This is an opinion column.

OK, hear me out.

What if I told you there was a day when Pluto entered its “out of bounds” phase in Aquarius, the same day Uranus in Gemini formed a sextile with retrograde Neptune in Aries?

Soak that in for a minute. Read it again.

And now you know why things got so weird Aug. 30, 2025. The stars were trying to tell us something.

Or dismiss this altogether —good luck finding another explanation for what happened in those 24 hours.

Auburn was the class of college football in the state of Alabama after an offensive exhibition the night before at Baylor. Hugh Freeze had apparently figured it out and QB Jackson Arnold looked to be in command with a convincing 38-24 beating of the Bears.

Notice was served.

Auburn … was back.

The next afternoon got even crazier when Alabama fell flat on its face against a Florida State team that won just two games last season.

The Crimson Tide’s demise was here.

Any hope of sustaining the Saban empire washed away in the Tallahassee downpour.

Kalen DeBoer was a fraud.

Ty Simpson was a bust.

How much is that buyout?

Or maybe Florida State was back to national contention after a year-long hibernation? That offense was electric, and the defense punished a soft Crimson Tide team that would be fortunate to reach the Music City Bowl.

The sky wasn’t falling. It already landed on Tuscaloosa and, with Auburn back on the rocket ship, dark days in crimson were coming.

Hope you got your jokes in with the Tigers because it’s about to be hammer time in Jordan-Hare?

Remember that?

That really happened, but the horoscope in that day’s USA Today should have been a warning. We were in the Virgo phase of the astrological calendar and the Aug. 30 edition of the national newspaper’s horoscope for that sign explains it all.

“An external shift may challenge your internal stability. Curveball energy is in the air when the Sagittarius moon triggers Uranus.”

Mind. Blown.

It was an astrological curveball that threw everything out of whack.

Feel free to offer a better explanation for why Florida State made Alabama look so bad a day after Auburn had a functional offense.

Now, 7.5 weeks later, the only coach in that three-team constellation whose job is safe is DeBoer.

The Seminoles actually stink.

They’re 3-4 and currently on a four-game losing streak. So is Auburn, but at least the Tigers got beat by good teams. Florida State is coming off losses to Pittsburgh and Stanford as the program appears to be in complete disarray.

How that team beat an Alabama group that’s now the hottest team in the nation defies every shred of conventional thought.

I’ll have dinner with Big Foot, Elvis and the Loch Ness Monster before someone explains that logically.

Auburn reverting to its recent offensive struggles wasn’t as surprising, if we’re being honest. The fact that Baylor has the nation’s 107th-best defense helps explain why the Tigers rolled up 415 yards that night. They’ve averaged just 275 in SEC play, while Baylor allows 407 a game. So that checks out.

But Florida State beating Alabama by 14?

It’s the outlier of the season. Mike Norvell’s now a whisker away from getting canned with a massive buyout that was, fittingly, part of a renegotiated deal to keep him from replacing Nick Saban at Alabama.

Kalen DeBoer rattled off wins over ranked Georgia, Vanderbilt, Missouri and Tennessee in succession.

And Ty Simpson is the Heisman Trophy front-runner.

Try convincing anyone that this would be true on Labor Day.

But as time rolls on, that final holiday weekend of summer looks more like the aberration than what followed.

A glitch in the matrix, if you will.

Or a “curveball” as the horoscope read because the planetary alignment seems to have returned a more familiar order.

Alabama is back to woodchipper mode.

Florida State is a dysfunctional mess.

And Auburn’s just kinda lost in the woods.

Pluto, without checking, must be back in bounds because who knows who can really explain what happened that weekend with any rational thought.

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