so sure about Adams.
* Neil Caudle is listed as the No. 3 quarterback. Tuberville said Barrett Trotter has played well, but Neil Caudle has earned the No. 3 spot and that it could change down the road.
* Gabe McKenzie is listed as the backup strongside DE. A.J. Greene is dealing with a hamstring issue, Tuberville said, and Savage is just coming off a shoulder injury, so Gabe's the best backup option for now, apparently.
* Thorpe and Hood are listed as the backup cornerbacks. No surprise there.
* Philip Pierre-Louis is listed as the No. 2 Z receiver and the No. 3 X receiver. Tuberville said Montez Billings is unlikely to play, so if their prediction from Sunday holds up, PPL is probably going to play more at Z Saturday.
* Tristan Davis and Eric Smith are listed as co-No. 3 running backs and Tristan is on the No. 1 kickoff return unit, but we continue to hear that he's struggling with his health. Ben Tate said he's hurting on Sunday and Brad Lester repeated that today. Said he's having serial foot issues -- although he said he doesn't think the current foot problem is the same one that plagued him last year. same foot, different problem, I believe he said. At any rate, Tuberville says he's practicing, but you have to wonder how useful he can be until he gets it together health-wise. Brad, by the way, has shaved his head bald and has a little chin beard thing going. He's a ringer for Chad Johnson right now.

OK, that wasn't quick at all. More later.

I went back and transcribed Tony Franklin's comments to the pack for my story on scripting that's running Tuesday. Figured I might as well post it.

Like I said in that post from yesterday, I found that scripting stuff to be really interesting. I hope it's not so inside-baseball that it comes off as boring. The really technical stuff can be dry reading sometimes, but I think this time it came off all right.

Anyway, here's what he had to say:

Opening statement:
The only news I’ve got is that both of them will play, just like I’ve told you before. As far as who will start, I don’t know. They’re both good. For me, it’s a very unique situation. I’ve never been in it before. I’ve never had anything like it before, to where that you’ve got two quality Division I quarterbacks that are both good leaders, both good players. Neither one of them have wilted under the pressure. They’ve both gotten better. So as of right now, as far as picking one and saying, ‘This guy’s the starter,’ we haven’t done that yet. We’ll have somebody that’ll go out there first on Saturday, but the good thing is we’ve got Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday and more time to put into it and see what happens from there.

On whether the starter will be set or whether it might be situational:
It’ll be situational. It could be something dynamic between now and Saturday that one of them emerges and shows some quality or something that we haven’t seen that makes him the guy, then that could be the case, too. But they’re both gonna play. I think that’s the most important thing. It’ll probably be even more important as to who finishes the game rather than who starts the game. That might be the more important thing.

On when he plans to tell the QBs of his decision:
As soon as I know. They know what you know. Today, when they went out there, I didn’t tell which one of them to go first. They do that between themselves. The snaps and how they alternate the snaps, they do that themselves. I just make sure by the end of the week that they’ve all gotten the quality of reps that they have to have. So when I look out there, like on a certain day, and see who goes first for a certain drill, they decide that every day themselves. So far, like I said, it’s been a good problem. And it’s really not a problem. I can find no negatives in it at all. Unless I made it negative, then it can be negative, but I don’t plan on doing that.

On how they might divide snaps Saturday:
I think the flow of the game and you watch them play, that might kinda help determine that. No but I mean I would be surprised if they didn’t play close to the equal amount of time. I think there could be a situation where one of them gets a hot hand and he may stay. But then again, there’ve been days out here where if you watched them where one of them gets a hot hand and the other one comes in and his is hotter. So again, I think they’ve both risen to each other’s level of excellence.

On how he feels about the offense as a whole:
I feel good. It’s impossible every year to tell. You never know. I don’t care where you are. I don’t care where you’re coaching. You never know until you go play other people. You can never tell against your own people how good you’re gonna be. I feel like we’re talented, I feel like we’ve got a lot of guys that can make plays. And it’s just a matter of how they click on Saturday when they go out there and how many plays they make and, like always, not turning the football over. But I feel like we’re talented enough that if we do a good job coaching that we should be really good on offense. I’ll be very disappointed if we’re not.

On his game-planning process for the opener and whether he scripts plays:
Yeah, I script. I’ve got a whole bunch of them right there (sitting next to him). They’re all basically, I usually script like 25 to 30 plays to start a game off with. That doesn’t mean that I stay exactly down it. The situation sometimes will dictate. But I usually try to make sure I get through those by the end of the half. I’d like to be through those and that kinda tells me what I’m gonna do for the rest of the game.

On when he decided the first play of the season:
Actually I haven’t decided yet. I’ve got about three in mind and it’ll depend on – field position could determine one play versus another, how far backed up we are, what hash we’re on. All those types of things could determine one over the other. But I’ve got about three thoughts right now.

On who fills Montez Billings’ spot if he doesn’t play Saturday. Fannin?
No. Probably you would have Carr and Pierre both play. They’ll both kinda share that position. Philip’s kinda going back and forth playing both X and Z, so if Montez can’t go, then he’ll probably get more at Z than he would at X.

Montez before his injury was the No. 2 at X?
Well they were rotating. Both those guys were playing. The way that we play, everybody plays. Hopefully Montez will be back. We’ll see.

Fannin is still rotating in that group?
Yeah, Fannin’s gonna play and he may play a lot of different spots. I think you’ll see him at different places on the field doing different things because he definitely needs the ball. So we’ve got to figure out ways that we can guarantee him touching the ball.

What stands out about Louisiana-Monroe on defense:
Extremely well-coached. We played them two years when I was at Troy and now Kim Dameron left and went to Ole Miss with Houston. But they kept everybody else and they brought in, I know, a guy from Nebraska as the new defensive co-coordinator. I expect their scheme, they’ve been pretty good on defense, so I expect them to be fairly similar. They’re very sound. They play hard, they run hard to the ball, they’re tough and they’re very well-coached. Both years it’s been a struggle. We struggled with them both years at Troy.

On what he’s told the offense about struggling against ULM at Troy:
We’ve talked about playing them. I told them what I expect out of them, that these guys are coming in here and they believe that they’re gonna win. There’s a tremendous amount of pride in that conference right now. I know because I was in that conference and I have a lot of pride and I know what we felt like when we went on the road playing the SEC. We took a tremendous amount of pride in making sure that when we left the field, they knew that they’d been in a game and hopefully you had a chance to win in the fourth quarter. They’ve gone one step further. They’ve won one on the road, so our guys understand that you only get 14 opportunities this year that you’ll get to do this stuff, so to me there’s never any excuse not to be ready to play.

On whether last year’s ULM-Alabama game forces teams to take ULM seriously:
It should. I think for that entire conference, it wakes everybody up. You look around that conference and you look at Florida Atlantic playing South Florida down to the last play at home and beating Minnesota. And Troy, we beat Oklahoma State last year and played the SEC teams fairly tough. So it had better be an eye-opener to them.

On progression of wide receivers as a whole from when he first saw them to now:
From when I first saw them till now is a huge dramatic change in I think probably just doing things the way I want them done. To me, that made ‘em more successful, I mean, the natural maturation process for anybody, maturing and getting better. But I think they’re happy because they know that they’re gonna get the ball and they’re gonna play. A lot of them are gonna play. So I think that’s the biggest thing. Guys like to play and they like to know they’re gonna have the chance to get the ball, so they’re all excited.

Wrote these last night, but lost my internet connection and didn't get it back till now. so here ya go.

Here are some of the highlights from Tommy Tuberville and everyone else's post-practice comments today.

* I listened to Tony Franklin for about 10 minutes. It was the first time he'd spoken with the pack since like Tuesday of the week before last. I'm sure there will be a ton of stories reminding everyone that he still hasn't announced his pick to start the Louisiana-Monroe game. I led my notebook with that nugget, in fact. In this case, the news is that there's no news yet.

While that's one of the things I wrote about for tomorrow, possibly the most interesting thing he talked about, at least for me, was his process for scripting plays. He said he's narrowed his choices to three plays for Auburn's first play on its first drive -- which is of course assuming he's operating under normal circumstances (not first-and-goal at the 1 or something like that). Already has 25 to 30 plays scripted to start out with. I find it fascinating stuff. I think I'm going to write about that for my Tuesday story, since they're off Monday. That's one fun thing about my job is that I get to decide what's interesting and what the 14 people who read my Auburn stories in the CLE have to read about.

Running a close second in what Franklin said this afternoon that I found interesting is this comment, starting with when he'll tell the QBs who's starting:
"As soon as I know. They know what you know. Today, when they went out there, I didn’t tell which one of them to go first. They do that between themselves. The snaps and how they alternate the snaps, they do that themselves. I just make sure by the end of the week that they’ve all gotten the quality of reps that they have to have. So when I look out there, like on a certain day, and see who goes first for a certain drill, they decide that every day themselves. So far, like I said, it’s been a good problem. And it’s really not a problem. I can find no negatives in it at all. Unless I made it negative, then it can be negative, but I don’t plan on doing that."

