Monday, March 19, 2007

And I’m back!

As you may have noticed, I was away from the blog for awhile. My apologies.

Some A-Day housekeeping stuff first: Obviously, I was right on target with my MVP ballot. It’s nice to know I’m plugged into the collective consciousness of the Auburn beat writer community, which voted on the awards. Good times.

Some apologies are due to Zac Etheridge, who had a nice stat line: 10 tackles, nine with the first team. Somehow, I overlooked him. But Goggans had a good day too, and I’d say he deserved the award. I’m stubborn like that.

Cox, of course, was a no-brainer, and Matthew Motley get some well-deserved recognition. So there you go.

In other award-related news, John Vaughn was named the Shug Jordan Award winner as “the most outstanding senior football player” on last year’s team. I haven’t found anyone who really understands the reasoning behind this. Sure, Vaughn had a good senior year; Lou Groza award voters thought he was one of the nation’s three best kickers. He’s AU’s all-time leading scorer.

But let’s face it: He’s a kicker. He had four or five chances—at most—to make an impact in any given game. That makes him more valuable than Courtney Taylor, Will Herring, Ben Grubbs and David Irons? I’m not seeing it.

(Again, nothing against Vaughn, who’s always seemed like a really nice guy and is definitely a very good kicker.)

Moving on…

I’ve hesitated to mention it, because I don’t want to get too personal with you guys, but I’ve been dealing with a personal tragedy lately.

My TV died. (What, you were expecting something serious? It ain’t that kind of blog, kids.)

And talk about terrible timing! The first round of the NCAA Tournament, the best sports weekend of the year! One of the best episodes of my beloved Lost in recent memory! A great episode of Rome (by the way, if you’re not watching it, you should be)! It’s been tough. I just thank goodness I invested in a DVR, which faithfully recorded all my missed programming until I could replace my failed TV.

Which I’ve done. I wish this sentence was all about my new TV’s awesome flatscreen-ness and HD-ness and so forth, but not so much. It’s basically the same as my old TV, except this one didn’t come from a pawn shop in Tallahassee, Fla. Good times.

I’ll be back Tuesday. Be good until then. And all you John Vaughn fans out there, please take it easy on me in your e-mails.