The image had been circling the Auburn-centric corners of the Internet nearly from the moment Alabama survived Georgia in the SEC Championship Game, advancing to its upcoming BCS title showdown against Notre Dame: an adaptation of the Fighting Irish's iconic logo to feature an Auburn Tiger instead, showing Tigers fans' support for the Irish in the face of their hated Crimson Tide archrivals.
So it's not surprising that a little more than week later, an adapation of that adaptation is now available as a T-shirt. Al.com reported Tuesday that downtown Auburn screen-printing company Stamp is selling shirts with the following designs it has christened "Fighting Burnie":
It's the tail curling up in simulation of the actual Irish logo's coattails that makes this. It's (ahem) debatable how much of a market there might be for such shirts after early January or even whether fans of another team ought to be making quite this much effort to support a team they wouldn't otherwise give the proverbial flying fig about ... but if you are going to make the effort, might as well make it clever. (One thing that's certain: Alabama fans don't have much room to make fun. Tide supporters made their own shirts in 2010, and they didn't get more original than the standard Tide logo in Oregon colors.)
Of course, no amount of T-shirt ingenuity will change the fact that Auburn fans aren't likely to be very happy when the BCS Championship Game is done: The Tide are 9.5-point favorites over the Irish, Nick Saban is 7-3 in bowl games as an SEC coach, and the SEC is still a robust 7-0 against non-SEC teams in the BCS title game.
