Fresh Men for Auburn Football

Auburn Football: I was in Auburn a couple days ago and you can smell football in the air and feel it lurking just off College Street. The campus and the whole town is alive with alumni, and with a new generation of alumni-to-be moving into fresh apartments.

My own son is one of these switching from the Copper Beech complex to a condo south of campus. I'm also glad to report that the historic oak tree at Toomer's Corner is still living, but it was sad to see the barricades around it and the lack of leaves at the tips of the branches.

This is type of mean-spirited damage is not what college sports is all about. It's about that 50-something couple I saw in Wal-Mart holding hands, with his orange polo and her white "AU" T-shirt. It's about the giggly girl shopper at the Apple Computer specialist store, Graphicom, where my son now has a part time job, in her blue and orange; and soon it's going to be about a crop of freshmen that Coach Gene Chizik said this week will NOT be sitting on the bench.

Chizik said this week that they'll play until they show that they need to be red-shirted and not the other way around. That should make for some interesting games, even if Auburn can't live up to it's pre-season #19 national ranking. Two of the most important new Tigers will try to boost the defensive side of the line, Jonathan Rose at Corner Back and Gabe Wright on the Defensive Line. With Nick Fairley and a number of other D players gone, these freshmen will be needed; and will bring an element of the unknown to the team -- should make for some fun footbal!

Micky D's for WiFi

We were on vacation in beautiful upstate New York in late July when it was time to get connected to a fast internet pipe so that my son, an impending Auburn University freshman, could have a chance at getting season tickets for Tigers football. The flood gates on the Auburn website were due to open at 9:00 am central time, 10:00 am our local NY time, so we located a nearby McDonald's restaurant and ordered some breakfast and asked for wireless access. The young lady behind the counter handed us our cinnamon rolls, OJ, and an instruction card and we went to work.

Thirty minutes later we still weren't on line, but we were getting closer after the store supervisor rebooted their system (the extent of her technical expertise, but she was very nice about it) and we realized that we were trying to get in via the local carrier's public portal rather than their McDonald's pathway. By twenty 'til all we had to do was wait. My son pounced on the tickets link as soon as it went live: $95 for 6 home games, not bad. And Auburn is the football team in Alabama with a tested coach in place, Tommy Tuberville. I guess I'll have to learn more about the players, and quick, since the season is about to kickoff in a couple weeks, it looks like with four home games in a row!

So when you need some internet in the middle of nowhere, for tickets or just sports scores, most McDonald's can hook you up, if you don't need much tech support.