AU FOOTBALL: Lots of action but little clarity in annual spring scrimmage

Cameron Newton hit Darvin Adams on a frozen rope for his first pass in front of a live Auburn audience Saturday and followed later with a 61-yard pass to put Blue in the red zone.

Neil Caudle had big passes, too. He hit Quindarius Carr for a 70-yard touchdown and was part of three touchdown drives.

Barrett Trotter was just as sharp. He had two long touchdown passes and ran the offense without showing any ill effects of a season lost to a torn ACL.

If you found clarity in Auburn’s quarterback race Saturday, you weren’t at the highest-attended A-Day scrimmage in program history.

The game ended, by the way, with Blue on top, 21-17, after Dontae Aycock’s touchdown run early in the fourth quarter. If the drive would have finished in the third quarter, the points would have been awarded to White team, a perfect summation of just how trivial the final numbers were Saturday.

“Obviously it was good to see guys step out here when there was a crowd situation and make plays,” coach Gene Chizik said. “But at the end of the day right now, with every position, it’s a comprehensive evaluation of 15 days, not just today.”

Rendering Saturday’s scrimmage, which was played under sunny skies before an announced crowd of 63,217 fans, even more minute was the fact that Auburn’s offense barely moved past the table of contents in Gus Malzahn’s playbook.

“It was slowed down a lot, but it’s a game for the fans,” Newton said. “So we just wanted to come out and execute and look polished in the things that are really the base of our offense.”

Here are the basics of what each of the three featured quarterbacks did during their time under the spotlight.

Newton threw the ball just eight times and picked up the bulk of his 80 passing yards on his deep ball to Carr while conducting the White team, which was comprised largely of players bound for the second-team offense. The opportunity for points was squandered, though, when Newton missed Jay Wisner on back-to-back plays in the end zone, as both passes sailed over the 6-foot-2 receiver’s hands.

“I thought it was a good enough pass but Jay, my height and his height are two different levels,” Newton said. “I should have made that throw nine times out of 10. The second time, it just got away from me. It was just a bad throw on my part.”

Newton’s first pass of the game was perfect, hitting Adams squarely in the chest as he ran across the middle, but none of his drives ended with points.

Asked if he and Malzahn collaborated to “sandbag” Newton’s first public showing, Chizik smiled and quickly denied any sort of conspiracy.

“What we were going to do was rotate our quarterbacks accordingly, however that unfolded, it unfolded,” Chizik said. “Some guys threw more than others.”

Newton was asked the same question. He smiled, too.

“Oh, I don’t know. I didn’t see it,” Newton said. “The only thing holding me back is that I just had this orange jersey on.”

Caudle threw the most of anyone Saturday, completing 17 of his 21 passes for 199 yards and the touchdown to Carr, who was named the game’s offensive MVP. The senior led three drives that resulted in touchdowns, one with the Blue offense, comprised mainly of projected starters, one with the White and another in the second half, when the format switched to offense versus defense.

“The defense wasn’t throwing a whole lot at us, so we should have thrown a lot of completions,” Caudle said. “We took advantage of what they were doing and moved the ball.”

Trotter moved the ball with the most efficiency. He hit seven of his nine passes for 154 yards and two touchdowns, one that went for 50 yards to sparsely heard-of walk-on Nathan Taylor of the White team and another that went for 44 yards to Terrell Zachery of the Blue team.

“I haven’t been able to do much (the first two years),” Trotter said. “I’ve been on the sidelines watching and learning a lot. It’s been a big help to come out this spring and really know the offense pretty well and be comfortable before I had to actually run it a lot.”

Perhaps the only concrete information to come out of Saturday’s scrimmage was the downgraded status of Clint Moseley, who didn’t see the field until the second half.

“I was so relaxed knowing that I didn’t get in during the first half,” Moseley said. “I had no other option. I had to play well.”

Even his status, though, has a shade of uncertainty to it.

“I wouldn’t read anything into anything other than the fact that, if you watch, each guy got reps with both groups and we tried to keep things as equal as we could,” Malzahn said. “All of those guys have had really solid springs and that’s the positive.”

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