Bo Nix, Auburn learn from struggles with crowd noise at Florida as they prepare for LSU

AUBURN — If you checked Twitter on Monday night, you might have seen a fake Bo Nix quote making the rounds.

It was posted by an account that claims to be a “CFB News/Parody” page, though fake quotes hardly seem to qualify as either of those things. The name of the account — which, inexplicably, has nearly 4,000 followers — won’t be shared here, nor will the quote that garnered close to 40 retweets, 150 likes and 160 replies.

But the gist of it was that the true freshman quarterback was downplaying the difficulty of playing in front of 102,321 fans at the always-raucous Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on Saturday, where No. 10 Auburn will take on No. 3 LSU in the most pivotal game of its season so far.

MORE:Painful losses to LSU motivate Auburn as it looks to end long drought in Baton Rouge

That couldn’t be further from the truth. Nix made that clear when he actually spoke to reporters Tuesday for the first time since Saturday’s 51-10 win at Arkansas. He has never been to Death Valley, but he’s heard all about the challenge it presents visiting teams.

His father, former Auburn quarterback Patrick Nix, started there as a senior in 1995. On one play deep in the offense’s own territory, he and some of his teammates stopped because they heard a whistle. Only that whistle came from the stands, not the referees. Nix was sacked for a safety, and the visitors lost 12-6.

“We talked about that a lot, the phantom whistle game and how he got thrown on his head and stuff like that,” Bo Nix said. “Obviously he’s done everything he can to tell me how loud it’s going to be. But until you’re there in person, nobody can really fathom how loud it is.”

Nix does have an idea, though. He played in an environment at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium in Gainesville, Florida, three weeks ago that Auburn coach Gus Malzahn said was one of the loudest he has ever experienced, and he’s spent 10 years in the SEC.

That noise created a lot of problems for the offense in a 24-13 loss. Nix looked rattled from the first snap of a game he finished 11 for 27 passing for 145 yards, one touchdown and three interceptions. He struggled to communicate play calls and checks at the line of the scrimmage with the rest of the offense, which turned Auburn’s hurry-up, no-huddle offense into one that was watching the play clock count down to almost zero. The offensive line committed three false-start penalties.

“When it's super loud, it's hard to hear,” right tackle Jack Driscoll said. “It's hard timing-wise. Bo can't just yell. If we're switching a play or whatever or protection, Bo can't just sit back and yell at all of us. He's got to go to each and every one of us so we can hear him. So that just takes time. And at times, we just let the play clock get low and we just kind of bit the bullet with the penalties.”

Nix said Tuesday that he feels “it was more on me than it was anybody else” and that he “didn’t do a good enough job communicating with others, of being loud enough.”

So, since the bye week that followed the loss to the Gators, Auburn has placed an extra emphasis on dealing with crowd noise. The team has pumped both music and crowd noise into its indoor practice facility in order to force both players and coaches to get used to communicating louder. Malzahn also said Tuesday that he has added “just some little wrinkles that we feel like can help us,” though he declined to go into specifics.

One of those wrinkles might be more of what the head coach described as “snap plays,” where Auburn wouldn’t look to adjust based on the way the defense is aligned but rather just line up, snap the ball and go.

“Really expecting our guys to handle the noise better and communicate better than we did at Florida,” Malzahn said.

The best way to do that would be to take the crowd out of the game early. That’s what Auburn did at Texas A&M’s Kyle Field, which doesn’t get nearly as loud as The Swamp or Death Valley but is still plenty big with 101,681 fans in attendance that afternoon in College Station, Texas, last month.

The Aggies won the coin toss and deferred, the Tigers received the opening kickoff, and on their fifth play from scrimmage, scored a touchdown on a 57-yard wide receiver reverse to Anthony Schwartz. The visitors never trailed on the way to a 28-20 win.

“We never really had to deal with that noise,” Driscoll said.

That’s obviously much easier said than done going to Baton Rouge, though. There’s a reason that Auburn has lost nine consecutive games at Tiger Stadium dating back to 1999 — it’s one of the toughest places to play in all of college football.

So far this season, a high-powered LSU offense that ranks third nationally in yards (539.9) and second nationally in points per game (50.1) has scored first in six of seven games and is outscoring opponents 11.5-3.3 in the first quarter.

“This is why you come to Auburn, to play in games like these,” Nix said. “I feel strong about our defense and their skill set, and I feel like they’ll do their best to contain (LSU quarterback Joe Burrow) and give us a good chance of winning the game, so on offense, we just have to do whatever it takes to move the ball and hopefully keep our defense off the field.”

That means communicating better. And after a wake-up call in Gainesville and three weeks of practice around a trip to Arkansas, Nix feels like Auburn is in a good position to do that in Baton Rouge.

“Going forward I think that the Florida game did help, obviously, a lot, just from experience and being there and doing that,” Nix said. “So, this week, I feel like now I can just really sit back and do my job.

“With all the things I’ve heard, all the good things about the stadium and the atmosphere. I’m looking forward to it.”

Josh Vitale is the Auburn beat writer for the Montgomery Advertiser. You can follow him on Twitter at @JoshVitale. To reach him by email, click here.