The Question Is: How Will Alabama’s D Work Against the Spread?

TV Lineup and Lines Below

Time Out
by Dan Rutledge

With Florida and Alabama already penciled in against each other in the BCS national semifinal game, also known as the SEC championship game, the rest of the league teams will fight it out for bowl bids in the last two weeks of the regular season.

The Week 11 schedule has five conference games on tap, with two non-conference matchups as well. Four teams can claim that magical sixth victory that makes them bowl eligible – Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky and Arkansas.

The tangle between the hedges in Athens between visiting Auburn and Georgia (Line: Georgia by 5) is big bowl-wise for both teams involved. For Georgia (5-4 ,3-3), a win would send them bowling somewhere. For Auburn (7-3, 3-3), a victory would give them the opportunity, as an eight-win team, to end its season in Dallas playing in the new Cowboys Stadium in the Cotton Bowl. That’s pretty heady stuff for a team that didn’t go bowling anywhere last season and to whose fans a spot in the Liberty Bowl or Music City Bowl would have sounded great before the season began.

For Auburn Saturday, it’s a question of which AU team shows up — the one that ran roughshod over opponents early in the season or the team that mysteriously misplaced its offense during a three-game losing streak.

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Regular followers will recall my story of the new “lucky” Lincoln Penny.

What I’m wondering is, will the double lucky two-penny find work more than twice?

Here’s the deal. After I found the first Lincoln penny, then the second one on the ground at UAB, I walked into the ATnT store on Old Highway 11 to pick up one of the supposedly “refurbished” iPhones they were selling for $50. When I walked in, the guy said they didn’t have anymore and wouldn’t be doing that program anymore. Then he said, “But wait, let me check in the back….”

Sure enough, he came out and said, “You must be carrying four lucky pennies in your pocket. We’ve got one left.”

I said: “No. Just two…”

Then today, I realized my drivers license expired yesterday, on Nov. 12, one day before Friday the 13th. With only a few minutes to spare before the re-opened satellite courthouse closed in famously broke Jefferson County, Alabama, I said what the hell. Let me see if I can sneak in late on a Friday afternoon and get it renewed without having to stand in line.

Sure enough, I walked right in — and out. Took less than 5 minutes. I said to the nice lady working the counter, “You must be glad to be back to work.”

“Sometimes,” she said, with a deadpan look. “The computers have been down all day. It’s been a madhouse.”

Then she looked up at me and said, “They just came back up right before you walked in.”

Now that’s what I call a lucky couple of pennies…

Alabama’s Agricultural Commissioner Ron Sparks is interviewed on television in Huntsville about how to bring jobs to Alabama…