* Did you know that Louisiana-Monroe had lost 25 straight games against SEC opposition before it beat Alabama last year? Wow. That's got to be a bit embarrassing. I read that little nugget in Auburn's game notes package today.
* WR Montez Billings is doubtful to play Saturday against Louisiana-Monroe. Franklin said that means Quindarius Carr and Philip Pierre-Louis probably will get more reps if Billings doesn't go and PPL will probably get more reps at the Z receiver than the X (they're both outside receiver spots. that's all I got), after alternating between the two a lot lately.
* Tuberville said Jomarcus Savage (shoulder) is back at practice and Bart Eddins (shoulder) should be back this week. He said Tristan Davis is back and running at full speed, although Ben Tate said Davis isn't fully healthy. He said he's still limping around.
* Tuberville and Paul Rhoads both said Raven Gray is having a very difficult time getting healthy after knee surgery nine or so months ago. Rhoads said what Gray is going though is pretty common. Tuberville said Gray is “really struggling,” not in the two-deep at DE and is not sure to play this week unless he improves quickly.
* It's not what the reporter was angling for (I think he wanted to know who else would be on the field besides Jerraud Powers and Walt McFadden when Auburn goes to a three-cornerback set), but Rhoads said Powers will be the team's nickelback. I asked him if that's because Powers is a more physical player than the other options. Sounds like it's because of his versatility:
"Jerraud Powers is an extremely intelligent, gifted athletic football player. He’s very mature, he’s a quick study. He allows you to do a lot of things both man and zone for a number of reasons that Jerraud Powers gives us our best nickelback."
* Tuberville said walk-on Justin Albert is back practicing. He said they'll start him out on scout team at running back, but that he might get a look at slot receiver or even cornerback. I know a lot of people thought a lot of him coming out of high school and think he might just turn into the next accomplished AU walk-on.
* Tuberville said Clinton Durst and Wes Byrum won't kick until Thursday to rest their legs. Tuberville said Ryan Shoemaker had been dealing with a hamstring injury, but is now back and will punt some in practice this week to even things out. Tuberville said they'll probably announce a punter by Tuesday at his press conference.

* Monday's main story: Auburn's players, coaches shifting focus specifically to La-Monroe. Sen'Derrick Marks says he and most of the other DLs have been watching film of them for months.

* Notebook: If you like overly long notebooks, this is your stop. Covers Tony Franklin talking about the quarterback hunt, Gabe McKenzie finally talking about his move to DE, Montez Billings' injury status for La-Monroe, and other injury updates.

No practice update today. Had some crazy house stuff to deal with that kept me from making it to Auburn today. Tommy Tuberville was the only person who was going to be available for post-practice interviews today, anyway. From what I've read and heard from over there this evening, it wasn't the most eventful interview session. Will be back with notes after they finish practice Sunday evening.

On a separate note, Auburn senior Jason Bosley has been placed on the watch list for the Rimington Trophy -- which is given annually to the nation's top center. Bosley is one of five SEC players on the list, one of whom is last year's winner, Arkansas' Jonathan Luigs. No player has ever been a repeat winner of the award.

Jason Bosley, Auburn
Antoine Caldwell, Alabama
Brett Helms, LSU
Jonathan Luigs, Arkansas
Josh McNeil, Tennessee

If you're the meeting-attending type, the Columbus-Phenix City Auburn Club will hold its annual kickoff meeting on Tuesday, Aug. 26 at the Country Club of Columbus. Social time starts at 6:30 p.m. and dinner at 7.

The guest speaker will be Phillip Marshall, the senior writer for the best ESPN-affiliated Auburn Web site out there, Auburnundercover.com.

Dress is business casual, which means no jeans or shorts, and especially no jean shorts. Cost is $20 for club members, $35 for non-members and $15 for children 12 and under. For more information e-mail Jana Tarleton at jhtarleton@bellsouth.net or call her at 706-576-5850.

In case you want to start making your tailgating plans now, Auburn SID Kirk Sampson informed the beat writers that Auburn's spring game will be held on March 28 next year. So mark your calendars.

I can't say anything terribly earth-shattering came out of today's post-practice interviews. You know what the neatest thing I heard today was?

I asked Antonio Coleman if he had any big plans for the team's day off on Saturday. I figured I'd get a little quote on taking it easy on the day off to do a note on that in a story tomorrow. But he said he's planning to go with the freshmen (who unlike the veterans will be required to go) to visit kids at Opelika's Storybook Farm. He doesn't have to do it. He said he just wants to and enjoys it. I thought that was something. You know what I do on my days off? Not a damn thing.

Here's the description of Storybook Farm from its Web site: "Storybook Farm, Inc. is an equestrian-based program offering free therapeutic care to children with chronic or terminal illnesses, disabilities and those learning to live with a loss."

That's a good thing the kids from Auburn do in going over there to visit those kids. Good for them.

* Tuberville said Tristan Davis again did not practice, but Brad Lester did.
* DL coach Don Dunn said Zach Clayton has a sprained neck, but he doesn't expect it to keep him out for an especially long period. He said he hopes Clayton will be back by the first game.
* Dunn said Jake Ricks is back practicing and had a great day today.
* WR coach Greg Knox said Mario Fannin's hamstring and shoulder are pretty much healed and he's back practicing and moving around well.
* Tuberville said Jomarcus Savage and Bart Eddins should be back to work shortly. Both ran on the side today, he said.
* Tuberville said he will host the seniors at his house tonight to talk about their time at Auburn and what they're expecting for the year. He said they'll eat steaks that he estimated to be about 2 inches thick. Said it would give them a chance to vent a little bit.

Auburn came in at No. 9 in the Football Writers Association's Grantland Rice Super 16. The Tigers even got one first-place vote.

USC earned the top spot, just ahead of Georgia. Both teams received five first-place votes.

For the entire list, go here.

Talked to or listened to a ton of folks today, including Tommy Tuberville, Eddie Gran, James Willis, Terrell Zachary, Robert Dunn, Chris Slaughter and Michael Goggans. Got some good stuff from those guys that I'll be including in notebooks over the next couple of days, but I'm just going to post some highlights from Tuberville's post-practice comments today and some quotes from him. It's late and they're practicing in the morning.

Highlights:
* He said they're still not ready to name a starting quarterback, that Kodi Burns and Chris Todd are still splitting practice reps 50-50 and that he still expects both to play. Whether they've made their decision, he's not ready to let on just yet: "This time of year, the first and second quarterback get the same amount of reps. Now when we start practicing, I would imagine after the first game we’ll cut back a little bit. But right now we’re still trying to pick the right one." The quarterbacks were unavailable to reporters today and have been since Sunday. So were Tony Franklin and Paul Rhoads. I think they were last available about a week ago.
* He said Brad Lester practiced Wednesday. Tristan Davis did not. Previously Tuberville said it was a foot problem that was bothering Davis. Today he said it was hamstring. Neither player has been available for post-practice interviews for a week or so. Tuberville said Davis could play if he had to, but they're being cautious with him.
* Sen'Derrick Marks is apparently feeling better after being slowed by some undisclosed injury last week. He was also unavailable today: "He didn’t look hurt today. He was a beast out there today. I think he strained the back of his calf last week."
* Craig Stevens didn't practice today. Tuberville thought he had some sort of toe injury. He thought Stevens might be back at practice Thursday. Stevens was unavailable after practice today.
* Tuberville was complimentary of the way Gabe McKenzie has taken to his new position, defensive end. McKenzie was unavailable after practice today: "He’s done well. Gabe is very attentive. Everything he does he’s full-speed. I’m proud of him just wanting to play, wanting to make a decision on going and being on the field. This offense, he woulda played some, but he was kinda seeing the rotation and kinda feeling that I’d like to do a little bit more, being a junior. I like his acceleration off the ball. He’s very coachable. And if he keeps practicing the way he’s practicing, he’ll play in the first game at defensive end."
* Tuberville said they hadn't received word from the NCAA Clearinghouse on Reggie Hunt's eligibility. We discovered later that Hunt had been ruled ineligible and he confirmed it to Auburnsports.com. He plans to attend junior college in Mississippi.
* Tuberville on Slaughter: "I think the light’s come on for him. You just hope it keeps staying on. Some guys sometimes lock up on you. Last year I thought midseason he kind of went downhill a little bit, but right now he’s practiced well. Every time we’ve practiced, he’s come out and it’s looked like he’s been on a mission, which has been good."
* Tuberville on whether they'd consider redshirting Raven Gray if his injured knee doesn't improve more: "A lot of it will depend on what he does in the next three or four weeks. A.J. Greene’s playing better, so with Gabe, that gives them five over there that we feel pretty good about. The first couple weeks, Raven looked real good and then he kinda went downhill because he started losing strength because he hadn’t been going that much. If he regains it, we won’t redshirt him, we’ll play him. He’s pretty good in certain situations. He’ll probably be a situation guy for a while. But no, we wouldn’t redshirt him – he’s just got to make a little bit of recovery."
* Tuberville said no players are academically ineligible.
* He was asked about whether he thought freshman receivers like Derek Winter and Darvin Adams will play. Winter, Adams and all other true freshmen are off limits until after the first game: "We talked about that today, about receivers. I don’t want to play one of those guys three or four plays and wish we hadn’t done it. So we’re gonna do long, hard thoughts, probably Saturday, Sunday morning before we start practice again Sunday afternoon. But they’re doing good. I imagine at least one of those will play. Maybe two."
* Just to add it in, Eddie Gran said he considers Brad Lester his starter, although the first play and personnel grouping could call for Ben Tate to be in the game to start out. It depends on what the playcall is, he said.
* Gran also said "there's no question" Eric Smith appears in line for playing time this season.
* He also said Wes Byrum seems to be the top choice as the kickoff man for now, but he'd like to work Morgan Hull into the job as the year goes along in order to keep Byrum's leg fresh.

