Auburn football: 3 questions heading into the Birmingham Bowl

Just over one month after finishing out their regular season with a 4OT loss to Alabama in the Iron. Bowl, Auburn football will head north to the Magic City to compete in The Birmingham Bowl. The Tigers will face off against the Houston Cougars, who finished their regular season 11-2 as runners-up for the AAU championship with a loss to Cincinnati.

Houston has lost four consecutive bowl games prior to the Birmingham Bowl, while the Tigers’ last bowl victory came in the 2018 Music City Bowl versus Purdue. The last time Auburn played Houston was 48 years ago, in 1973, when the Tigers beat the Cougars 7-0.

Despite the disparity in the season records, Auburn enters the game as the favorite and definitely has the talent to beat the Cougars. But will they be able to pull it off? After all the drama in the program, from the offensive coordinator search to Bo Nix’s entry in the transfer portal to Tank Bigsby’s decision to stay on the team, what will Auburn football look like in their bowl game?

Here are three burning questions about Auburn football ahead of the Birmingham Bowl:

Question #1: Can the Tigers avoid their first losing season since 2012?

Bryan Harsin’s first-year team dropped the last four games of the season, losing every matchup in the month of November, so can they bounce back for a bowl win so soon? Houston is not an easy opponent, by any means, but there are a few things that give the Tigers an advantage over the Cougars, the biggest being location.

While Houston is approximately 9.5 hours from Birmingham, it’s only two hours from the Plains, so Auburn football should essentially have the home-field advantage for the matchup. This game is also extremely important to some players in building their draft stock.

Players like safety Smoke Monday opted-in to the bowl game despite their intentions to enter the 2022 NFL Draft, meaning they have more to play for than the average player. However, ending your season with a winning record instead of a losing one should be motivation enough for the Tigers to give their all against the Cougars this Wednesday.