Auburn football: Joe Burrow says AU crowd trumps Penn State’s whiteout

Before you knew Joe Burrow as LSU’s championship quarterback, he played for Ohio State in some of the wildest Big 10 environments–including the one that Auburn football will find itself in this weekend. Back in 2016, Burrow witnessed a whiteout game at Beaver Stadium, and the Buckeyes lost 24-21.

In 2018, Burrow and the LSU Tigers made a trip to the Plains where they faced a fired-up Auburn crowd. LSU ultimately won the game 22-21, but Auburn football did not go down without a fight, and the home crowd made it that much more difficult for Burrow to secure the win.

Following the game, Burrow was interviewed on-field and definitively told CBS that the hostile environment of Jordan-Hare Stadium trumped that of Penn State’s whiteout, per 247Sports in an article from 2018:

"“This one trumps Penn State,” Burrow said during his on-field interview with CBS after the win. “It was a lot louder, I could barely hear myself think out there, but I tried to stay calm and all of my guys helped me do that.”"

According to Burrow, the LSU Tigers prepared for the Auburn game the way that Coach Bryan Harsin is working to prepare for the Penn State game this weekend:

"“I think it shows that we are a tough team,” Burrow said. “Auburn is a great team, obviously. We practiced all week like if we were going to play in front of 100,000 people. We had speakers that were louder than the stadium out there, we couldn’t hear a single thing in practice. We came out and executed the game plan as good as we could.”"

One of the biggest narratives coming from Penn State fans this week has been that Auburn football has no idea what’s coming and will be totally unprepared for the whiteout. We don’t just know what a hostile crowd environment is like–we’ve been the hostile crowd ourselves.

Whether the Tigers win or lose this weekend, it probably won’t have anything to do with Penn State’s whiteout crowd.