* Auburn defensive backs story -- Continuing the position-by-position breakdown. Wide receivers coming Friday.

* Notebook -- Quarterback stuff, Reggie Hunt, Michael Goggans on Gabe McKenzie, Injuries, other stuff

Word came down from the NCAA Clearinghouse that Reggie Hunt has failed to qualify. He plans to enroll at Copiah-Lincoln Community College in Wesson, Miss., and redshirt this season. He'll play next year and have three years of eligibility remaining when he signs with somebody in 2010.

Hunt spoke with Bryan Matthews from Auburnsports.com if you want the whole story.

I wasn't aware of this until another writer mentioned this a few minutes ago, but Samford announced today it will play Auburn in 2011 and Florida State in 2010.

You might recall that former Auburn quarterback and coach Pat Sullivan -- the 1971 Heisman Trophy winner -- is the head coach at Samford. According to the release, it will be the first time he coaches against Auburn. I thought he'd coached against Auburn while at UAB, but I guess that's not the case.

The FSU matchup will have some interesting angles, too, since Bobby Bowden went to school there (you think he'll still be the coach there in 2010?) and coached there, as did his successor-in-waiting, Jimbo Fisher.

Anyway, here's the link.

* Offensive line preview (Third part in a position-by-position breakdown. Already covered defensive line and linebackers. Defensive backs tomorrow)

* Gabe McKenzie's move to defense.

* Notebook. Injury updates on Ricks, Savage. Some other stuff.

Listened to Auburn coaches Tommy Tuberville, Terry Price and Steve Ensminger today. The two assistants were particularly timely since they're the position coaches at each of Gabe McKenzie's positions -- tight end/inside receiver (Ensminger) and defensive end (Price). They assured us that Gabe will still play some offense after switching to defensive end today. That seems to be a difficult proposition, but more power to him if he can pull it off.

First, I'll post some notes from Tuberville's comments and then drop some quotes from that trio -- some of which I used in my stories for Wednesday, some of which I didn't -- below the notes.

Notes:
* Still no word on Reggie Hunt as of this morning.
* Brad Lester (ankle) and Tristan Davis (foot) still did not practice. Tuberville said they would wait until they're 100 percent. He said Davis is about 75.
* Jake Ricks (knee bruise) is apparently OK. Truthfully, I didn't know until Tuberville said he was relieved Jake wasn't seriously injured that he was injured at all. Said he did some jogging on the side today and should be back practicing shortly.
* Jomarcus Savage (shoulder) should be back soon as well. Tuberville predicted he and Ricks will probably do conditioning stuff all week and then come back next week to start game prep. Tubs said the plan is to play Savage if he can stay healthy.
* Bart Eddins (shoulder) may or may not play in the first game, he said. He said Eddins' shoulder is still sore and regaining its strength and he won't go until he's 100 percent.
* He said they're still undecided on redshirting a handful of freshmen. The names he mentioned were Harry Adams, Spencer Pybus, Darvin Adams and Barrett Trotter, adding, "you can pretty much name most of them yourselves." He said Gabe switching to defense might mean freshman Vance Smith has a better chance to play this year.
* Darrell Roseman is also playing some offensive line, although he's not especially healthy yet.

So here are some of the highlights of what they had to say...

Tubs on what they accomplished this morning:
"We divided up some. Not a whole lot. Everybody didn’t go to scout teams today. We still wanted to look at a few guys that might not go to scout team, but it was a good start to game preparation. We spent probably half of practice working on the Warhawks and the other we’re still working on the fundamentals. A lot of guys still need fundamentals and we’re not gonna stop that – we don’t stop that all year. And we always spend on Tuesday about 20, 25 minutes a day working against each other, ones versus ones, ones versus twos, and then we got into game preparation of special teams, working at what we think they might do on special teams and putting a few new things in that we haven’t done in the first few weeks."

Tuberville on Gabe McKenzie's decision to play defense:
"He kinda saw that the line was pretty long there with Tommy doing so well. But he catches the ball and has done better. He will also play tight end, but with Raven Gray slowed a little bit with his injury, who will eventually be a good football player for us, Gabe thought that he might be able to get some snaps on the defensive side. Today was his first time in full pads. He did very good, he’s just got a lot to learn. But I think as the year goes on, he could really give us a lot of help there. He’s very athletic and he was a very good defensive player in high school. But this situation that we’ve got right now, he sees that if he wants to be on the field more, he might have to get some reps at defensive end. The defensive end position we’re playing him at is the tight end side where you’ve got to be physical, and that’s right up his alley."

Tuberville on McKenzie's immediate prospects at DE:
"I’m not saying he’s gonna play 30, 40 snaps in the first game, but I would see him possibly getting in the game quite a bit. But this week would be the telling tale. He’ll have to show us something this week because of all the fundamentals that we’ll do and not do next week. We’re gonna be just kind of in a game mode next week."

Tuberville on how this helps Gabe, more on his decision:
"You don’t tell anybody where to play. That’s kind of our deal. We kinda let them see it. Gabe last year, he played, I’m gonna guess on average maybe 20 plays a game. He wants to be out there more. He’s very enthusiastic about football. He loves football. So I think this is a great move for him. I think it gives him a chance to have an opportunity at both after next year. He’s a junior and one more year will give him a chance to get a look at the next level at both of them."

Ensminger on moving McKenzie to defense:
"We kinda discussed it and felt like he could give some depth on defense over there, so he’s gonna spend some time over there and if he can help the team, then it’ll be good. But he’ll still get some offensive reps. He’s gonna get some offensive reps. We need him on the other side of the football. He understands it. So right now he probably needs to spend this whole week over there learning their system and all that. But he’ll still get his plays in on offense."

Ensminger on how defensive coaches seem to have had their eyes on McKenzie for a while:
"They see him out there running and everything else with a big body and say, ‘Hey, he can play defensive end.’ I guess during the course of the years, we’ve had enough depth at defensive end that we felt pretty comfortable. Right now, we’ve had some people banged up, I guess, and the depth’s a little short there, so he kinda wanted to do it. And if it’ll help the team, I’m for it."

Ensminger on how Terrell Zachary has looked in camp:
"Really good. For a player that has had some ups and downs here at Auburn with his academics or whatever, trying to get on the field, (he’s a) very responsible young man. He’s done everything I’ve asked him to do, has worked his tail off. Like I said, he’s probably – at my position, I know – the most improved player since last January to now that I have."

Price on what he knew about McKenzie before Tuesday:
"Tight ends and defensive ends do a lot of competition against each other every single day in practice so obviously you know about him, know about his ability. I guess that’s something he wanted to do and obviously I welcome that with open arms. We’re gonna work with him the best we can and see if we can get him ready to play defensive end in the SEC."

Price on how quickly McKenzie will contribute:
"It just depends on how fast he develops. It’s hard to tell after one day, but obviously he has athletic ability, he has toughness, he runs well and now it’s a matter of learning the defense and learning the techniques it takes to play out there."

Price on the versatility it takes for McKenzie to do both:
"There’s a lot of guys on both sides of the ball that can switch sides at any time because of their ability. Obviously we worked with the guys we had and it’s kind of a situation where he kinda in his mind made his mind up that he wanted to come over there and play defense. Obviously when he did decide to do that, we took him with open arms and we’ll put him to work every single day and see what he can do."

Price on whether it's easier to play strongside DE (where McKenzie is playing) or weakside:
"From a learning point of view, it’s a little bit easier because, again, you don’t have to worry about dropping into coverage and doing some of the things you have to do in a 3-4.
(Strongside is) a little less challenging as far as that part’s concerned, so he won’t have to learn the coverages and won’t have to learn how to drop on receivers and running backs and tight ends and all those things. But he’ll still have to learn where to go and where to line up and how to get everything going."

