This has got me thinking. We have not had any kind of foothold in the rivalry with them since The Bear was leaning up against the goalpost. 3 in a row has been as far as we have gotten, and we've only done that 3 times over the last 34 years. We are currently on a 3 game streak, and barring something STUPID happening (which is NOT outside the realm of possibility), we should make it 4 in a row against them for the first time since the early 70's to early 80's when we rattled off 9 straight. I'd LOVE to repay the 6, if nothing else, and we very well could, because it's going to take Freeze a bit to get this thing even up to what they were in Malzahn's waning days
Are we also going to pretend Alabama did not have a colossal advantage in the series prior to the invocation of scholarship reductions in 1976? That had at least something to do with the mammoth wins advantage Alabama once enjoyed. It's the same thing with the Shorthorns and Aggies - go look at how evened up that series is once the Blue Blood programs (and I'm willing to concede that in the early 70s, Texas qualified as such) couldn't sock away as many players as they wanted if for no other reason than to keep an opponent from getting them.
Bear in mind, it's not like we were smashing them on the field EVERY year even during the nine-game win streak (1973-81). Auburn entered the fourth quarter of those games with a shot to win five of nine times and went 0-5 in those games. The combination of the scholarship limitations (designed specifically to create parity), Bryant leaving the scene, Auburn getting Bo Jackson, and the game moving to an alternating home-and-home rivalry...all things that occurred between 1976 and 1989, a small window of time historically speaking.....evened out the playing field enough that it is unlikely barring an implosion of one program or the other that long winning streaks will ever happen in this series again.
Auburn's one long winning streak in this series, let's see:
a) began after the 1995 scholarship limitations began to hurt recruiting
b) coincided with the repeat violator findings of the NCAA that REALLY hurt us
c) saw us have a period of time where we had no less than FOUR HEAD COACHES in the span of only 31 months (none of them interim coaches btw)
d) was helped by Auburn going undefeated in 2004 at the same time we were in the doldrums
When will this scenario ever even happen again?
As a reminder, heavily crippled Alabama still was only one play away from winning 4 of those six games, two of them played in the CFB equivalent of The Black Hole.
The question right now is how much NIL is going to offset any supposed advantages
Auburn (supposedly) derived from being the only team in CFB to ever pay players and cheat.
In the case of Ole Miss, we can see quite reasonably that they were nothing at all post-integration (an 8-4 team with the occasional good 10-win year, usually with several losing seasons interspersed) save for when Freeze's cold hard cash brought a bunch of black guys out of Chicago whose souls yearned to play for a bunch of Rebel-flag waving Klansmen in the buzzling metropolis of Oxford, Mississippi.
It's a little more difficult with Auburn to simply dismiss any and all good seasons they have as "they cheated," but at the same time, I suspect the openness of NIL may cut into their way of having done business successfully, too.
My suspicion is that NIL is going to create a scenario where what worked to draw Cam Newton will, yes, work to draw in other players AT ALL SCHOOLS...who then have zero incentive to actually earn it, having gotten paid up front.