With so much of the preseason coverage of the Auburn football team devoted to the always-interesting quarterback race, it can be easy to forget that there are actually 10 other players on offense, every play. (It’s true — we looked it up.)

Offensive coordinator Tony Franklin serves as the Tigers’ quarterbacks coach, but he’s focused on more than just Kodi Burns and Chris Todd. He knows Auburn’s success on offense this season depends at least as much on the offensive line, the receivers and the running backs as it does on the much-discussed signal-callers.

This year is Auburn’s first running Franklin’s spread offense, which debuted in the Chick-fil-A Bowl last December. Though most of the personnel was recruited to run former coordinator Al Borges’ West Coast-inspired scheme, the Tigers seem to have adjusted well to the spread over the past nine months.

So, just how good can the offense be?

Your guess is as good as his. It’s the eternal dilemma of the offseason: After nine months of practicing against their defensive teammates, there’s really no way to be sure how good the offense is.

“It’s impossible every year to tell,” Franklin said. “You never know. I don’t care where you are, where you’re coaching, you never know until you go play other people.

“You can never tell against your own people how good you’re going to be.”

Still, Franklin sees plenty of signs for optimism. There’s the deep offensive line, which returns four starters. There’s a deep, if mostly inexperienced, pool of receivers. And there’s a four-man stable of running backs, a group as talented as any foursome in the league.

“I feel like we’re talented,” Franklin said. “I feel like that we have a lot of guys that can make plays.”

Making sure he gets the most out of all that talent is Franklin’s job. The coach has spent hours pondering the right ways to do that. Over the summer, when many of Auburn’s coaches grabbed a few precious days of vacation, Franklin could be found in his office almost every single day, studying film of practices and future opponents.

That process didn’t end until sometime last week. That’s typical for Franklin, who usually doesn’t finalize his gameplan until the Thursday before a Saturday game.

After all that study, Franklin selected around 30 plays — about a third of the total AU will run in a game this year. That group of 30 plays is his “script” for today’s game against ULM.

The Tigers will run all or most of them in the first half today, giving Franklin an idea of how the Warhawks’
defense will respond to a given play on a given down-and-distance.

“That kind of tells me what I’m going to do for the rest of the game,” he said.

But no matter what play Franklin calls and no matter which quarterback executes it, he’s sure of one thing: Auburn’s offense is ready to go, starting today.

“I feel like we’re talented enough that if we do a good job coaching, we should be really good on offense,” he said. “I’ll be really disappointed if we’re not.”

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