Price on the good news that Jomarcus Savage would be back shortly:
"Very, very, very encouraging. A young player like that needs to be out there every single day. Anytime you hurt a shoulder, you never know how bad it is – whether it’s a few days out, a year out, surgery, whatever it is, you just never know. So it’s very, very good to hear that he won’t have to have any kind of major surgery right now. I think he’s gonna be fine. He’s gonna work hard, rehab and get out there as soon as he can."

Price on the depth chart at strongside DE:
"That situation is really in flux right now. We’ve got Mike Goggans that I think is established right now as the starter at that position. Right now we’re still trying to figure out who’s behind at that position right now. He was doing well before he got hurt, so we’ll have to get him healthy and get all our guys on the field and kinda evaluate them and see where they sit."

Price on Raven Gray:
"He’s pushing through everything right now and working as hard as he can and trying to do the best he can on the football field to help himself on the depth chart. That’s kinda where it is."

One of the other writers was talking on Sunday about one of the crazier ballots in the Associated Press preseason poll. Didn't rank Auburn, Tennessee, West Virginia, Illinois or Kansas, yet ranked Alabama and Notre Dame and had Cal at No. 6. Turns out I went to high school with the guy at St. Paul's in Mobile. His name's Taylor Zarzour and he's on the radio in North Carolina now. I think we actually worked on the high school paper together many years ago and from what I remember, he was a pretty good guy.

Yeah I think his ballot's kind of out of left field, but I came across a Web site that asked him to explain it and his response seemed pretty reasonable (basically, he picked teams based on what he thinks the outcome of their season will be, not where they stand going in). I think he's wrong, but he's as entitled to his opinion as I am to mine. I trust that once the games start, he'll rank the teams where they deserve to be ranked. This controversy is yet another reason why I hate preseason polls. They serve absolutely no useful purpose other than water-cooler conversation.

Gabe McKenzie has moved from tight end to defensive end. Tommy Tuberville, DEs coach Terry Price and inside WR (TE) coach Steve Ensminger talked to reporters about it after practice. McKenzie was requested, but was not made available.

Darrell Roseman has also apparently moved over to offense.

I'm going back to Columbus to write, so I'll have more on that later.

I've been away from my computer ALL DAY and it's been every bit as pleasant as I'd thought it could be. While I was away from home and my laptop, Auburn was adding another commitment to its 2009 class.

Atlanta (Douglass High) linebacker Jonathan Atchison is now commitment No. 23. Rivals.com gives him a three-star grade and rates him as the nation's No. 59 outside linebacker. Scout also gives him a three-star grade and rates him as the No. 18 strongside linebacker.

Atchison had a whole buncha offers from mid-level and sometimes pretty darn large programs, including Alabama, LSU, West Virginia, Ole Miss, Mississippi State, Purdue, Louisville, Maryland and others.

Here's the first part of what Tommy Tuberville had to say, followed by some highlights from the other questions and answers after his opening statement.

We didn’t perform real good in most of our scrimmage yesterday. We kinda ran out of gas. We lost our concentration, we made a lot of mental mistakes. I figured that before we watched the film, but I wanted to wait and see. Effort look like we tried to be good. It looked like we were running with leg weights on, but there were some good things. We made some plays.

I thought defensively we stepped up about the middle of practice. We played well on defense and then we just lost our concentration and guys kinda, we went through wrong gaps, we didn’t use our hands, we didn’t get off blocks and we didn’t tackle well. We’ve gotta get a lot better on defense. Actually the bright spot, I thought, was our defensive backs. I thought they covered well, broke on the ball. Mike Slade, probably the best scrimmage he’s had, really played well. Really proud of him. D’Antoine Hood stepped up and looked like he’d been out there for a while and even Neiko Thorpe, both those guys are really making some progress. Harry Adams, hit and miss, a little bit. He will play, and made an interception, but technique-wise he’s got a ways to go. But I like his effort. Our front and our linebackers, we didn’t play near as well as we did the week before.

Offensively, I thought we made some plays. Guys catching the ball and getting 10 to 15 yards down the field. We’re learning to run north and south after the catch. Our offensive line came off the ball well for about the first 25, 30 plays and after that we didn’t do very well. We lost our concentration, we missed blocks and defense threw a couple more different blitzes at them that I thought they adjusted well, but it took a while. We’re gonna have to do a little bit better, offensive line, to make adjustments and be able to figure things out a bit quicker. Both quarterbacks did well. We threw the long ball pretty good, a little bit better than we have. Threw some good corner routes. I thought we caught the ball better other than a couple guys. We had about five drops early on crucial down-and-distance situations that could have been a lot better. We’ve got to catch the ball a lot more consistently.

Kicking game was a little sporadic in terms of punting. Both punters I thought did a good job after they got the jitters. It looks like sometimes we go in that stadium and we look real good out here in all areas and then we go in the stadium and change our tempo for some reason. We tighten up, so we’ve gotta get out of that scenario.

(Jomarcus) Savage will have an MRI tomorrow. His shoulder is a little sore, but they’ll check it and a couple more guys that they’ll look at. But really nothing that we’re concerned about other than Savage. But today we did a lot of team stuff full-speed except for tackling. I thought we got better. We came back in the right frame of mind. Guys did a good job of working on their mistakes that they made. That’s really the last time that we’ll go against each other in practice that much for a while. Tuesday we’ll start in the morning about 9:30 and start scout teaming and start working a little bit more on situation stuff and won’t work against each other as much.

Other Tuberville highlights:
* He said they should make decisions on who will or won’t play tomorrow.
* Chaz Ramsey attended practice today, but isn’t ready to practice yet. They aren’t expecting him back especially soon. Same with Andre Wadley today.
* He said Brad Lester and Tristan Davis will be back at practice Tuesday.
* Mario Fannin practiced full-speed today.
* Tuberville on Reggie Hunt’s situation with the Clearinghouse: “Surely they’ll let us know in the next couple days.”
* Brent Slusher has medical “issues.” Plural. Tuberville is hoping he’ll be back and cleared to practice soon.
* Ryan Williams is eligible to play, on one condition. “If he gets out of my doghouse, he will be. He’s in the doghouse. He’s doing good out there, though. We’d love for him to step up and do well for us because that’s an area where we’re not abundant in depth and experience. Course he doesn’t have much either, but he’s got to get out of my doghouse."
* There are “a couple more” in the doghouse, as well, although he wouldn’t specify who. “They’re scratching at the door,” he said.

Auburn's Kerron Stewart won a silver medal in the 100-meter dash Sunday in Beijing, as part of a clean sweep by Jamaica in the event.

Stewart is the first Auburn woman ever to win an Olympic medal in track and field.

That's 14 medals now for current and former Auburn athletes.

Auburn won another three medals tonight in Olympic swimming, with Mark Gangloff winning gold as part of the U.S. men's 400-meter medley relay and Australia's Matt Targett taking silver for swimming for the same event. Neither of them actually swam in the final. They swam in the preliminaries, but were replaced by other swimmers in the final. Michael Phelps was one of the four U.S. swimmers who replaced the foursome from the prelims, winning his unprecedented eighth gold medal of these Olympics.

Same thing with Margaret Hoelzer, who was part of the U.S. women's 400m medley relay. She swam in the prelims and helped the U.S. qualify for the finals, but was replaced by Natalie Coughlin in the finals.

This was the third medal of these Olympics for Hoelzer -- two silvers and a bronze. It's the second for Targett -- a silver and a bronze.

Auburn finished the swimming portion of the Olympics with 13 medals. Auburn's previous high was six. Auburn had three more swimming medals than any other college. Cal-Berkeley was second with 10. From the SEC, Georgia won three and Tennessee two.

All right, after finishing my story and notebook, I'll drop some of the stuff I gathered from today's post-scrimmage. This week was much, much better than after last week's scrimmage, so thanks to them for taking care of us. Of course, you'd love to be able to watch the thing in a perfect world, but I get why they keep it closed. Keep that in mind, though, when you're reading everybody's stories from the scrimmage. You're only able to be so accurate when you're writing about something you haven't seen. Details vary from person to person when they're recounting things.

Anyway, Tuberville said they ran about 90 plays, plus 30 more in the kicking game. He said the only injury was to freshman DE Jomarcus Savage, but he didn't think it was serious. Bart Eddins (shoulder) should be back within the next week, he said.
* Also, Brad Lester, Tristan Davis, Mario Fannin and Sen'Derrick Marks didn't scrimmage.
* He probably had the line of the day, when he said they should have the depth chart ready in about 10 days: "We’ll look at (film) and we’ll talk about it. We’ve got to give y’all something the next couple weeks, since we’re not fighting anymore."
* Still no word on Reggie Hunt. He said they expect word from the Clearinghouse by maybe Monday, which he said is like the deadline, since classes start on Monday.
* Senior safety Jonathan Vickers has been awarded a scholarship.
* Tuberville likes what safety Mike Slade did today and predicts he'll play a lot this year.
* Rod Smith said he scored on a TD pass of about 50 yards from Kodi Burns.
* He said the coaches were going to immediately watch and grade the film and then
show it to the players afterward. He thinks they're getting ready to decide which freshmen are bound for redshirt years.
* Speaking of freshmen, lots of talk about Philip Pierre-Louis today. Tuberville talked about him at least once or twice. I know I've been pumping him up on here, too, because he's been really fun to watch so far. My guess is that he's going to be a fan favorite because of what he does after the catch. I've already posted Tubs' comments from after the scrimmage on PPL. Here's the quote I used from Jerraud Powers about him today:
"I didn’t get a shot at him. During practice and stuff, we usually sort of talk stuff to each other. I get him a few times in practice, but he’s so quick and fast, it’s hard to get a hold of him. But I didn’t get a chance to go against him today, but I saw him make a lot of plays today, though."
* Tomorrow's the last of 16 straight days of preseason practice. They'll break on Monday for the first day of classes and then begin their regular fall routine. Only two weeks to go...

