Coming off a much-needed win against Ole Miss, Auburn heads into its bye week with some momentum. Last season, the Tigers played their best football following the bye week with double-digit wins over Texas A&M, No. 1 Georgia and No. 1 Alabama.
If Auburn wants a chance to repeat some of the success, here are a few improvements that needed to happen during the bye week and the week headed into Texas A&M:
Improve on red zone success
The Tigers are currently ranked No. 12 in the country in total red zone visits. In those trips, Auburn is converting those visits to points only 82.86 percent of the time. The 82.86 score percentage does not seem too bad but if broken down even further, Auburn is only scoring touchdowns on 57.14 percent of total red zone trips, dropping the Tigers to the bottom tier of offenses in the country.
The lack of touchdown scoring in red zone is not the recipe of success if Auburn wants salvage what it can from this season, especially coming up against three quality opponents in Texas A&M, Georgia and Alabama.
Continue the momentum in the running game
With a healthy-ish Boobee Whitlow against Ole Miss, the Tigers were finally able to get back to a successful Malzahn offense that was led by the power run game. Whitlow carried most of the load on Saturday when he rushed for a season-high 170 yards, while Malik Miller rushed in two short-yardage touchdowns.
Auburn had success controlling the line of scrimmage, especially getting push up the middle. According to Justin Ferguson’s Film Room at The Athletic, Auburn ran the inside zone, power and draw 23 times for 6.78 yards an attempt.
Boost Anders Carlson's confidence
The freshman kicker has struggled to say the least this season and is not living up to the Carlson legacy left by his brother. On 21 attempts Carlson has only made 11 of those for 52.4 percent. The stats don’t tell the whole story with majority of his misses coming from 50-plus yards out. Carlson’s performance has Auburn ranked 112th in the nation in field goal percentage.
In the bye week, Auburn needs to boost Carlson’s confidence and focus on putting him in better positions in the coming weeks.
Rely less on Stidham
The big storyline heading into the season was that Malzahn was going to let Stidham loose, but what if letting him loose is a part of the offensive woes. In some of the biggest offensive explosions from 2017, Stidham threw on an average of 25 passes but this season, he has eclipsed that number five times with three of those coming in losses.
This might be a trend the Tigers should look into when trying to focus on future offensive game plans.
Get healthy
The Tigers have been playing banged for a few weeks now and with Whitlow going down with another injury, it will be key to get him healthy during these two weeks. Offensive linemen Jack Driscoll reinjured his knee against Ole Miss and Malzahn even said that the focus was getting both Whitlow and Driscoll healthy.
Jamel Dean is now expected to make a return and the bye week is just extra time for him to rest as an “upper body injury” kept him from traveling to Ole Miss.
The rest of the team needs to use the time to heal all the bumps in bruises before heading into the most physical part of the team’s schedule.
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