The 2021 season will be far more forgiving for Auburn football than the all-SEC 2020 slate was. Non-conference play being on hold for a year wasn’t the primary reason the 2020 campaign was seen as so forgettable and ended in Gus Malzahn getting fired.
This fall’s schedule returns non-conference play, with four September matchups on the docket before a Week 5 trip down to Death Valley to take on the Tigers of the Bayou.
While Week 4 against Georgia State has been identified as a potential trap game by Sports Illustrated, Week 3’s trip up north to Beaver Stadium is anything but.
Penn State-Auburn football is the September 18th main event, and that day has a ton of good football planned. Coastal Carolina-Buffalo, UCF-Louisville, Oklahoma-Nebraska, and Indiana-Cincinnatti are all juicy inter-conference affairs, but the Nittany Lions and the Tigers are headlining primetime that Saturday night.
With great power comes great responsibility, though, and both programs need to prove that 2021 could be a bounce-back year before their matchup loses its luster.
Penn State could find that a little difficult given the strength of their first two opponents. Camp Randall Stadium will be a hostile environment when Madison, Wisconsin hosts the Nittany Lions for a Big Ten tussle in Week 1. Their debut at Beaver Stadium with a (hopefully) full capacity crowd for the first time in two years in 2021 will be against the defending MAC Champions Ball State.
PSU could be limping into their matchup with Auburn football, but don’t expect the same for the Tigers.
Bryan Harsin and co. have a difficult road ahead in year one, with one of the toughest schedules in college football. But that’s not because of who they have scheduled for the first two weeks of the season.
Jordan-Hare Stadium is set to be the host of two big blowouts in Week 1 and Week 2. The poor Akron Zips–the underdog on the wrong end of a 36.5 point spread–will be the first team to hear the roar of a full capacity Tigers crowd, while Alabama State, the projected fourth-place finishers in East division of the SWAC of Division I FCS, will take I85 north to the Plains the following Saturday.
After running over two non-conference opponents, Auburn football will be rolling into Happy Valley with serious momentum for Week 3 of the 2021 season.