Here are some more quotes from the players I talked to post-scrimmage:

Jerraud Powers on the scrimmage:
"I would say the first half, I’d say we probably got the upper hand in the first half, but as the scrimmage went along, receivers started making plays and they started running the ball a little bit. I thought Tate had a good scrimmage. He was running the ball well. So later in the second half, the offense probably got the upper hand."

Powers on whether the pace of the offense affected the defense:
"Personally I’ve sorta adapted to it. It doesn’t bother me personally. But I think with the d-line though – and I think o-line too – I think it takes a toll on them as it goes on. That’ll happen, just because those guys are 290, 300 pounds. As far as the linebackers, secondary, I think we’re starting to adapt to it a little bit."

Merrill Johnson, on the offense and defense's performances:
"The offense, they’re getting great chemistry together. They were moving the ball downfield pretty good today. That’s a good thing, as long as our defense continues to progress and continues to get better. We need to work on tackling and I think everything’s gonna work itself out."

Johnson, on whether tackling was again the biggest issue in the scrimmage:
"It is. But we work on tackling every day and we’re gonna continue to get better at it, but right now we’re not where we want to be. So we’ve just got to stay hungry until we get there."

Smith, on the quarterback race:
"As far as one pulling away from another, I can’t tell you that. As far as the competition, it’s still a great competition going on and I’m just looking forward – I don’t even know who’s gonna be the starter – so I’m just looking forward to seeing who’s gonna be the starter. Both of those guys continue to make plays for the team."

Mike McNeil, on how the defense is a little rusty on its tackling because it hasn't done much in practice:
"That’s definitely a reason. You practice how you’re gonna play. We’re not being as physical in practice or they’re blowing an early whistle. That benefits the offense, but it also hurts the defense."

McNeil, on Ben Tate's performance in the scrimmage:
"Ben Tate is a great back. To me he has it all. He has speed, quickness and the size and the strength – and he has good vision. He’s a smart back. He’s not just gonna run blindly, he’s gonna find blocks. I think overall, Ben Tate had a good day."

McNeil, on the running game:
"I think the running game’s gonna excel because of the passing game. They’re gonna open up, spread the field. We’ve got great backs who can run the ball and wide receivers who can catch the ball, so we’re gonna use all that to our advantage."

McNeil, on what the defense needs to work on:
"Right now I believe it’s just conditioning and tackling."

For a couple reasons, most of which are related to my utter stupidity, I missed Tommy Tuberville's comments directly after the scrimmage. I got there just in time for player interviews. However, the good people in Auburn's sports communications office let me listen to their tape of Tuberville's comments and I just got finished transcribing. Here's almost all of what he had to say:

Opening comments:
(We were) awful sluggish coming out of two-a-days, but we can expect that. It looked like we were running in mud at times, but we got something done. Mainly the scrimmage was for some of the younger guys that needed to play, needed to get tired, needed to get hit, find out what it’s gonna be like. Most of the other guys did play at some point. We did have to hold a couple guys out. But started fast on offense and I thought the defense came around the last three quarters of practice. We had some good runs, some good blocking up front. We were a little bit more physical today. We needed that.

We did work on kickoff, kickoff return, live. We worked on punting live and we did quite a few field goals. I think Wesley missed maybe just one. He’s been real consistent. Our punters, both of them had I think four live punts and each of them had one that wasn’t real good. The other three were very competitive. We’ll see what they averaged after today.

Jomarcus Savage banged his shoulder up a little bit. He had to come out. He’s really the only injury, but he should be back next week. The doctor said it’s nothing serious. But a lot of good contact, but also a few more mistakes than we made last week. Probably seven or eight penalties. This was an SEC group that worked and I told them to be very picky, very tough in terms of alignments and guys doing the right things, and they called it and it was good.

We ran two-minute drills at the end that were live and one group did good on offense. The other one didn’t do very well and we ended up with a good field goal at the end out of Wesley and Hull, making their field goal from two-minute drill on the last group to finish up solid.

We’re gonna come back this afternoon and look at the film. We’ll grade it first and the players will come back and look at the film. We’ve got a lot of mistakes. Now we’ve got to start finding out who’s gonna play. Start from our freshmen up and who we want to start putting on special teams. Tomorrow we’ll come back. I haven’t decided on what kind of practice we’ll have. After we look at the film, we’ll determine that. Monday will be a day off, but we’ve got to get their legs back. They’re pretty much gone in terms of any quickness or speed.

One guy that did show some elusiveness and made some big plays is Philip-Pierre Louis. That’s one guy that I’ll tell you did well in the scrimmage. He’s not a big target, but the quarterbacks have a lot of confidence in him and a lot of confidence that he can make plays afterwards. There were other guys that made plays, but standing out there and watching a guy that just made consistent plays was him. Defensively, it wasn’t anybody that really stood out, but we probably threw the ball a little more today than we ran it, so that was a challenge to our secondary and linebackers, trying to find out where they’re at. Last week we ran it probably more than we threw it, so a little bit different today. Questions.

On Philip Pierre-Louis (who he's taken to calling Frenchy):
He just caught short passes, made 10-, 15-yard runs after that. No long plays. It’s just consistently when the ball’s thrown his way, he caught it. I counted the first half, we probably had four drops. I’m talking about total. And he wasn’t in any of those. We concentrated a little bit better catching the ball in the second half. I thought our quarterbacks did a pretty decent job throwing the ball. Not anything spectacular. The biggest thing is making the right decisions in these scrimmages when you’ve got two guys vying for the starting position, and I thought both of them did about the same. We’ll have to look assignment-wise and how they ran the team. Both of them scored points, but we mixed them up, in and out, trying to find the right combination.

On depth chart:
About third game. We’ll have one probably Tuesday or Wednesday game week. We’re gonna look at a lot of different guys and we’ll have to make some decisions. There’s not many hardships anymore. If you play ‘em, they’re done. And so we want to make sure that any of the younger guys that we play, it’s gonna be worth it. There are some battles at a lot of positions, so we’ll have to grade this film first and see if anybody made any movement, but we’ll have a depth chart, not this week but the next week.

On the scrimmage:
There was probably a few more bigger plays last week. There was more of a grind today, working it down the field. The offense did have some consistency. That’s what I like. They were more consistent. Brad didn’t play. Tristan didn’t play. Ben did play, got I’d say off the top of my head, 10-12 carries, which he needed to get this week. He didn’t do much earlier in the week because of his concussion, but he looked pretty good today running the ball. But we all looked slow. It looks like we all had ankle weights on.

On tackling in scrimmage:
Tackled a little bit better. But when you’re trying to tackle Frenchy, it’s pretty tough. He’s gonna be exciting to watch. He’ll make you look bad in one-on-one, but it’s good. It’s good to see somebody like that in the open field. I’m talking about not just the young guys, everybody was trying to take a dead beat on him. He’s gonna make a lot of people do tackling drills the next week if he can stay healthy.

On releasing the depth chart:
We’ll look at this and we’ll talk about it. We’ve got to give y’all something to talk about the next couple weeks, since we’re not fighting anymore.

On the No. 3 quarterback race:
Both of ‘em played a lot. I thought Neil has really improved. The thing that he’s gotta do is make a little bit quicker decision. Every once in a while, of all of them, last spring and everything, he’d throw it to the wrong-colored jersey and that’s what we’re trying to get him out of. He’s done a better job of that. I think he’s much improved in that area, making better decisions. But again, this offense, he’s pretty familiar with. But Barrett got a lot of velocity on the ball. He’s one where we’ll have to make a decision what we want to do with him.

On defensive highlights:
Harry Adams made a nice interception. We blew the whistle. He probably coulda run it back, but when I saw him get to the sideline, we didn’t want to embarrass the offensive linemen trying to chase him. But he made a good play. There wasn’t many fumbles. We didn’t have many fumbles at all, but there were some pretty good tipped balls. I thought our d-line got a pretty good pass rush today from the corners. We looked a little quicker out there. We just looked sluggish in some areas, though, but we knew that was gonna happen.

