Auburn football: Tigers headline CBS Sports’ chaos teams in 2022

It’s not as cliched as looking up ‘chaos’ in the dictionary and finding the words ‘Auburn football’ there, but the Tigers are absolutely deserving of being considered one of the primary purveyors of chaos year in and year out, and luckily CBS Sports’ Tom Fornelli didn’t disappoint.

Fornelli’s piece “Five potential college football chaos teams ready to wreak havoc on playoff race in 2022 season” was headlined by Auburn, who is so defined by the chaos that the CBS scribe said ‘chaos is the only non-chaotic thing about the program.’

Perhaps no sentence in the entire article read as canon quite like when Fornelli said that ‘Auburn is never more dangerous than when you expect nothing of it, so be wary, playoff contenders within the SEC.’ With that sentence alone, he proved to the world that he understood the assignment.

Four College Football Playoff contenders–and in reality, only three with the recent success and personnel under center to truly qualify–were the focus of Fornelli’s Auburn football portion of his piece. Knocking off Penn State at home could be an early season statement, but the author (like all of us) was more concerned about AU’s trip Between the Hedges October 8th, hosting Texas A&M November 12th and traveling to see the team up north in Tuscaloosa November 26th.

Auburn football could destroy anyone’s season

It’s arguable that Auburn’s place in the SEC title picture as a potential spoiler with low expectations and a high likelihood of positively surprising is preferable to that of Arkansas or Ole Miss right now since neither program is likely to match last year’s win total.

AU will rarely lay points on the spread this season and, as Fornelli points out, could destroy somebody’s season ‘should the Tigers pair that defense with a good day on offense in those games.’

It’s going to be a guilt-free season overall, since the worst-case scenario is what the national media is preparing us all for anyway.