Auburn Football: These Tigers Just Can't Be Stopped

Auburn football is on one of those rare, once-in-a-lifetime or so mortal rolls.

Auburn football is college football's tsunami; it is a category five hurricane.

It simply looks unstoppable, doesn't it?

These Tigers blew the roof off the Georgia Dome Saturday afternoon with that 56-17 beatdown of South Carolina that delivered the SEC Championship and a berth in the national title game in five weeks against the Oregon Ducks.

Oh yes, and in the process, Cam Newton's long arms will wrap nicely around the Heisman Trophy next Saturday evening.

The old ball coach, Steve Spurrier, was scratching his head to come up with superlatives after his team looked helpless in the second half of the championship game.

"You can't tackle him," Spurrier said of the 6'6", 250 lb. dynamo that is Newton. "He's almost a one-man show but these guys really help and their receivers are really good."

Newton put up more yardage than South Carolina. He passed for that career-high 335 yards then glided around the field when needed for another 73. That adds up to 408 yards of the 589 that sent the Gamecock faithful home shaking their heads.

"I'm just a blessed individual," Newton understated.

And that puts him in the Tim Tebow category as only the second player in the history of the SEC to run and pass for 20 touchdowns in a season.

This run by Auburn has taken the look of an enormous snowball rolling down a mountain. Doesn't look stoppable, does it?

"This is huge for our university," said Tigers coach Gene Chizik, the guy that had the Tiger faithful up in arms when he was brought in from Iowa State with that five-win resume. "We couldn't be more excited about it."

Excitement?

The mental state of Auburn and its fans might be about five clicks above that.

This waltz into the championship game may be justice delivered from the 2004 season when Auburn was left out of the national title conversation.

This is when hurt feelings go away, it's when attention turns to the big prize.

Chizik says that those early comebacks against Clemson and South Carolina helped forge this team's mentality. Then there was that little comeback against Alabama. Then the biggest comeback of all when Newton was declared a free man by the NCAA, free to try and deliver a national title to Tiger Nation.

About halfway through this run to 13-0, Chizik had a sense, a feeling. "Halfway through the season we thought we had a chance to be a championship calibre team."

Auburn took "championship calibre" into high gear last Saturday. The Tigers simply put a big fat exclamation mark on it.

Now another high-scoring tornado of a team stands between Auburn and a first-ever win in the BCS title game.

"It's a challenge," Chizik said, looking forward five weeks. "They're very well-coached. They have great athletes in a great scheme."

Gene, you guys aren't bad either.

And this team has done it with a lot of dark storm clouds hanging over it.

"We've been through so much," Chizik said, confirming the difficulty of the journey.

"The highs and lows," he said as he came up with one word that helped put these Tigers in the title battle with Oregon:

"Resiliency."