On Eddins’ shoulder:
I talked to him today. It’s just a bruise. He said he’d be back Tuesday. Doctors said probably more Thursday or maybe hold him out all week and just get him ready for Sunday. Next week we’ll go all the way through Friday and take Saturday off and start back on Sunday on game week. But good news on that. Just a bruise.

On Reggie Hunt:
We called all day yesterday. When they don’t return your calls, you know … But there’s probably not anybody in here that doesn’t remember one like that every year. You just can’t get any word out of them, and we were supposed to hear Monday, so I’m sure Monday will be pretty much the deadline. We’ve got to do it Monday. We start school Monday and we’ve got him ready to go, if they’d just give us a call. Course it could go the other way, too, so we’re expecting either way.

On safeties behind the starters:
I’ll tell you, Mike Slade made a couple good plays, broke on the ball well. I noticed that. Again, we tried to throw the ball on the safeties today a little bit more, tried to throw the ball in the middle of the field. I think Mike has really improved. He’s gonna see a lot of playing time. Of course last week and this week, we went after the corners, all of them, first and second team. But that’s what this offense does. It’s gonna really put pressure on them, and this week was no different. Had a couple pass interference calls this week that we didn’t have last week.

UPDATE: I apologize for posting incorrect information, if Sam Collins did not in fact fall ill in practice. The original story I linked is no longer available, but here's the current one on the Advertiser's front page.

This is sad news. Sam Collins, an 18-year-old freshman football player at Huntingdon College in Montgomery, collapsed at practice Friday and later died. No cause of death has been determined, but the Montgomery Advertiser story said his coaches originally feared he had suffered heat stroke or some other heat-related illness.

Collins was an all-state football player last year at Flomaton High, which is right up the road from my hometown, Mobile. Condolences to his friends and family.

Man. That 50-meter freestyle is crazy. It's almost violent how these guys attack the water. Auburn's Cesar Cielo just won the Olympic gold in the event and broke his own Olympic record -- which pretty much makes him the world's fastest swimmer. That's the marquee sprint swim, one trip down the pool, fast as heck.

Good for him. I interviewed him this summer with a couple of other reporters and thought he was an interesting kid. His coach at Auburn, Brett Hawke, was going to be an assistant on Cielo's Brazilian team to go with him to Beijing.

That's 10 medals now for Auburn, which would put Auburn 10th if it were a country, one ahead of Great Britain and four behind Germany and Japan.

You know, it hasn't been a bad week to be an Auburn swimmer. Kirsty Coventry just reclaimed her world record in the 200-meter backstroke. She set it earlier this year, then her former Auburn roommate Margaret Hoelzer stole it and now Coventry has won it back -- taking an Olympic gold medal in doing so.

Coventry won gold in 2:05.24, beating Hoelzer's record of 2:06.09. Hoelzer took silver in 2:06.23. This is the first time ever an Auburn duo has finished 1-2 in an Olympic event. Unfortunately the United States' drought in the 200 back continues. The U.S. women haven't won that event since 1972 -- the longest goldless streak in any women's Olympic swimming event.

That's nine medals now for Auburn. Could be more soon. Cesar Cielo is swimming in the 50 free finals shortly.

I've got to get out of here to go look and try to find somewhere to live here before the sun goes down, but I'll throw out a quick recap of what Tommy Tuberville said after practice just now:

* Today was the final two-a-day workout. Said it hasn't been the toughest camp that they've had, mostly because the weather has been fairly mild. Despite that, he said they've run about 20 to 25 percent more reps in the same amount of practice because of the pace of the offense.
* He said they'll begin whittling down who they're expecting to play after tomorrow. Noted there are about 16-17 guys circled on their board that they'll have to make decisions on.
* They'll scrimmage tomorrow (closed) at the stadium. Should run about 80-100 plays, plus lots of kicking game. Estimated it would last about an hour and a half to 1:45.
* It will all be live, with the exception of some kicking game scenarios.
* Chris Todd and Kodi Burns will quarterback the first half and Barrett Trotter and Neil Caudle the second. They'll all be seeing a lot of blitzes, he said, and will work in lots of different situational scenarios.
* Ben Tate was back at practice today. Brad Lester won't scrimmage tomorrow. (TT said he has an ankle injury). Neither will Tristan Davis (foot). Nor Mario Fannin (hamstring)
* He said he's been watching the young DBs on film a lot. Believes all of them (I believe he was referring to Neiko Thorpe, D'Antoine Hood and Harry Adams) will play. On Adams, he said he wouldn't want him to play if all he was going to get was on special teams.
* Said this freshman class is probably one of the fastest ones they've had. Talked about how well Philip Pierre-Louis, Darvin Adams, Eric Smith, the DBs, Jomarcus Savage and Derrick Lykes have performed. Said Lykes is "exactly what you look for."
* Raven Gray is still struggling with fatigue because of being out with injury for so long. Same with Tez Doolittle, although he talked about how great Tez's attitude has been in coming back and how much he wants to play.

All right, that's all for now. If anyone has some advice on rental properties around here, please let me know. I've got to find something, and fast.

I've especially started thinking in the last couple days about how it seems like many of Auburn's special teams battles are still up in the air. It was a good day for Eddie Gran to come in and talk to the beat writers this afternoon, after Auburn's morning workout. They'll practice again later this afternoon -- the last two-a-day of preseason -- and we'll talk to Tommy Tuberville.

It sounds like tomorrow's scrimmage might help in some regard, but I don't know that Gran, Auburn's special teams coordinator, thinks it will decide things in every race.

P -- They give off the impression that the closest race is between Ryan Shoemaker and Clinton Durst at punter. Several times one of the coaches has made that comment.

K -- It sounds like Wes Byrum's got the lead on Morgan Hull

PR -- I think Gran would probably use Robert Dunn first, but he said he's been pleased with Philip Pierre-Louis and Chris Slaughter there as well. Watching those guys return punts in practice has been fun, especially when they find their hole and get to accelerate.

KOR -- First guy Gran mentioned was Tristan Davis. In no particular order, I believe the other names he mentioned were Ben Tate, James Swinton and Pierre-Louis.

Obviously not a big news day. Here are some good examples of just how not newsy it has been thus far:

Pierre-Louis came and spoke to the pack after practice. He sort of settled the beat writers' debate about how to pronounce his last name, but not really. He said his dad says it Pierre-Lou-wee. Philip said he usually says Pierre-Lou-Iss. He said we should probably go with Lou-wee like his dad says it. I think I'll just call him Philip. I guess I was kinda rambling there. These are the things you really need to know.

Someone asked Philip, a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., native if it has been difficult adjusting to life in Auburn. I believe he said it took some getting used to. I asked him if he'd ever seen a cow. Seemed like a perfectly legitimate question. He assured me that they do have cows in South Florida. Dang. That's not the way I pictured Fort Lauderdale at all.

We'll have some stuff from Tommy Tuberville later. Might have some injury rundown to discuss entering the scrimmage. Back later...

The finals in the women's 200m backstroke will be held at 10:03 p.m. Eastern. Auburn's Kirsty Coventry and Margaret Hoelzer will both compete. Coventry qualified first and Hoelzer fifth.

Auburn's Cesar Cielo will also swim in the 50m freestyle finals at 11:39 p.m. He broke an Olympic record in the semifinals and also set Americas and South American records.

Also, former Auburn track star Marc Burns (Trinidad and Tobago) ran in the 100 meters tonight, placing second in his heat and advancing to today's quarterfinals at 7:45 p.m. He's the first of 12 Auburn track folks who'll compete in Beijing.

More Friday...

Today's practice was incredibly boring...at least for me.
There was no 11-on-11. No Brad Lester, Tristan Davis or Ben Tate. It was exactly what Tommy Tuberville predicted Wednesday that it would be -- a light day.

At the end of practice, they cut watermelons and the players ate up. Oddly, some of them were trying to make sure some of us reporters there took a slice. I'm by no means against eating a nice chunk of watermelon, but they didn't bring that stuff out there for me to eat, so I didn't take any.

They practice Friday at 9:30 a.m. and 5:30 p.m. (remember I operate on eastern time) for the last two-a-day practice of the preseason. The practices will be at the football complex and are scheduled to be closed. They'll scrimmage Saturday (also closed)
and start classes on Monday -- which will be the first day off of the preseason. I can't wait. I haven't packed a dish or a stitch of clothing yet and I have to start moving very, very soon.

So with that said, I haven't got much to offer today. Spoke with Neil Caudle, D'Antoine Hood and Tommy Trott today after practice. Sat and listened to Trott talk with Jay G. Tate for a long time and really liked the kid. I'm gonna try not to steal much from that, but Jay's on the clock. Couple more days and he loses all proprietary rights to the material from his Montgomery guy. Trott looks just like former Georgia quarterback Joe Tereshinski to me. Not a dead ringer, but fairly close. It's probably the haircuts...those young cutters with their full heads of hair.











Tommy T. (right)
Joe T. (left)

Anyway, I'll head over in the morning (actually in like six hours) and we'll see what they have to say then.

