AUBURN | The one thing I just can’t seem to get over about Auburn’s 15-point win at Arkansas is that I don’t think the Tigers played particularly well.
The defense gave up chunk yards, especially on third down and the offense still can’t run the ball even against one of the SEC’s worst rushing defenses.
Despite all that, AU still won relatively comfortably and has two weeks to continue to work on those deficiencies.
So I don’t look at it as a negative at all. I look at it as a coaching staff that again had a better plan and made the better adjustments, and a group of players that don’t hang their heads when things go bad and continue to fight for all four quarters.
It’s the proverbial 1-0 mentality.
Quarterback Bo Nix did play well and so did the wide receivers. They’ve improved this season. Defensively, the secondary is starting to make more plays. The pass rush has improved.
That’s quality coaching.
Sure, AU is still limited talent-wise in some areas, but those areas, particularly the offensive line, can improve. This off-week is the perfect time to shore up that unit and get the ground game going.
What does this offense look like with Tank Bigsby and Jarquez Hunter getting 5-6 yards on first down instead of 2-3? Well, let’s find out.
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September was pretty solid and all, but this season was always going to come down to SEC play and so far, so good.
Auburn is 2-1 in the conference and those two wins came as road underdogs. The loss was to the best team in the country.
When you look at the remaining schedule, there's two games that should be fairly close and could go either way — Ole Miss at home and at Texas A&M -- and there’s two games AU should be fairly heavy favorites to win — home against Mississippi State and at South Carolina.
The best-case scenario is absolutely in play, winning the next four and going into the Iron Bowl in a winner-take-the-West showdown with Alabama. That’s a Crimson Tide team that is good, of course, but not as dominant as year’s past and certainly beatable at Jordan-Hare Stadium.
We’re past the halfway mark of the season and Auburn’s still in this thing. With this roster and a brand new coaching staff, I’m not sure you could ask for anything more.
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In today’s musical journey, we go back 36 years to an animated video that helped the third release of a song reach the top of the U.S. charts. On Oct. 18, 1985, A-ha’s Take On Me climbed to No. 1 on the Billboard 100. The song spent one week at No. 1 but remained on the charts for 27 weeks. The video, which used rotoscoping, won six awards at the 1986 MTV Video Music Awards including Best New Artist in a Video, Best Direction and Best Special Effects. The video has been viewed over 1.3 billion times, one of just five music videos from the 20th century to have over a billion views.
A-ha was formed in Oslo, Norway in 1982 by Paul Waaktaar-Savoy, Magne Furuholmen and Morten Harket. They quickly moved to London to pursue a career in music and already had a song they were playing called, Miss Eerie. They recorded it and called the first version Lesson One. It was released with a video in 1984 but failed to chart. It was re-recorded as Take On Me and failed to chart again until finally finding the right mix in 1985 with the help of producer Alan Tarney and the backing of Warner Bros. UK. A-ha only had two other sings chart in the U.S. The Sun Always Shines on T.V. peaked at No. 20 in 1986 and Cry Wolf made it to No. 50 the following year. The band is remembered as a one-hit wonder in the U.S. but had much more success in Europe and is active today. They have recored 10 studio and four live albums, performed at the Nobel Peace Prize Concert in 1998 and are listed in the Guinness World Records book for having the highest-paying rock concert with 198,000 attending a concert at Maracana Stadium during the Rock in Rio festival in 1991.
Warner Bros hired Steve Barron to direct na new video for Take On Me. He’d previously directed videos for Micheal Jackson’s Billie Jean and Dire Straits’ Money For Nothing. The rotoscoping method combines pencil sketching over live action frames to give the animation realistic movements. There were approximately 3,000 frames rotoscoped for the video, which took 16 weeks. The video was released to dance clubs and MTV, where it quickly became a big part of the rotation, a month before the song was released. It only took 15 weeks for it to climb to No. 1 and its ended ranked 10th in the 1985 year-end chart. Barron also directed the video for The Sun Always Shines on T.V., which begins with a rotoscope epilogue to the Take On Me video.
