AUBURN, Ala. – Lying on the Auburn bench, his injured knee being examined by Dr. James Andrews, Stan White heard the roar of the Jordan-Hare Stadium crowd.
"I did not physically see the play," said White, 25 years later. "I basically heard the play."
The Play. Nix to Sanders. A 35-yard touchdown pass on fourth-and-15 that sparked Auburn's comeback victory in the 1993 Iron Bowl.
"When you think of the season, that play stands out in your mind," said Terry Bowden, then Auburn's first-year head coach. "The improbable circumstances in a final game of the season. I think that play defined 1993."
Auburn's 22-14 win capped an 11-0 season, Auburn's first undefeated, untied campaign since the 1957 national championship.
Trailing 14-5 midway through the third quarter, backup quarterback Patrick Nix replaced White when Stan tore his medial collateral ligament on a third-down blitz.
"That's when your emotions turn," White said. "'Wow, is this my last play to play at Auburn?' I don't think there was any question that the players on that team, on that sideline, including myself, didn't think we were about to come back and win that game. There was no question."
On fourth-and-15 from the Alabama 35, Bowden elected neither to punt nor attempt a 52-yard field goal.
"I thought it was too long for a field goal," Bowden said. "Terry Daniel was an All-America punter, and he could kick it a mile, but I only needed about a half mile there. You didn't want to go out there and punt it out of the end zone on fourth down at that important stage of the game.
"At the time, our defense was playing pretty good. It wasn't the most difficult call of my life. Okay, it's fourth-and-15, let's just throw it up. If it's incomplete, defense is in good field position. Who knows? You might get pass interference."
While Nix grabbed his helmet, Bowden conferred on headsets with his brother, offensive coordinator Tommy Bowden, and quarterbacks coach Jimbo Fisher.
"The stars were aligned and things fell into place," Bowden said.
Instead of sending flanker Frank Sanders to the wide side of the field, his normal location, Auburn altered the alignment.
"Not sure Pat Nix had a strong enough arm to throw the deep takeoff to the field, so I flipped the formation to put Frank Sanders into the boundary, which is very short from the hash, so that Pat Nix would have a shorter throw for a takeoff," Bowden said.
"Antonio Langham was their star cornerback. And he played on Frank the whole day. That was his job, to play on Frank Sanders. So he always just goes out to the field and lines up, expecting Frank to come out. That's where he always went.
"Antonio sees it late. He starts to jog across the field, and he got about halfway across, and he just signaled the other corner – stay there – he'll stay out wide. The other guy was a very good player, too. But it took their All-American first-round draft pick, and took him off Frank Sanders for that play. And Frank caught the jump ball, fell across the goal line for a score."
"Sure enough, it worked," White said. "They didn't see it until the last minute. Antonio stayed on the strong side, or the wide side, where Frank usually was going. That was the matchup we wanted. They thought that Frank could outjump Tommy Johnson, and sure enough, that's what they called, and they got that. So he just lobbed one up and Frank went and caught it, and that kind of jolted us back into it."
Auburn still trailed 14-12, but momentum had swung. The Tigers outscored Alabama 10-0 in the fourth quarter, putting away the game on James Bostic's 70-yard run with 2:19 to play to win 22-14.
"A lot of emotions for me personally," said White, a four-year starter who captained the '93 team. "Last game at Jordan-Hare, last game at Auburn. Knowing we weren't going to play for a national championship or be in a bowl. Even though I didn't finish the game, it was very fulfilling."
Unbeaten: Auburn's 1993 team exceeded expectations, finishing 11-0
'HERE WE COME'
Not much was expected of the 1993 Auburn Tigers. On probation, off TV, and a new coach making a jump to the big time.
"I was 36," Bowden said. "I was coming from Samford University. People knew of my father, but they really didn't know of me. I was the youngest head coach in the country at that time. It was my tenth year as coach in college. I'd had 10 years to mess up everywhere else to prepare me for that experience. I was a lot more prepared than people thought, just because I'd been a head coach for 10 years in college at a smaller level.