Today's stories:
* Lead on Auburn's receivers
* Notebook leading with Tommy Tuberville's reaction to the new SEC 15-year deal with CBS. (Like I said, it was an extremely slow day).

I saw where Rivals upgraded Auburn commit Raymond Cotton's rating to four stars today. They also rate him as the No. 12 dual-threat QB prospect. I was thinking about how rare it was for an Auburn commit to receive a bid to the Elite 11 quarterback camp and I actually dug up a list of all 10 Elite 11 classes thus far. Auburn has had one player go to the camp -- Neil Caudle in 2005.

For whatever reason, Auburn has rarely gotten the huge QB signees in my 20-something years of keeping up with the Tigers. I've always wondered why that is. I guess it's because Auburn has so often been close to the vest in its offensive approach -- which might be why they always seemed to bring in great running backs. In contrast, Georgia has three former Elite 11 QBs on its current roster -- Matthew Stafford, Joe Cox and Logan Gray -- and two more commits out of this Elite 11 class in Aaron Murray and Zach Mettenberger.

Obviously if you look at some of the names on there, it's not a rock-solid predictor of collegiate success. But there are some pretty stinking good players who have participated in that thing since it started a decade ago. If my count is right (and if Jarrett Lee winds up as LSU's QB) it looks like four starters for Auburn's 2008 opponents are former Elite 11 QBs -- Stafford, Lee, Jevan Snead and Jonathan Crompton.

Here's the list. I'd acknowledge where I found it if I could only remember:

1999
Brock Berlin
Jeff Smoker
Chris Rix
Casey Clausen
Matt Cassell
Roman Ybarra
Matt Lovecchio
Chance Mock
Jon VanCleave
John Rattay
Zac Wasserman

2000
Derek Anderson
Nic Costa
Kellen Clemens
Brodie Croyle
Billy Hart
Matt Leinart
Ingle Martin
Adrian McPherson
Kyle Orton
Casey Paus
D.J. Shockley
Paul Troth

2001
Ben Olson
Chris Olson
Drew Olson
Justin Zwick
Tyler Palko
Trent Edwards
Vince Young
Reggie McNeal
Gavin Dickey
Evan Kraky
Will Proctor
Ryan O'Hara

2002
Michael Affleck
Dennis Dixon
Tommy Grady
Robert Lane
Chris Leak
Justin Midgett
Blake Mitchell
T.C. Ostrander
Clayton Richard
Jamarcus Russell
Andre Woodson
Kyle Wright

2003
Rhett Bomar
John David Booty
A.J. Bryant
Kirby Freeman
Brian Hildebrand
Cornelius Ingram
Nate Longshore
Tony Morelli
Chase Patton
Bobby Reid
Matt Tuiasosopo
Drew Weatherford

2004
Harrison Beck
Jake Christensen
Joe Cox
Jonathan Crompton
Jonathan Garner
Ryan Perrilloux
Kyle Reed
Mark Sanchez
Rob Schoenhoft
Willie Tuitama

2005
Matthew Stafford
Tim Tebow
Kevin Riley
Cody Hawkins
Jevan Snead
Josh Freeman
Mitch Mustain
Pat Devlin
Jake Locker
Isiah Williams
Neil Caudle
Zach Frazer

2006
John Brantley
Stephen Garcia
Willie Korn
Ryan Mallett
Rontrell Bailey
Aaron Corp
Logan Gray
Peter Lalich
Jarrett Lee
Brock Mansion
Keith Nichol
Tyrod Taylor

2007
Nick Crissman
Dayne Crist
Blaine Gabbert
Mike Glennon
Jacory Harris
Star Jackson
Landry Jones
Andrew Luck
E.J. Manuel
Kyle Parker
Sean Renfree
John Wienke

2008
Tajh Boyd
Richard Brehaut
Allan Bridgford
Raymond Cotton
Garrett Gilbert
Andrew Maxwell
A.J. McCarron
Zach Mettenberger
Aaron Murray
Bryn Renner
Tom Savage
Eugene Smith

Link to story on official Auburn site.

Here's the gist:
Cesar Cielo and Kirsty Coventry broke two more Olympic records in event preliminaries in Beijing. Cielo's big event is the 50-meter freestyle and he broke the record in his heat. It fell in the next heat, but he still tied an Americas record and broke the South American record in the event.

Coventry set a new Olympic record in qualifying for the 200-meter backstroke semis.

In all, six Auburn swimmers advanced to an event semifinal today:
Cielo (50m free)
Coventry (200m back)
Margaret Hoelzer (200m back)
George Bovell (50m free)
Gideon Louw (50m free)
Fred Bousquet (100m fly)

The 50m free folks competed at 10:03 tonight (9:03 central). Hoelzer and Coventry swim in the same heat in the 200 back semis, tonight at 10:32 (9:32 central). Bousquet will be the last of the AU swimmers to compete tonight at 11:24 (10:24 central).

It's been a long day, so I'm not transcribing anything tonight. I'll probably wish I had tomorrow.

First things first, a couple of links to my stories for Thursday.
* Feature on freshman linebacker Spencer Pybus, who might be facing a redshirt season because of depth. Then again, maybe he won't. Folks are talking him up around there. That's a nice story considering it went down to almost the last minute before Auburn gave him an offer.
* Notebook -- Leads with Drew Cole's move to safety, talks about James Swinton, Philip Pierre-Louis and Harry Adams and who is the fastest player on the team. Gets into injuries and some other stuff.

OK, some practice notes:
* Chris Todd and Kodi Burns didn't participate in the competitive drills this afternoon. Tommy Tuberville said they wanted to give them a break and also let Barrett Trotter and Neil Caudle get some reps in.
* Almost every big play I wrote down from 7-on-7 and 11-on-11 came with Neil Caudle at quarterback. That's both a good and bad thing.
The good: A well-placed 33-yard touchdown pass to Philip Pierre-Louis in 7-on-7; a well-placed 33-yard touchdown pass to James Swinton with Ryan Williams in coverage in 7-on-7; a perfectly thrown TD to Pierre-Louis of about 80 yards with D'Antoine Hood in coverage.
The bad: An ugly interception for a touchdown thrown out of his own end zone, caught by Josh Bynes around the 5 and returned for a walk-in TD; a deep ball to Rod Smith that Jerraud Powers made a nice play on and picked off at the goal line
* The Trotter plays I jotted down were a nice throw and catch where he hooked up with Tommy Trott in traffic for about a 20-yard gain and a nice throw to Derek Winter for a TD with D'Antoine Hood in coverage (I believe this was in 7-on-7).
* Watched the kickoff return drills a little closer than I have previously today. Pierre-Louis, Swinton and Harry Adams were the guys working there. I really like watching Pierre-Louis. He can flat out fly, but he's about 5-foot-nothing, 100-and-nothing. Maybe a faster version of Markeith Cooper if you remember him. I'll eat my hat if he doesn't play this year.
* Speaking of Pierre-Louis, he obviously had one of the better days. Aside from the long TD catch, the highlight for me was when he caught a short little pass and made Tray Blackmon fall down with a fake. Granted, the slippery playing surface from this morning's rainfall provided an assist. Still, the offensive guys gave Tray some grief over that one. It got a laugh out of me.
* In blue this afternoon: Mario Fannin (I don't think he did anything this afternoon, although he practiced some this morning) with a hamstring injury and Chris Evans. Out of blue and back for full participation were Harry Adams and Robert Dunn.
* Ben Tate didn't practice today. Tuberville said "he got his bell rung" in that collision I mentioned with Evans on Tuesday.
* Brad Lester and Tristan Davis rode stationary bikes during the afternoon practice. Tuberville said they could have practiced, but they're letting them recuperate for Saturday's scrimmage.
* Bart Eddins apparently injured his left shoulder sometime during practice. I didn't see it happen, but I saw him at the end of practice without his pads on (they were in shoulder pads and shorts this afternoon) and he'd apparently been icing the shoulder.
* It looks like Neiko Thorpe is in the lead to be Auburn's third corner. When they lined up in a nickel defense today, the DBs were Powers, McFadden, Thorpe, Etheridge and McNeil.
* You'll be glad to know that at the end of practice, Tuberville gathered everyone up and they held hands and sang Kumbaya. A particularly poignant moment was when Lee Ziemba, Ryan Pugh and Antonio Coleman sang in three-part harmony. Never one to miss an opportunity to brawl, though, Ziemba took his helmet off and cracked Coleman over the head with it when AC got out of tune in one of the choruses. Or maybe I'm making that up. You know us biased media people, always blowing things out of proportion.

Highlights of Tuberville's post-practice comments:
* Still no word from the Clearinghouse on Reggie Hunt, although it sounds like he thinks Hunt is going to make it into school.
* They'll be doing a light practice tomorrow afternoon. It's scheduled for 4:15, but at this point, I don't like telling anyone a set practice time. They seem to change on a daily basis, sometimes several times in a day. I think he said they'll do some walk-through stuff and work on the kicking game mostly.
* He said they've only received about half of the summer school grades and they haven't suffered an academic casualty yet.

