How the BCS Championship will be won.
Monday night's BCS Championship tilt, as any championship should be, is overwhelmingly a collision of strengths: Auburn's Heisman-winning quarterback opposite Oregon's high-octane spread running game, at the forefront of two of the most prolific offenses in the country. But it could just as easily be defined by which outfit more effectively exploits the others' few glaring weaknesses. And no area of either team is more vulnerable than the Auburn secondary.
The Tigers' back four (or five, or six, depending on the situation) was the worst in the SEC in passing yards allowed and 75th nationally in efficiency D – the worst number of any defense that's ever appeared in the BCS Championship Game, by far. The Tigers were a smorgasbord for elite receivers, in particular. South Carolina's Alshon Jeffery launched his All-America campaign in September with eight catches for a career-high 192 yards and two touchdowns. Three weeks later, Arkansas' Greg Childs burned Auburn for his career-high, 164 yards, with a pair of scores on nine catches. A week after that, LSU's Reuben Randle answered Cam Newton's celebrated touchdown run with a 39-yard catch-and-run that knotted the game at 17-17 in the fourth quarter, one of Randle's six catches for 73 yards. Georgia's high-flying, A.J. Green, matched Childs' stat line against the Tigers with nine catches for a career-high 164 yards and two touchdowns of his own. Julio Jones added to the party with 199 yards on 10 grabs on Nov. 27, including an uncontested touchdown that opened the floodgates on Alabama's 24-0 rally to open the game.
Auburn finally held Jeffery relatively in check (4 catches, 39 yards, 1 TD) in the SEC Championship rematch with South Carolina, which also happened to be their most complete win of the season. But it still comes into Saturday badly in the red, giving up more points on more yards per game (and per play) than all but one other team that's ever played for the title, Oklahoma in 2008. The reason is obvious: The Tigers can't cover.
They can, however, stop the run: In the SEC, only Alabama was better against opposing ground attacks, by barely a yard per game. The vaunted Crimson Tide backfield served as the Auburn front's most high-profile victim, totaling a paltry 69 yards on 2.3 per carry and failing utterly to chip away at the clock with a big lead, but the Tigers also held all four of the other ranked teams on the regular season schedule – Mississippi State, South Carolina, Arkansas and LSU – well below their season averages on the ground, notably holding South Carolina's freshman star, Marcus Lattimore, to 33 yards on Sept. 25. Only Ole Miss, with 218 yards rushing on Oct. 30, made a really significant dent, and even then much of it came on an 83-yard touchdown run by the Rebels' Jeff Scott on the second snap of the game.
Oregon fans are hoping Scott's breakaway is a harbinger of a big night for the Ducks' own diminutive speedster, national rushing leader LaMichael James, who has more game-breaking runs by himself than all but a handful of entire teams. But the Ducks haven't faced a top-10 rushing defense all season; the closest was Arizona State, which finished the season 18th against the run, and held Oregon to a season-low 125 yards on Sept. 25. For Auburn's part, no individual player in college football has wreaked more havoc in opposing backfields from the interior line than Nick Fairley, who's flanked by three other senior starters on the defensive line (Antoine Carter, Zach Clayton, Michael Goggans), two more seniors at linebacker (Craig Stevens and Josh Bynes) and a pair of veteran safeties (senior Zac Etheridge and junior Mike McNeil) who are active against the run and have been around the block enough times not to fall apart opposite the Ducks' breakneck tempo and misdirection.
Which brings us to Oregon quarterback Darron Thomas, whose occasionally erratic right arm has already emerged as the the game's designated "X-factor": The offense is at its lethal best when its signal-caller makes defenses pay for overplaying the run, as Thomas consistently has this season with 200 yards and multiple touchdowns passing in 40-plus-point barrages against Tennessee, Arizona State, Stanford, UCLA, USC and Washington – all games (with the exception of Arizona State) in which the Ducks also piled up at least 250 yards and multiple touchdowns rushing. Jeff Maehl is no Alshon Jeffery or A.J. Green athletically, but he does provide Thomas with the kind of reliable, All-Pac-10 caliber target that stands to give the Tiger secondary trouble, and he proved he can do damage deep with an eight-catch, 145-yard night against similarly struggling back four from USC, including touchdown grabs covering 15, 45 and 30 yards. Thomas ended that night with 288 yard passing and a career-high four touchdowns.
On the other hand, he was also inconsistent enough in his first season as a full-time starter that it's hard to imaging the Ducks mounting drives with the passing game serving as a consistent chain-mover if Auburn holds the running game in check: With Thomas often completing passes in the 50-percent range, it can be a fairly boom-or-bust proposition. The vast majority of the time, it's the former; when he failed to make Cal pay with big plays for its aggressive approach to stopping the run in mid-November, the result was an unlikely defensive struggle that nearly resulted in one of the upsets of the season.
If Thomas can add another chapter to the Tigers' season-long tale of woe in the secondary, it can potentially open up things up for James in the "option" part of the Ducks' spread option assault – or, just as likely, potentially excuse James' uncharacteristic absence if Auburn loads up and dares Thomas and Maehl to beat them over the top. If Oregon presents the most versatile, explosive attack Auburn has encountered, the distinction goes both ways: Without a credible passing threat to keep the solid-tackling safeties honest, the Tigers are in better position personnel-wise to clamp down on Oregon's running game than anyone else the Ducks have seen to date, too. Thomas has to force them into the impossible task of defending the entire field.
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Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.
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