A recently settled lawsuit may have effectively killed off the college football video game for now. No one mourns the loss today, having witnessed joystick offense played out in flesh and blood, to the coarse howls of 75,000 overtaxed voice boxes.
Indeed, both Auburn and Missouri attacked Saturday’s SEC Championship game like gamers with an endless list of cheats.
Both teams wore deep grooves in the Georgia Dome carpet with their many long sorties back and forth, accumulating close to three-quarters-of-a-mile (or 1,211 yards to be precise) of offense.
At the finish, the weary scoreboard groaned: Auburn 59, Missouri 42.
With the victory, No. 3 Auburn completed its remarkable worst-to-first comeback, from 0-8 in the conference a year ago to undisputed SEC champion today. And with a 12-1 record, it celebrated on the confetti-strewn Georgia Dome floor Saturday evening while awaiting a summons to some as yet unknown postseason destination. It clung to hopes that it could still be called to the BCS Championship game — and likely will get that call after No. 2 Ohio State lost to Michigan State later in the evening in the Big Ten Championship game.
“From the first team meeting to now we’ve come a long way,” Auburn coach Gus Malzahn said. “It’s been a unique experience.”
In an event with so many electric offensive performers — and with no one on defense wanting to admit they were within 100 miles of Northside Drive — one name stood above the rest.
As they are wont to say around the greater Auburn-Opelika metroplex: Tre magnifique!
Tre Mason, calling upon the Auburn tradition of steel-jacketed ballcarriers such as Bo Jackson, Ronnie Brown, Joe Cribbs and Cadillac Williams, rushed for 304 yards and four touchdowns. He toted the ball 46 times without complaint, running through Missouri with the fluid ease of the Grand River.
After his fourth touchdown of the game, it was the iconic Bo himself who hugged Mason on the Auburn sideline, pouring words of admiration into the junior’s ear.
“I’d say he’s one of the better players to ever wear an Auburn helmet,” seconded his coach, Gus Malzahn.
Mason gave some love as well to the unappreciated part of 304 rushing yards.
“Those guys (the offensive line) opened up some of the biggest holes I’ve ever run through,” he said.
“You let a guy go through gaps like that at full speed then you’ve got problems on the other end. You’re asking your safeties and other people to make plays with him in space and that’s difficult,” Missouri coach Gary Pinkel said.
Welcome to the highest-scoring SEC Championship game of the 22 played. And it wasn’t even close, these two Tigers combining for 26 more points than the 75 scored by Florida and Alabama in 1996. Offensive records by the score came with all those points.
It began for Auburn with a fumble. On his first possession of the game, Georgia Bulldogs outcast Nick Marshall had the ball batted from his grasp, his fumble eventually leading to a Missouri field goal. The quarterback’s two lost fumbles will scarcely be remembered in the blur of touchdowns that followed.
None more impressive than Auburn’s first, with Marshall faking an end-around, scrambling to his left and throwing a pass 40 yards on a zipline to Sammie Coates.
That represented the first of seven lead changes before the Auburn offense, running at its usual pace of a Chihuahua that got into mommy’s diet pills, exhausted Missouri.
In only its second year in the SEC, Missouri came intending to make a prairie-state statement. It opened its carpetbag and unpacked a formidable offense, but absolutely nothing for when Auburn had the ball.
Asked how to stop the seemingly unstoppable Malzahn offense, Pinkel acknowledged, “Everyone has problems with it. You know what? I’m the wrong person to ask, because I’d have stopped it if I could have.”
Nor did it help Missouri that Auburn is 800 miles closer to the Georgia Dome. Missouri loves company and would have appreciated a little more of it Saturday. The crowd was a good 70 percent Auburn orange and blue.
Indicative of Missouri’s stubbornness in the face of it all was the 55-yard touchdown pass from James Franklin to Dorial Green-Beckham with 18 seconds left in the first half that made cut the Auburn lead to one, 28-27. But Auburn, able to default to handing the ball off to Mason whenever needed, owned the second half, outscoring Missouri 31-15.
When Auburn cornerback Chris Davis — an obligatory mention of one defensive player — sort of broke up a fourth-down pass to Green-Beckham with 4:27 left, the issue was decided.
All that left was for Auburn to revel in its second SEC championship in four years and to take its case from regional to nationwide. “We’re playing our best football right now and I don’t know that a lot of teams can say that,” Malzahn said.
While he was at it, the coach made a last-second pitch for Mason’s late-starting Heisman Trophy campaign.
“You’re looking at one of the top running backs in college football and he proved it again today. Usually the best players on the best teams have a chance at it,” Malzahn said.
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