"Auburn had had two straight non-winning seasons. They were 5-5-1 and 5-6 coming into that year. And Coach Dye is a legend. I was replacing someone who had brought Auburn's program to an equality with, on level, with Alabama, getting the game to Auburn and bringing the two programs to a level stage at that point.
"After a couple bad years, and me being very young, people didn't know what to expect. There was worry, and there was doubt."
The doubts subsided as the victories accumulated. Ole Miss, LSU, Vanderbilt, Mississippi State.
"When you're going through it, you just say, 'hey, let's go out there and play every week, and go win,'" White said. "It seems very simple, but we had that mindset because we weren't expected to be very good."
Then came No. 4 Florida to the Plains in mid-October.
"Everyone thought nationally, 'Who's this team that's not on television? They're not going to be able to hang with Spurrier and that juggernaut offense,'" White recalled.
"Most people thought, if you get into a Fun-and-Gun type game with Spurrier, you're going to lose. That's exactly what we did, and we won. That put us on the radar. That Florida game was the pivotal moment in that season. I think everybody on that team after that said, 'Okay, here we come. We can do something.'"
Calvin Jackson's 96-yard pick six got Auburn on the board. Scott Etheridge's tie-breaking 41-yard field goal with 1:21 remaining gave Auburn a 38-35 win.
"All of a sudden, at that point, everybody said, 'We can do something special here,'" Bowden said. "Because nobody was better than Florida that year. That was the point in which we began to look and see ourselves as someone who could really be a contender for the conference, although we weren't eligible for postseason. We weren't eligible for the SEC championship. But we knew we could win it on the field. We had a chance to be the best in the SEC on the field.
"There was a point that our expectations changed, it was the day we beat Florida at Auburn."
'IT'S MUCH MORE IMPORTANT THAN THAT'
A month later, Auburn completed the perfect season, with White cheering on his understudy from the sideline.
"I was laying down with my back on the bench, and I hear the crowd go wild, and our sideline," White said. "One of the first ones over there, my roommate, Reid McMilion, saying we just got it.
"Several of them came up, 'This one's for you. We're going to win this for you.' That really made me feel special."
A quarter century later, White reminisces frequently with former teammates.
"The longer you get away from it, the more appreciative you are," said White, in his 17th season as Auburn's radio analyst.
In the postgame locker room, Bowden told his team, "Today I became an Auburn man." He would coach the Tigers for five more seasons, resigning in 1998. After a decade in broadcasting, Bowden returned to coaching, first at North Alabama, then at Akron for the past seven seasons.
"All you can think of is how special that year was," said Bowden, now in his 25th season as a head coach. "In retrospect, as you get older and as you go through many seasons, and most coaches who are lucky enough to last – I'm 62 years old – know that undefeated seasons don't come around very often, no matter how good you are, for most of us in this business. That one always has that special place.
The Captain: A four-year starter, quarterback Stan White heard, but didn't see, the season's defining play
"When people try to describe what it's like coaching Auburn, or coaching in the state of Alabama. I remember watching national TV, and they grabbed some of our fans who were already in their RVs on Thursday evening or Friday morning. And I'm watching TV, I have not experienced the Auburn-Alabama game, as a player or as a coach. They asked two or three of our boosters – I knew them eventually – 'How serious is this game? Is it life and death?' And their answer was, 'Oh no, it's much more important than that.' That always stuck in my mind.
"I've said, in the state of Alabama, years aren't numbered, they're just identified by what happens in the Auburn-Alabama game. There's "Bo over the Top," there's "Punt, Bama Punt." People in Alabama don't number years. They name them, and that was 'The Catch.'"
Jeff Shearer is a Senior Writer at AuburnTigers.com. Follow him on Twitter: @jeff_shearer