On the Spot: Players, coaches and teams with the most at stake on Saturday.

For all the derision -- heck, that's putting it lightly: For all the barely concealed rage that greeted the hiring of Gene Chizik as Auburn's 25th head football coach last December, the actual results on the field have been surprisingly positive. The Tigers started the season 5-0, matching their win total for all of 2007, and were ranked as high as No. 17 in the AP poll with a torrid offense that performed miles beyond the 2008 version despite deploying essentially the same personnel. There have been low points in SEC play -- losses to Arkansas and Kentucky, a 31-10 shellacking at LSU -- but the Tigers still have a chance to win eight or nine games this season, which would match the average Tommy Tuberville established in 10 years on the Plains.

As inspiring as all that has been, though, the first eleven games were just the undercard. We all know the main event, which cranks up when undefeated Alabama rolls into Jordan-Hare Stadium on Friday. Yonder lies your future, Coach Chizik: The Iron Bowl is the game you must win if you are ever to be served a meal in Lee County again, and the result will dictate public perception of your manhood until you die or voluntarily take a job elsewhere, whichever comes first.

Think that's a little overwrought? I just left Birmingham, Ground Zero of the Alabama-Auburn rivalry, after seven years (and six Iron Bowls), and I can assure you it's not. The animosity between the two fan bases results in a 24/7 statewide genitalia-swinging contest that is the simmering inspiration behind every car-flag purchase, every call to the Paul Finebaum radio show and even a substantial portion of wardrobe choices this time of year. A lot of hopes and dreams are invested in this matchup, and when those hopes and dreams get dashed, the coaches more often than not take the blame. Bill Curry, who was 26-7 against everyone except Auburn but 0-3 against the Tigers, famously claimed that someone threw a brick through his window following the '89 Iron Bowl (couldn't have been his quarterback, obviously). Two years ago, even the instantly sainted Nick Saban wasn't immune from the Finebaum fire-spitters when he concluded his first regular season in Tuscaloosa with a loss to Tuberville's Tigers, Alabama's sixth in a row.

The latest victim of the rivalry is Tuberville, who exited on the heels of a 36-0 dismembering by the undefeated, top-ranked Tide last year that wiped clean Auburn's recent slate of dominance. And when that loss was followed just two weeks later by the arrival of Chizik -- surely the first coach in history to spin a .208 career winning percentage into the top job at an erstwhile SEC powerhouse -- looming in-state inferiority was surely the most pressing concern on the minds of the Auburn faithful. To even the most loyal Tiger fans, the mental image of "5-19 Gene" recruiting in the same state as the burgeoning Saban juggernaut seemed almost surreal. Some observers suggested the daunting prospect of having to compete with Saban's resurgent Tide was what scared off some of the more attractive candidates for the Auburn job to begin with.

You hear a lot less of that talk now that the Tigers are 7-4. But neither do you hear much talk that they're a serious threat to earn win No. 8 this weekend. (For the record, the oddsmakers have installed the Tigers as 10.5-point underdogs.) That probably has more to do with Alabama's No. 2 ranking and the ruthless air of inevitability they've acquired under Saban than anything else. But progress or no progress, Auburn still has its own problems to work out, beginning with a lack of consistency against the better teams on their schedule -- the Tigers have handled a good Ole Miss defense at home and navigated an even better Tennessee D on the road, but they've also had their doors blown off in all phases by Arkansas and LSU. AU has given its fans just enough good to expect a decent effort against the Tide, and just enough bad to still be wary of another gruesome bloodletting.

It sounds weird to say Auburn doesn't need to win this game -- I certainly don't think any of the numerous AU fans I know would dare utter anything like that, this or any other year -- but win or lose, they've still built a promising foundation in what could've been a very, very difficult season. It's how they win or lose that will make or break the self-esteem of War Eagle Nation and set the tone for the next era in this storied rivalry. A close game means Auburn fans can still hold their heads up high when they run into their crimson-clad co-workers at the water cooler on Monday morning, and can still hold out hope that Chizik will defy the naysayers and return the Tigers to prominence. A blowout, though, would validate concerns about Chizik's ability to compete with Saint Nick and -- fairly or unfairly -- negate a lot of the progress Chizik has made in breathing new life into a stagnant program.

Most importantly for the blue-and-orange side of this rivalry, it'd also re-ignite talk of an inferiority complex Auburn has been accused of harboring since they had to spend a quarter-century as the most prominent recipient of Bear Bryant's wrath (the Bear was 19-6 against "that cow college" from 1958 to '82). It's all well and good for Chizik to turn Auburn into a reliable winner of eight, nine or even 10 games per season, but a team that can't regularly hold its own in a feverish in-state rivalry is a "little sister" no matter how many other games it wins. And in Alabama, even more so than any other state, that's just not something any coach can afford to be.