AUBURN | For Auburn, it doesn’t get much worse than this.

With Saturday’s loss at No. 19 Missouri, the second blown 11-point lead in the fourth quarter in the last three games, the Tigers are on the fast track for a fourth consecutive losing season.

I hadn’t witnessed three consecutive in my lifetime until last year and you have to go all the way back to the five straight losses from 1946-50 for the last time that happened.

We are in the midst of one of the worst stretches in Auburn football history.

It will end at some point. When that will be actually intrigues me. It’s far more interesting than anything happening on the field right now.

I see this team at an inflection point.

Perhaps they will rally on the field somewhat over the last five games and at least win the ones they’re supposed to and maybe some they're not — and not blowing another double-digit, fourth-quarter lead would be a plus too. And just four days after the season, Hugh Freeze and his staff will sign Auburn's best recruiting class of the Rivals era, and this time next year AU will be competing for a spot in the 12-team playoff.

That’s the best-case scenario and it’s not a dream scenario. This team and this staff have the potential to turn it around starting this week, or maybe next week.

But the worst-case scenario is very much in play too.

It’s not out of the question this Auburn team tanks it over the remainder of the regular season and finishes 3-9 or 2-10, and Freeze enters next season on the hottest of hot seats.

That No. 5-ranked class could also fall apart as other top programs swoop in for the flip. That would be a tough pill to swallow.

Perhaps the final outcome will be somewhere in-between.

I would have thought this impossible a couple of months ago, but I wouldn’t rule out AU stumbling to the finish line on the field and still signing a top 5 or better class.

That’s a lot of uncertainty for a football program that should have already turned the corner after three losing seasons. Auburn has too much support and too much investment to suffer this long.

But that’s the reality.

The good news is the answers are coming in a little more than six weeks. The season will be done and the class will be signed and we’ll all know exactly how Freeze and his staff navigated one of the lowest points in program history.

You just hope there’s a light at the end of this long, dark tunnel, and AU doesn’t have to hit the reset button once again.

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In today’s musical journey, we go back 47 years to the release of one of the best-selling albums of all time, which was inspired by a musical and produced as a spoof of a famous musical artist. On Oct. 21, 1977, Meat Loaf released Bat Out of Hell, which was written by Jim Steinman and produced by Todd Rundgren. Steinman based it on Neverland, his futuristic rock musical about Peter Pan. Steinman and Meat Loaf performed the material to a number of producers and Rundgren only agreed to produce it with his own money after considering it to be a spoof of Bruce Springsteen and his 1975 Born to Run album. Ironically, both Max Weinberg and Roy Bittan from the E Street Band ended up contributing to Bat Out of Hell. It was recorded in 1975 and 76, but it took six months after completion to find a distributor in Cleveland International Records, which was a subsidiary of Epic. It was the debut album for Meat Loaf, whose previous experience was mostly as a performer on Broadway including Hair and as Eddie in both the Broadway and film versions of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Steinman’s Neverland had a very short five-day run at the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts in 1977, but it was used as the basis for his 2017 Bat Out of Hell musical, which has had long runs in Manchester, England, London, Toronto and is now on an international tour. The album sold over 14 million copies in the U.S. and 43 million copies worldwide, making it the fifth-highest selling record of all time.

Marvin Lee Aday was born in Dallas, Texas in 1947. His mom was a school teacher and sung in a gospel group, and his dad was a former police officer who sold a homemade cough syrup. His father had the hospital staff put Meat on his crib because of his size and red complexion. He was also called M.L. early on because of his initials but eventually earned the nickname Meat Loaf in seventh grade due to his size. He graduated from Jefferson High School, where he participated in theatre, in 1965 and moved to Los Angeles shortly thereafter. He formed his first band, Meat Loaf Soul, in 1968 and ended up opening for Van Morrison, the Who and Grateful Dead over the next couple of years before Meat Loaf joined the Hair cast in 1970. He met Steinman during an audition for another play and it was shortly thereafter that they started work on Bat Out of Hell. He went on to release 12 albums and had one No. 1 song in 1993’s “I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That), which won him a Grammy Award. Other popular and successful singles include 1978's "Paradise By the Dashboard Light" and "Two Out of Three Ain't Bad," 1994's "Rock and Roll Dreams Come True" (the video is directed by Michael Bay and includes an 18-year old Angelina Jolie), and 1995's "I'd Die For You (And That's the Truth)." Meat Loaf also appeared in more than 50 movies and T.V. shows including 1997’s Spice World and 1999’s Fight Club. He passed away in 2022 at the age of 74.