Oregon analyst: Former Auburn football QB must prove he’s no fluke
Former Auburn football quarterback Bo Nix has to prove that the 2022 season, one in which the Pinson Valley product nearly doubled his prior single-season best in touchdowns (29) and set career highs across all passing efficiency measurements, wasn’t a fluke — this, at least, according to Ducks Wire’s Miles Dwyer.
“Hopefully, Nix will prove that he is the real deal next fall and that last season was not a fluke,” Dwyer wrote.
Of course, the implication that Nix never repeating the gaudiness of last season’s stat totals makes his first Ducks campaign a fluke is an indictment on the three years he spent on the Plains under Gus Malzhan and Bryan Harsin. Nix showed incremental improvements each season in completion percentage and overcame a sophomore slump down-year in 2020 — the official year for down-years in the history of modern civilization — to have the Tigers ranked in the top 15 the first week of November 2021.
The typical caveat of going from SEC defenses to Pac-12 defenses should apply since his worst game during the 2022 season was opening week against defending eventual SEC/CFP Champion Georgia, but even still, Nix’s second year was marred by two canceled regular games due to COVID-19 relative to a regular season and his third by a late-season injury that took away three games. His progression when read on paper makes 2022 seem like a fluke, but he may have progressed had he not been dealt with the two strangest years in recent history during his sophomore and junior years.
Auburn football is the only entity that can switch up the Bo Nix narrative
Nix can replicate last season’s success, but if Auburn football got its act together during the 2023 upcoming season and won even eight games in the last season of the loaded SEC West’s existence, AU wouldn’t be seen as the loser of the QB’s Plains departure.
History is written by the winners, and if the Tigers can start doing that, there will be less attention on the star QB who left the program and had his best years elsewhere.