The kick is up. It tails left, and — doink — bangs off the upright. Fans in downtown bars jump and yell and high five each other.
Auburn has the ball. Now it’s fourth down: illegal substitution, Alabama. Doors downtown burst open like a broken-down dam and fans stream onto the street toward Toomer’s Corner.
Auburn is in victory formation. The ball is snapped to Nix, and he takes a knee. One fan looks up at the towering oaks, and the first roll of toilet paper is thrown.
This was the scene Saturday night in downtown Auburn. Thousands of other fans would heave rolls of toilet paper until early the next morning, maybe more than any other time this season.
And Sunday morning, someone had to clean it up.
“It’s going to take us more than one day to get [all the toilet paper],” said Nevous Gibbs, district manager for Diversified Maintenance, on Sunday afternoon, looking around at all the paper that still had to be picked up.
Auburn University contracts Diversified Maintenance to clean up Samford Lawn and Toomer’s Corner following an Auburn win.
“On a regular game in the regular schedule, when they win, we’ll get it all done on that day,” Gibbs said.
This is the first time in a while that the crew has had to come back a second day to finish picking up the paper. And if toilet paper cleanup time is used as a metric for the significance of a victory, Saturday’s win stands pretty tall, Gibbs said.
The multi-day cleanup following the 2019 Iron Bowl win places it in a pantheon of other recent exceptional Auburn wins; Gibbs, who has worked for Diversified Maintenance for six years, recalled that the 2013 Iron Bowl — the one that featured the famous “Kick Six” — took multiple days, and the crew had to stay until Wednesday cleaning up the toilet paper.
The only other time he remembered having to come back for multiple days to clean up toilet paper was after the men’s basketball team’s victory over Kentucky to advance to the Final Four last season.
Diversified Maintenance also cleans up the toilet paper following wins in other sports. The company sent a crew to Toomer’s Corner following the equestrian team’s national championship win in April 2019, Gibbs said.
Even after a football or basketball loss, Gibbs said they’ll send someone to drive by and see if the trees have been rolled to decide if they may need to send a crew to tidy up.
Work begins early for the cleanup crew. They normally show up at about 5 a.m. on the Sunday after a Saturday football game, and, depending on the amount of paper there is, will leave sometime that evening or night.
Sunday afternoon, the crew was using trash grabbers and rakes to gather the toilet paper that was on the ground. The toilet paper in the trees was sprayed down with a hose.
“We’re just overseeing this whole area,” Gibbs said, motioning to Samford Lawn. “Anything over back toward [the rest of campus] or back by the McDonald’s, we’re not over that.”
The crew finished the majority of cleanup by about 2:30 p.m. Monday afternoon, only raking up the last bits of toilet paper that lie on Samford Lawn.
While the amount of toilet paper thrown lengthened the cleanup time, the rain that came early Sunday morning didn’t do them any favors.
“It really made it harder when it rained,” Gibbs said. “Some of it’s trying to dry up at the moment, so hopefully we can pull out the blowers and blow it all into one little pile.”
Gibbs is from Montgomery, Alabama. He’s a graduate of Alabama State University, and now he calls himself an Auburn fan. But he’s conflicted.
“Every time I watch it, it’s not even about the game anymore,” Gibbs said. “It’s about, if they win, I’ve got to be out here in the morning; if they lose, I don’t.”
But he said he’s still happy for the team.
“It’s a good thing though,” Gibbs said. “They’re winning. They won.”
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Evan Mealins, senior in philosophy and economics, is the editor-in-chief of The Auburn Plainsman.
