Auburn football: My, how the goals have changed for this football team

Raise your hand if this is how you envisioned the Auburn football saying playing out?

The anti-Gus folks are emphatically raising both hands.

That doesn’t mean you hoped Auburn would be 4-3 going into its road game at Ole Miss. No, it just means that you’ve had “I told you so” sitting on the tips of your tongues since Gus Malzahn signed that seven-year extension at the end of last season.

And the anti-Gus crowd is growing. With good reason.

Before Week 1 against Washington in Atlanta — remember that game, when Auburn put up more than 400 yards, beat the No. 7 team, looked like an elite team and owned the nation’s best win of the season? — goals were in place.

How times have changed. Here’s what everyone was thinking for 2018:

• The Iron Bowl would decide which team from the SEC West goes to Atlanta for the SEC Championship Game, where Auburn played last season against Georgia.
• A spot in the four-team playoff.
• 10, 11 or what the heck, 12 wins in the regular season.

After the loss to LSU, the mindset changed, although the goals remained intact.

After the loss to Mississippi State, goals began to shift.

After the loss to Tennessee, it was time to tear up that goal list and think smaller. Much smaller:

• Earn a winning record.
• Reach a bowl game. One bowl projection I saw this week has Auburn playing Duke in the Belk Bowl. How amusing is it that a potential Auburn-Duke matchup in basketball on Nov. 20 in the Maui Invitational is overwhelmingly more attractive? And how crazy is it to think that Bruce Pearl’s team might have a better chance of winning that game against the Blue Devils than Malzahn’s Tigers do?

Chew on that. 

No, the season is not what any Auburn fan hoped to see.

If things play out remotely the way they appear in mid-October, Auburn will lose to Texas A&M, lose to Georgia and lose to Alabama. When it comes to that winning record and a bowl game, the game Saturday at Ole Miss is as big as it gets. Lose that and cries for Gus to be gone get very loud, very fast.

But hey, don’t forget about the Liberty game. That’s the one guaranteed victory remaining on the schedule. Maybe then we’ll get to see Malik Willis or Joey Gatewood or even Cord Sandberg. Of course, one of them will light it up Nov. 17 and we’ll all wonder why we didn’t get at least a taste of it in late September or through the first half of October.

At this point, Auburn football has nothing to lose. Will anyone be excited about a trip to the Belk Bowl at the end of a season that started with College Football Playoff aspirations?

After weeks of writing it, it seems obvious now that Anthony Schwartz and Seth Williams should and will be focal points of the offense.

It’s a time to experiment. Seriously, it can’t get worse that losing to the Vols.

See if one of the three dual-threat quarterbacks on the sideline can spark this offense.

It sure beats watching Auburn struggle to beat — or lose — to Duke in the Belk Bowl.