Alabama has everything to lose in the Iron Bowl

Don’t let the “18” on the helmet or the five stern statues along the Walk of Champions up to imposing Bryant-Denny Stadium fool you. Alabama — mighty, title-laden, we-don’t-storm-the-field Alabama — absolutely dreads playing little ol’ Auburn.

It’s true. Alabama fans look forward to the Iron Bowl the way you look forward to a dental cleaning. You know it’s necessary, but you have to do it anyway. Best-case scenario, you come out feeling exactly the same; worst-case, you’re in for a full year of pain. There’s no real upside here for Alabama, just a desperate need to survive the week without too much physical or psychological damage.

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Take, for instance, this year’s game, scheduled for 7:30 p.m. Eastern — long after sundown — this Saturday in Auburn. On its surface, this wouldn’t appear to be a contest; No. 10 Alabama is a powerful, if occasionally erratic, offensive machine with a clear path to the SEC championship game, while Auburn is 5-6, down a coach and uncertain of its identity and its future.

But this is the Iron Bowl, and strange things happen here. That’s why the line is just 5.5 points in Alabama’s favor, as opposed to, say, the 13.5 points Georgia is getting against a Georgia Tech team that’s far more accomplished than Auburn this year. The mojo is just different in the Iron Bowl, and that’s what has Alabama nervous heading into a game where, against any other opponent, they’d be highly, perhaps even supremely, confident.

Which brings us to Auburn’s feelings on the Iron Bowl, which can best be described as, “Hell, let’s see what happens this year.” Auburn is college football’s chaos-bringer, a program that reeled off two of the greatest finishes in sports history in back-to-back games, and also a program that’s wandered in the desert for the last decade, lost in a haze of coach-culture misfits. You never quite know which Auburn is going to show up in the Iron Bowl, which makes this such a fascinating — and, for Alabama, terrifying — game.

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“We understand it’s going to be a great experience there, and it’ll be one where we’re facing a team that wants to knock us off of our goals and our hopes and all that,” Alabama head coach Kalen DeBoer said earlier this week. “You’ve really got to simplify it down. You’ve got to prepare. Prepare for the noise, prepare for the emotions that come.”

Good luck. The cool, late-November evening atmosphere at Jordan-Hare Stadium has a way of summoning up ghosts. Unheralded players step up to play the game of their lives. Balls bounce in unpredictable directions. Field goals fly wide … or, in one memorable case, just a wee bit short.

Few college football fans — and exactly none in Alabama — who were conscious in 2013 will ever forget the Kick-Six, the moment when Auburn landed the most decisive knockout blow in the rivalry’s history. Auburn fans can recite the call of the late Rod Bramblett (“Auburn’s gonna win the football game!”) like the Pledge of Allegiance or the Lord’s Prayer. Here, let’s enjoy it once again:

(Sorry, Alabama fans.)

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In 2017, No. 6 Auburn knocked off No. 1 Alabama in Jordan-Hare. Two years later, in a shootout that featured a 48-point second quarter, No. 16 Auburn knocked No. 5 Alabama out of the playoff and a New Year’s Six bowl for the first time since 2010 with a 48-45 upset victory.

The problem for Auburn is that the two most recent Jordan-Hare Iron Bowls have seen the ghosts turn against the home team. In 2021, Alabama outlasted Auburn in four overtimes thanks to the miracle heroics of Bryce Young and John Metchie. Two years later, Auburn had Alabama pinned on fourth-and-31, and Alabama’s Jalen Milroe executed a play called “Gravedigger” that gave the Tide a game-winning touchdown. The agony at Jordan-Hare on both nights was visible and palpable.

Time and the flow of college football have dimmed the Iron Bowl’s glow a touch; it’s now possible to lose the game and still win the national championship. (See: 2017 Alabama, which would go on to beat Georgia for the title on Tua Tagovailoa’s miracle 2nd-and-26 play.) At 9-2, Alabama doesn’t quite have the luxury of taking an Iron Bowl loss this year, as a third loss almost assuredly removes them from playoff contention.

You can debate whether Auburn-Alabama is the finest college football rivalry in the country. Michigan-Ohio State has had more at stake in recent years; Army-Navy has more red, white and blue tradition. What’s indisputable, though, is that no rivalry has inspired quite the range of absurd, unhinged, even felonious behavior in its fan bases. (Nobody’s poisoning any trees over, say, Notre Dame-USC.)

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“I don’t care where you live or where you’re from, you know about the Iron Bowl,” Auburn interim head coach DJ Durkin said Monday. “Certainly, to this area, there is nothing bigger.”

The Iron Bowl also has the highest per-capita rate of named games, matchups that you know not by their year or score, but by the nickname that still hangs on them. There’s Kick-Six and Gravedigger, of course, and also Punt Bama Punt, the Run in the Mud, The Camback, Bo Over The Top … names that summon up days of triumph and futility, exultation and desolation, over and over again.

Because that’s the heart of the Iron Bowl, the way that the fans in Tuscaloosa and on The Plains lock in for one day a year, and then relive it for the next 364. Perhaps Alabama will run away with this one and begin looking to the SEC championship game … but probably not. These games have a way of coming down to the final second.