Flashback Friday: Auburn 2006

It was the 6th week of the 2006 Season. Arkansas was having a pretty wild season with close wins over Vanderbilt (Missed 4th quarter field goal that would have given the commodores the win) and Alabama (Leigh Tiffin missed a few kicks) to go with a humbling 50-14 loss to USC.

If 2015 was the season of chaos, 2006 was the season of order. There were very few top 25 teams that lost to unranked teams at that point in the season. Arkansas came into the game as 15 point underdogs. No one outside of Arkansas knew about Darren McFadden, Felix Jones, and Marcus Monk, why should anyone think that Arkansas was going to have a chance?

This game was not exciting. It didn’t featured high powered offenses challenging each other and breaking new scoring barriers. Instead it was a defensive struggle. Auburn ran 60 plays while Arkansas ran 55. The big plays were a 50-yard Touchdown Reception by Marcus Monk (his only catch of the game) and a 63-yard touchdown run by Darren McFadden. Auburn didn’t have a play that went more than 23 yards.

Arkansas had a bye the week before, but I don’t think the extra prep time was the difference.

Auburn played a bizarre Thursday Night game in Columbia, SC the week before.

Who knows. Mustain only had to attempt 10 passes for 87 yards (50 of which came on the one completion to Monk), Malzahn did use a trick “Fish out of Water” play aka a Woody play to get a 25 yard rush to put Arkansas up by 2 scores at the end of the 3rd quarter.

I can’t let the recap of this game go without mentioning Jamaal Anderson. Jamaal Anderson started out as a wide receiver and the en vogue thing at the time was to turn wideouts into Defensive ends, and it worked very well for Jamaal Anderson. He spent plenty of time in the back field and made life a living nightmare for Kenny Irons and Brandon Cox.

The 27-10 win was capped by Houston Nutt climbing up the hedges and leading the fight song from the stands with the band. The picture was in sports sections in newspapers across the nation. I was in that picture.

Sorry for the quality of these highlights, but I can’t believe those were our uniforms at one point. They look so different now.