I'm sure I'm forgetting something, but that's all I got for now.

Auburn's Cesar Cielo won bronze tonight in the 100-meter freestyle, making it seven medals now won by current and former Auburn swimmers (a new AU record for a single Olympics). In other words, right this second, Auburn is tied with Great Britain for 10th in the medal count. Couple more and they'll tie Germany for ninth -- and I'm betting they win at least two more when Margaret Hoelzer and Kirsty Coventry square off in the women's 200-meter backstroke.

Cielo's a bad man. His time of 47.67 seconds in tonight's event was a new record for a South American swimmer. I wrote a story about him this summer around the time of the U.S. Olympic Trials (although he's Brazilian). He twice won NCAA Swimmer of the Year, won 10 NCAA titles and 19 SEC titles, all Auburn records. So he decided to forego his senior year at Auburn to go pro. That's how good he is -- he's skipping a year of eligibility to become a professional swimmer.

Here's where AU's medal count stands right now:
Kirsty Coventry, Zimbabwe: Silver x 3
Fred Bosquet, France: Silver
Cesar Cielo, Brazil: Bronze
Margaret Hoelzer, United States: Bronze
Matt Targett, Australia: Bronze

Y'all see where Josh Jarboe is going to Troy? He was one of the top high school receivers in the country last year and signed with Oklahoma, but got himself in a little trouble before he got there. A little more after he got there, including a freestyle rap on Youtube that became a little Internet sensation. He was kicked off the team not long after that thing began making the rounds. I started to embed it in a post, but after watching it I realized my boss would have a coronary (it's got a little bad language).

Instead, here's a highlight reel of Jarboe. He's a very talented player. I know Georgia fans were excited about the possibility of him going to UGA last year before he committed to Oklahoma. I'm guessing they're glad he opted to go elsewhere, especially in light of the other disciplinary issues they've had this year. Besides, they signed two super-talented receivers this year in A.J. Green and Tavarres King anyway.

* Practice was originally supposed to be closed this morning, but it wasn't. No idea what was going on with that change. I kinda thought they might start closing it down after yesterday, which would be understandable. As long as they're open, though, I'm gonna be there and write what I see. They practiced at the football complex instead of the intramural fields and we watched from the railings with the fans who were in attendance.
* Drew Cole has moved from cornerback to safety. I spoke with him after practice about the move and will probably have something on that in tomorrow's paper.
* Wearing non-contact jerseys today: Robert Dunn, Mario Fannin, Harry Adams, Chris Evans
* Didn't see Brad Lester or Ben Tate out there
* Spoke with or listened to a ton of guys after the morning session: Don Dunn, Greg Knox, Chris Slaughter, James Swinton, Tray Blackmon, Zac Etheridge, Cole, Zach Clayton and Barrett Trotter. Should have some good stuff coming from those guys in the next few days.
* Slaughter and Swinton continue to receive a lot of praise for their performances in camp. Slaughter made a beautiful diving catch on a Kodi Burns bomb today in practice. We'll talk to Tommy Tuberville after the evening practice.

Ex-Auburn swimmer Kirsty Coventry won her third silver medal of these Olympics tonight, placing second behind Australia's Stephanie Rice in the 200-meter individual medley. Both swimmers beat Rice's previous world record, with Coventry clocking a 2:08.59 and Rice a 2:08.45.

Coventry has also won silvers in 400m IM and 100m backstroke in Beijing. She also won three medals in 2004, giving her six for her career -- three more than the previous record for an Auburn swimmer.

In other Auburn Olympics news, Eric Shanteau, who gained international attention when he announced that he'd been diagnosed with testicular cancer after the Olympic Trials, failed to qualify for the finals in the 200m breastroke. He clocked a personal-best time, but finished in 10th place in 2:10.10. He needed to place eighth to advance to the finals.

Also, Auburn's Matt Targett and Cesar Cielo qualified for the 100m freestyle finals by finishing fourth and eighth, respectively, in the semis. I believe that finals race is Thursday.

From Auburn's release, previewing Wednesday's action:
Incoming freshman Arianna Vanderpool-Wallace gets things started at 5:39 a.m. CT as she competes in the 100m freestyle prelim. Wallace will swim in the third heat, occupying lane four, and enters with a seed time of 56.01.

Former Auburn swimmers get in on the action beginning at 6:22 a.m. CT as two are set to compete in the men’s 200m individual medley preliminary. Nick Bovell (Trinidad & Tobago) goes first in heat two, swimming in lane two, with a seed time of 2:03.02. Jeremy Knowles (Bahamas) follows in heat three, occupying lane eight, with a seed time of 2:02.79.

Rounding out the Auburn contingent in the session will be incoming freshman Stephanie Horner. She is part of the pool of swimmers available for the Canadian 800m freestyle relay. Canada is scheduled to swim at 7:06 a.m. CT, going in lane one in the first heat. The team enters with a seed time of 8:04.19.

Schedule

Here's what Auburn offensive coordinator Tony Franklin had to say to reporters after Tuesday's practice:

On Saturday’s scrimmage:
Saturday I thought we got a lot accomplished, a lot of guys made plays. It seems like six weeks ago that Saturday happened, so my memory fails me on exactly what happened. There’s been a lot of film since there. We had good tempo as the scrimmage progressed. Early on, we didn’t have real good tempo and that’s because we’re a little slower out here right now than what we normally will be. But trying to get through two-a-days and trying to make sure that the defense is able to accomplish what they need to accomplish … so Saturday took a while for us to get our tempo the way that we want it. But overall we played hard and we had some good playmakers that made plays, so I was pleased with what happened.

On the quarterback race:
I’ll tell ya what’s fun. This has been the most fun for me about watching the quarterbacks. It’s like a great heavyweight championship fight and one guy lands what you think is a knockout blow and the other guy falls against the ropes and 5 seconds later he comes back and he lands a blow that you think’s gonna knock the other one out. And it happens every day to where one guy will make a throw that just blows your mind and then the other one will walk in and he’ll trump it. And that’s phenomenal because it shows that they’re both competitors, that neither one of them wither from the competition, they step up to it. And I think, again, like I’ve said many times, the longer this thing progresses, the more that it becomes such a wonderful problem because they’ve both risen to the occasion, they’ve both gotten better and I’m very tickled with how they’ve both played.

On if he still thinks it will be the week before Louisiana-Monroe that they’ll name a starter:
I don’t have a clue. I don’t have a clue.

If they decide to split it up, will they even announce a starter:
I don’t know, it’s something coach Tuberville and I will sit down and talk about and see what we feel like is best for the team. Like I told you I guess the last time that we talked is that it’s something that right now I’d have a very difficult time doing that because they’re both really good. They’re both making plays, they’re both getting better at their weaknesses. Kodi’s gotten a lot better throwing, Chris has gotten a lot better running, so it’s really like I said. It’s one of those things that the harder it gets, the tougher the competiton gets, then the better that they both get. So it’s been really a blessing for both of them. They’ve both become better.

On what he’s seen from the receivers:
I see talent that’s good enough to win in this league and I see it our job to make ‘em better. That’s what we’re hired to do and I’m very pleased with it. They’ve stepped up, they’ve gotten better. They’re a lot better now than they were at the end of the spring. Greg and Steve have both done an incredible job with coaching those guys and getting them better. The details they’ve paid attention to and they’re good enough to win in this league. It’s our job just to make sure we do a good job coaching them.

On receivers that have stood out:
You know it’s really several that stand out. The biggest probably most pleasant thing that’s happened so far has been Chris Slaughter. He’s a guy that you can tell his talent, but the work ethic and the day in and day out grind of doing the right things and making plays and all that, just I never saw it. And from the day that we started, the first practice that we had, he was like a different person. I keep waiting for it to fall off and it hasn’t, so that’s been probably the most pleasant surprise. Gabe McKenzie’s been another pleasant surprise. Gabe has caught, he’s had very few drops, if any, in competition. That’s very pleasant. His routes are still not as crisp as they need to be, but he has stepped up and shown more promise.

On how many freshmen might play:
Well, the running back probably, Eric, will probably play. Philip will probably play. Derek is a question mark. Not really 100 percent sure yet whether he will or not. Darvin will probably play. So those guys are definitely gonna play.

On the importance of having Jason Bosley back in practice:
It means we’ve got a snap, you know? We had a day where he and Pugh both were out and it was a challenge, as you saw Tyronne getting his first time ever at center. But it’s a lot for leadership and it helps getting Pugh back getting reps at tackle too. But it’s big. Your center on this team plays a huge role, so it’s good to have him back.

(I can’t hear this question well, but I think the reporter asked if Barrett Trotter or Neil Caudle has separated himself as the No. 3 quarterback):
Not really. I mean they’re both good enough. It’s just a matter of probably just making a decision one day as to which one that we’re gonna use.