Welcome to the Killing Fields: Why Jordan-Hare Eats Gators for Breakfast
So fee, fi, fo, fum on that haunted football emporium, with a name not even correctly pronounced all these years. Would they call it the “Jerden” River?
Ralph Shug (Call Me ‘Jerden’) Jordan. (Facebook)
By Buddy Martin
There is a particular strain of Southern hospitality practiced on the Plains of Auburn, Alabama, that goes something like this: They will hold the door for you, call you “sir,” sell you a $9 hot dog with a smile, and then, right around kickoff, gut you like a bream and dance around the fire with your heart still twitching.
I have covered games in a lot of stadiums over six decades, and I will tell you plainly — there is no place in the Southeastern Conference where the folks are nicer and the football is meaner than Jordan-Hare Stadium. (Pronounced “Jerden” after Coach Shug.)
It’s the SEC’s version of a tribal ceremony, except instead of feathers and drums they’ve got war eagles and 88,000 people in orange doing the wave while your quarterback loses his mind on national television.
They will genuinely, sincerely, ask if your family made the trip down all right. Then they will eat your heart out on the 50-yard line and wash it down with something served in a mason jar, all with a smile you’d swear was sincere — because, in its own strange way, it is. They don’t boo you out of that building. They just quietly consume your soul and hand you a program on the way out, in case you’d like a souvenir of your own demise.
I have personally witnessed some of the ugliest football ever played by Florida Gators inside that building, and I’m including in that ledger the November afternoon in 1969 when one of the greatest arms this state ever produced, John Reaves, walked into Jordan-Hare — then still wearing its old Cliff Hare bones — and threw the ball into the waiting hands of Auburn defenders nine different times. Nine. That is not a typo, and it is still the NCAA record nobody has come remotely close to touching. Nine interceptions from a future first-round pick.
(Think of this for frame of reference: All last season Patrick Mahomes threw just 11 interceptions!)
Auburn’s Pat Sullivan threw two touchdowns that day, ran for two more and Reaves’ Gators, unbeaten going in, staggered out on the wrong end of a 38-12 licking that remains one of the strangest and most humbling days in Florida football history.
That building has always had a knack for devouring great quarterbacks. It just prefers them served with a side of turnovers.
Even Steve Spurrier, who authored more misery for Auburn than any man alive, never quite solved the Plains. As a player he was busy winning Heisman Trophies in Gainesville, but once he came back to coach the Gators from 1990 to 2001 — a run that produced a scarcely believable 122-27-1 record — Jordan-Hare still found ways to bite him. In 1993, his No. 4 Gators walked into that stadium and got outlasted by Terry Bowden’s undefeated, probation-bound Tigers, 38-35, in a track meet that still gives Gator fans of a certain age heartburn.
His happiest trip there came in 1999, when Florida throttled Auburn’s running game down to one — one! — rushing yard and won going away, 32-14. That, friends, is the last time a Florida team has won a football game inside Jordan-Hare Stadium.
Not last year. Not last decade. 1999. Y2K hadn’t even happened yet. Florida has been back on the Plains exactly three times since — 2001, 2006, and 2011 — and lost all three.
The Gators’ last actual win over Auburn anywhere came in 2019, a 24-13 job — but that one was played safely at home in The Swamp, where the natives are considerably friendlier. Florida hasn’t set foot inside Jordan-Hare in 15 years. There is a whole generation of Gator fans who have never watched their team try to survive that building.
(BTW, Fi on that haunted football emporium, with a name not even correctly pronounced all these years. Would they call it the “Jerden” River?)
And it isn’t just Florida who leaves the Plains rattled. Nick Saban — a man who won more national titles than most fan bases have ever seen, and who spent 17 years driving his Alabama teams two hours down I-85 to Auburn — stood on College GameDay and declared the building flat-out haunted.
“In my opinion, in 17 years, going to Auburn, playing in Jordan-Hare, that place is haunted,” Saban said. “I guarantee it. The way we lost games and the way we won games there, it’s unbelievable.”
This from a man who is not exactly known for believing in ghosts, or in anything he can’t out-recruit.
Understand what he’s talking about. This is the building that produced the Kick Six, when Auburn’s Chris Davis fielded a missed Alabama field goal one second from the end of the 2013 Iron Bowl and returned it 109 unbroken yards to beat the No. 1 team in the country, 34-28. Two weeks earlier, in that same building, in that same magic season, Auburn faced fourth-and-18 against Georgia with 36 seconds left, needing a miracle — and got one, when Nick Marshall’s desperation heave deflected off a Georgia defender’s hands and into Ricardo Louis’s arms for a 73-yard, game-winning touchdown that history now calls the Prayer at Jordan-Hare. And in case you thought the building had retired, in 2023 Alabama faced its own fourth-and-31 with 43 seconds on the clock and somehow, impossibly, converted it into the winning touchdown to beat Auburn 27-24. Three different miracles, three different decades, all under the same set of lights.
If that’s not a haunted house, somebody ought to call the Ghostbusters and get a second opinion.
Now, before you light a candle and start reading tea leaves — there is a far less supernatural explanation floating around, and Auburn folks will tell it to you themselves. It isn’t ghosts. It’s noise.
Jordan-Hare gets absurdly, structurally loud, the student section rocks, and 88,000 people screaming into a bowl-shaped stadium has been known to rattle a placekicker or a freshman quarterback about as effectively as any poltergeist ever could. Coaches around the league — Kirby Smart among them — have said as much about visiting the big, hostile SEC buildings: The sheer weight of the crowd noise turns a normal Tuesday-practice-clean football game into forty-eight minutes of pure chaos, sometimes enhanced by piped-in crowd noise, as was the case in 2006 when the SEC fined Auburn for doing that after the Florida game.
It isn’t hoodoo. It’s just a really, really mean home-field advantage with a good PR department and a bag of mischievous Tom Foolery.
Which brings us, at last, to Saturday night. Florida travels back onto the Plains for the first time in 15 years to face Auburn, and for once both sides are walking in with fresh blood on the sideline — Jon Sumrall in his first season running the Gators after coming over from Tulane, and Alex Golesh running his first Auburn team after his own stop at South Florida, following a season that ended with Auburn firing Hugh Freeze in November. Two brand-new head coaches, both 2-0, both trying to prove their program is for real, meeting for the first time under the lights at 7 p.m. ET — with Florida a modest 2.5-point favorite and the over-under total sitting around 53.5.
It is, by any measure, a legitimately big early-season swing game for both jobs.
I don’t know what it is about that particular patch of Alabama real estate. Maybe it’s the noise. Maybe it’s the ghosts of Sonny Ferguson’s three interceptions off poor John Reaves. Maybe Auburn just built the stadium directly on top of an ancient burial ground for opposing kickers.
All I know is that Florida is favored to walk in there Saturday night and finally do something the Gators haven’t managed since Bill Clinton’s second term — win a football game inside Jordan-Hare Stadium.
History says don’t bet the mortgage on it. But then again, somebody has to be the team that finally breaks the curse, and it might as well be a bunch of Gators who’ve never even been inside that haunted house before. Bring garlic. Bring a horseshoe. Bring your best offensive line. You’re going to need all three.
I pick the Gators and lay the points. I think they will break the curse and bring relief to their new coach for the “Burden of Jerden.”
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