AUBURN | Auburn returned from Knoxville with a series win over a top 10 team and the assuredness that they can beat any team anywhere and under any circumstance.
Perhaps the Tigers’ players and coaches already believed that before taking 2-of-3 from Tennessee. But they know it now.
Auburn out-played the defending national champions on their field in front of their fans. The Volunteers were fortunate to win just one.
Game one started in the pouring rain, had a 13 hour and 22 minute delay and ended in a 6-1 win. Game two had an 18 hour and 27 minute weather delay, lasted 11 innings and ended in a 5-4 loss.
The weather cooperated for game three, which AU won 8-1 in seven innings.
But it was more than handling the elements and a talented UT squad that was special about Auburn’s win at Tennessee. It was how well AU handled all the extracurriculars that come with playing against a Tony Vitello-coached team.
His teams play aggressive. They aren’t afraid to talk trash or flip a bat every now and then. They don’t often hold back after a big hit or big strikeout.
They like to intimidate their opponents, and it often works.
It didn’t this weekend.
This Auburn team, which has played the nation’s No. 1 strength of schedule, isn’t the type to back down from a challenge. And they felt challenged before even stepping between the lines Friday night.
I’ll let Ike Irish explain it.
“They didn’t play the national anthem and that kinda pissed us off,” Irish told the Auburn Network. “This team loves living for the national anthem and playing for it. And then he said some words to Rembert. We didn’t like that and we don’t like a guy who likes to show us up. Chris is one of the best dudes on the planet. The game humbles you and it humbled him in that moment. I was just the person that had to do it.”
I’ll never understand why UT decided to start Friday night’s game in a driving rainstorm, but after their ace pitcher, Liam Doyle, struck out Chris Rembert, he had some words for Auburn’s standout freshman.
Irish heard those words and sent the fourth pitch he saw from Doyle over the left field wall for a two-run home run.
Irish batted .444 in the series with six runs scored, one home run and five RBI. Rembert batted. 417 with four runs scored, one home run and one RBI.
They certainly weren’t intimidated.
“We knew it was going to be a hostile weekend,” said Irish. “We don’t like each other. And we knew we had to play at our level. We couldn’t play how they wanted to play. We just had to be us.”
Doyle took the loss in game one, throwing just one inning before the delay. He returned to pitch the final two innings of game two Sunday and earn the win. But he was ejected after making the final out with a harder than necessary tag at home plate in the top of the 11th inning.
Vitello was ejected in the fifth inning of game three.
It certainly wasn’t Auburn that lost its composure this weekend. But this isn’t about the Volunteers.
It’s about an Auburn team that’s developed a true grit. A team that plays hard and plays together. It’s a team full of players that love ball.
And it’s a team that appears to be coming together at just the right time.
Auburn left Knoxville with a series win and an opportunity for much more. The Tigers will be ranked high this week. They’ll be in the discussion as a potential top eight national seed.
It’s all there for the taking over the final two weeks of the regular season. And Auburn’s grown into the type of team that’s going to grab it with both hands.
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In today’s musical journey, we go back 10 years to the release of a debut album from a veteran songwriter that went on to win a Grammy Award for the Best Country Album. On May 5, 2015, Chris Stapleton released Traveller, which peaked at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and has reached quadruple platinum status after selling over 2.6 million copies. It is the best-selling country album of the 2010’s. Stapleton wrote or co-wrote all but two of the album’s 14 songs. It had several hit singles including “Traveller,” which won a Grammy for Best Country Solo Performance, “Nobody to Blame,” which won an ACM Award for Song of the Year, “Parachute,” “Fire Away,” which won a CMA Award for Music Video of the Year and a cover of “Tennessee Whiskey,” which hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs and No. 20 on the Billboard 100. “Tennessee Whiskey” became a hit for Stapleton after he performed it as a duet with Justin Timberlake at the CMA Awards in 2015, which was also a big boost to album sales. The song was originally recorded by David Allan Coe in 1981. George Jones’ 1983 version reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot Country. Stapleton wrote “Traveller” on a cross-country trip from Phoenix to Nashville with his wife shortly after his dad passed away in 2013. That trip also provided the picture of Stapleton for the album cover. Most of the album was recorded at RCA Studio A in Nashville and it was produced by Dave Cobb.
Christopher Alvin Stapleton was born in Lexington, Ky., in 1978. His father was a coal mine engineer and mother worked in the local health department. He grew up in Staffordsville, Ky., which is right outside Paintsville, which is the home of former Auburn play-by-play announcer Jim Fyffe. After one guitar lesson at the age of 12, he started teaching himself to play and writing and singing songs. Stapleton played football and was valedictorian at Johnson Central High School. In 1996, he began studying biomedical engineering at Vanderbilt before dropping out to pursue a career in songwriting. He wrote more than 1,000 songs over the next decade including six that became No. 1 hits for other artists including Kenny Chesney, Luke Bryan and George Strait. He formed a bluegrass group, the SteelDrivers, in 2007 and a Southern rock group, the Jompson Brothers, in 2010. He decided to pursue a solo career and signed with Mercury Nashville in 2013. Two years later at the age of 37, he released Traveller. Stapleton has gone on to release four more albums, won 11 Grammys and was recently ranked by Rolling Stone 170th on its list of the 200 Greatest Singers of All Time. He had two more No. 1 hits in 2021’s “Starting Over” and 2022’s “You Should Probably Leave,” and many other popular songs including 2017’s “Broken Halos” and “Millionaire,” 2018’s “Say Something,” a duet with Timberlake, and 2023’s “White Horse.” He has been married to singer-songwriter Morgane Hayes since 2007 and the couple have five children.
