Auburn QB Bo Nix excited to ‘cut it loose’
Bo Nix has turned around his — and perhaps Auburn’s — season since watching from the sideline as his backup helped prevent an embarrassing upset.
The Tigers’ formerly struggling quarterback has turned in perhaps the best stretch of his career for the 12th-ranked Tigers since getting benched as nonconference foe Georgia State nearly pulled off a stunner at Jordan-Hare Stadium. Nix began to stage his turnaround by leading his team to a Southeastern Conference road win the next week.
“Since the LSU game, I’ve just gotten my confidence back — kind of just an edge to me that I’ve always been able to play with,” Nix said after last weekend’s win over Ole Miss, which dropped from 12th to 15th after its loss.
“The past few games, I’ve just played with that mindset: Cut it loose, you’ve got nothing to lose, you don’t know what else is going to happen, tomorrow’s not promised. So just go out there and cut it loose and have some fun.”
The Tigers (6-2, 3-1) will ride that hot streak into Saturday’s game at No. 13 Texas A&M (6-2, 3-2). CBS will televise the 3:30 p.m. Eastern matchup.
Nix has completed 77% of his passes the past two games for 568 yards against SEC West Division opponents ranked in the AP Top 25, with three touchdowns each passing and rushing. He also helped deliver Auburn’s first win at LSU since 1999 with a highlight-reel fourth-down play a week after the T.J. Finley-led comeback sparked speculation Nix might have lost his starting job.
Nix kept it and has helped put Auburn in contention for a division title and a spot in the SEC championship game in coach Bryan Harsin’s debut season.
C-USA adds four teams
Conference USA announced Friday that it will add Liberty, Jacksonville State, New Mexico State and Sam Houston State in 2023 as the league tries to replenish its ranks after having nine schools announce plans to leave in the past month. C-USA said its new members will join July 1, 2023.
The overhaul might not be done, either: Mid-American Conference presidents met Friday with possible expansion on the agenda and C-USA members Middle Tennessee State University and Western Kentucky University as potential options, a person familiar with the situation told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the league’s discussions are private.
Including MTSU and WKU, C-USA has only five members that have not announced plans to leave in the next few years. The NCAA requires leagues in the Football Bowl Subdivision — the upper tier of Division I — to have at least eight teams.
The confererence realignment dominoes began to fall in July with the Southeastern Conference inviting Oklahoma and Texas to leave the Big 12 and join by 2025. The Big 12 responded by adding four schools, three from the American Athletic Conference, which led the AAC to poach six from C-USA.
C-USA also lost three members to the Sun Belt in recent weeks, and the last piece of the Sun Belt’s plan to expand to 14 football members fell into place Friday: James Madison, a perennial championship contender in the Football Championship Subdivision, was given approval by the state to move up to the FBS. The Sun Belt’s new members are all expected to join by 2023.
Liberty and Jacksonville State are both members of the ASUN for most of their sports, though Liberty is an independent competing in FBS and Jacksonville State has been a successful program in FCS. New Mexico State is an FBS independent and a member of the Western Athletic Conference for other sports. Sam Houston State, the reigning FCS champion, is part of the newly restarted WAC football league.
Desperate showdown
MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. — For Miami and Georgia Tech, the room for error is gone.
If the Hurricanes want to continue having any sort of viable shot at winning the Atlantic Coast Conference’s Coastal Division, where the standings get messier by the week, they must beat Georgia Tech. And if the Yellow Jackets want to have any realistic chance of making a bowl game, they must beat Miami. As such, both sides know what’s coming from the other side when they face off Saturday: desperation.
“When we play in the ACC Coastal, we expect the games to be tight, close, highly contested,” Miami coach Manny Diaz said. “Georgia Tech’s backs, they’re against the wall. We recognize that. We expect to see a wounded team fighting for their life on Saturday.”
He’d prefer to see his team have the same approach. It’s been that way of late, and it’s been working. Miami (4-4, 2-2) has given itself hope again after beating N.C. State and Pittsburgh — both AP Top 25 teams at the time, both in the opening rankings released earlier this week by the College Football Playoff committee — over the past two weekends. None of the four teams left on the Hurricanes’ schedule has a winning record, so there’s a chance for Miami to keep moving up in the Coastal race.
Georgia Tech (3-5, 2-4) is ahead of only Duke in the Coastal standings, and a loss Saturday would put postseason hopes in absolute peril because the Jackets would need to win out just to become bowl-eligible — and they’d have to beat No. 1 Georgia to make it happen.