AUBURN, Ala. – It was the Friday before the Liberty game. The football team was gathering inside the athletics complex getting ready to load the buses like they do every Friday before a game. Meanwhile, fans waited outside to greet the players and maybe get an autograph or a picture made with them.
Two fans, in particular, found their way inside the front door, and that's where head coach Gus Malzahn found them. He recognized one of them.
"You must be Dee Ford," Malzahn said.
Ford was stunned. Five years ago, she had never even heard of Auburn. According to her Twitter account, she was just a "boring surveyor" from England. But because of her name and a mix-up that happened in January 2014, here she was in Auburn meeting the head football coach, along with athletic director Allen Greene, and experiencing a football weekend on the Plains.
"The entire experience has been completely surreal," Ford said afterwards. "I'm still so full of adrenaline, and I can't believe the opportunities that were given to me. It was just out of this world. I'm just overwhelmed by the whole things, from start to finish."
👀 📸 Welcome home Dee! #WarEagle pic.twitter.com/7VoCMDDnlF
— Auburn Football (@AuburnFootball) November 17, 2018
So how does one go from being a "boring surveyor" to a celebrity of sorts at Auburn?
It began back in 2014 when former athletic director Jay Jacobs tweeted at Ford. He thought he was tweeting at former Auburn defensive end Dee Ford, wishing him luck in the Senior Bowl that year. But instead, he unknowingly tweeted at a woman in England. From there, fans started retweeting Jacobs or tweeting directly at Ford – thinking it was the football player.
"It's not me. It's not me," Ford would tweet back. Nobody believed her.
At first, the tweets didn't make sense. The language was the same, but because of the cultural difference, some of the tweets sounded rude or funny to her. So she ignored them. But when they kept coming, she decided to have some fun with it and started interacting with people. Those same people eventually introduced her to the sport of football.
Intrigued, Ford did a little research of her own on football and even bought the book, "American football for dummies." It wasn't long after that she was staying up into the wee hours of the night to watch Auburn play or to follow the games on her computer.
"I've got a channel and every other week we can see an Auburn game," Ford said. "Otherwise, I have to follow it online or I can listen on the radio. But I can see enough games to understand what's going on."
Over the years, as Ford has grown close with different Auburn fans, she's received invites to fly over and attend her first football game at Jordan-Hare Stadium. But whether it was work or finding somebody to look after her house, it was never the right time. That was until this year when everything fell into place for the Liberty game. It was the perfect weekend and the perfect game.
So Ford reached out to Jennifer Roemershauser, one of the Auburn friends she had met on Twitter, and said she was thinking of coming over that weekend.
Roemershauser was one of the fans that tweeted at Ford five years ago, believing it was the soon-to-be first-round draft pick Dee Ford. When she realized her mistake, Roemershauser apologized. The conversation continued, though, as the two would tweet at each other during games, and they later met while Roemershauser was in England for work.
It only made sense that Ford make her first visit to Auburn with Roemershauser, a diehard Auburn fan who now lives in Texas with her husband and who understands what it means to be part of the Auburn family.
"You have to leave like I did to appreciate this," Roemershauser said. "What we have is special. You don't know until you leave and come back, and then you feel it and you see it. You don't appreciate it until you have that happen. This experience and that family, I feel it. This means more to me than you could possibly know."
"But at the same time, seeing [Ford] understand that ours is different. This is different, and she's so lucky to have found us."
The weekend itself was more than Ford or Roemershauser could have ever imagined. Meeting Malzahn and Greene on Friday at Reverse Tiger Walk was just the beginning.
On the day of the game, the two went from tailgate to tailgate after fans discovered that Ford would be in town. They also made it over for Tiger Walk, which was "amazing." And as it turns out, Malzahn wasn't the only person to recognize Ford. Everywhere she went, there were people stopping her and asking to take a photo.
"It's just bizarre," Ford said. "People are stopping me in the streets. I got stopped in the toilet."
During the pre-game festivities, Ford and Roemershauser were down on the field where they got to take a photo with the eagle following its flight and watched as the team ran out of the tunnel. Then they found their seats and saw Auburn beat Liberty in dominating fashion. And afterwards, they joined fans in rolling Toomer's Corner – one of the best traditions in college football.
"The game was beyond my wildest dreams," Ford said. "It just came alive. I completely get what the whole thing is about now. It was unbelievable. Everybody was so happy and so welcoming. It didn't matter what was going or whether we won or lost – it was fantastic that we won – but it was still amazing because everybody was talking about Auburn, and it was a family."
If you go look at Ford's Twitter bio, she's still a "boring surveyor from Kent," but it says she's "now also a firm member of the #AUfamily."
Welcome to the family, Dee.
Greg Ostendorf is a Senior Writer for AuburnTigers.com. Follow him on Twitter: @greg_ostendorf