TAMPA, Fla. | Derrick Brown and Auburn's All-American-trimmed defensive line quickly figured out the Gophers' game plan on the ground. They just couldn't figure out how to stop it.
“We knew what we were coming into," Brown said. "We just didn’t get the job done."
The Tigers allowed a season-high 215 yards on the ground and for Gophers leading rusher Mohamed Ibrahim to average 7 yards a carry as the Big Ten toppled the SEC in the Outback Bowl with Minnesota's 31-24 victory over Auburn.
Minnesota blocked well at the point of attack against Brown and company, then the Gophers' tailback duo of Ibrahim and Rodney Smith made moves at the second level. That led to chunk plays early, but more importantly, Auburn's defensive line was made to move side to side, and that was an issue it couldn't shake.
“The offensive line wasn’t the problem; it was the scheme," Brown said. "They’re running sideline to sideline. I’m not giving no excuses, but when you run sideline to sideline, you kind of take the defensive line out of it."
As Davidson simply put it, "big men don't want to go sideways. Big men want to go downhill." In its first game without offensive coordinator Kirk Ciarrocca, who left for the same job at Penn State, Minnesota pulled around for running plays often and extended the gaps at the line of scrimmage.
"You want to get vertical penetration, but at the same time, when you get vertical penetration, you start opening up holes, and that’s when those backs — they’re not really even coached to go to a hole, they kind of just find the open hole and go," Brown said. "So you saw that all day. They were kind of picking one and popping out the other. It was a good scheme.”
Auburn settled in and made stops in the third quarter after a 24-point second half — forcing two punts to start the third quarter and thwarting a quarterback sneak on fourth-and-inches in its own territory — but it was still buried late by conversions on the ground and by play-action success from quarterback Tanner Morgan.
Bo Nix and the Tigers' offense started pulling its weight with one scoring drive in the third, but a season-low performance of 232 yards on that side of the ball took its doll on Kevin Steele's unit.
“Just fatigue, honestly," cornerback Noah Igbinoghene said. "It’s something that we train on to withstand, but shoot, you never know sometimes. ... It really doesn’t matter what the offense does, because we put the pressure on ourselves anyway to shut them down no matter what. Shoot, we just didn’t get it done today. That’s how it is.”
Never full of excuses, though, Davidson and company believe Minnesota's plan to stretch them out — and gas them — shouldn't have been as effective as it was on Wednesday afternoon.
"They just had an overall great game plan, and I mean it paid off as you can see," said Davidson, who played his last college game in Raymond James Stadium. "... We should have stopped it."
