It wasn’t the offensive explosion that lead to the 70-point rout of Louisiana-Monroe last season, but the Auburn Tigers’ offense was pleased with a 31-0 season opening win on Saturday.

“We got the job done,” Tigers coach Tommy Tuberville said. “We didn’t do anything spectacular.

Overall, it was just a good performance.”

Under new offensive coordinator Al Borges’ offense, many wondered if the Tigers would become suddenly pass happy.

However they showed good offensive balance while keeping things “vanilla.”

“We tried to throw the ball downfield and tried to do a little bit of everything we have been doing,” Tuberville said. “The biggest thing we tried to work on the second half was our offensive line.

We played 10 guys on the offensive line today, and that is a bit unusual for us.”

With a re-building Mississippi State squad up next week, don’t expect the Tigers to go from vanilla to Neapolitan in a week’s time.

“I think these first couple of games we’re going to work on ourselves, our offense and our defense and get things down,” senior running back Ronnie Brown said. “I think it kind of helped us to get off to a good start like that.

I think it was pretty helpful for both sides of the ball.”

After Saturday’s win, Borges said he’d like to go deep a few more times, but that he was pleased with the overall play selection.

“You’d always like to go out there and score 70 points, but you’re not going to score 70 points every week,” Borges said. “We’ve got great backs, we’re going to run the football.

But we’d like to be over 210-220 (yards) passing and I know we didn’t make it.”

Wide receiver Courtney Taylor, who had a big 39-yard catch and run against the Indians, said he hoped the coaches would have opened things up some more.

“I was a little upset, I didn’t get to score today,” Taylor said, jokingly. “I was like, ‘hey, where’s this play at?’ I understand and everything, we played a little

conservative. We didn’t bring a lot of stuff out of the book.”

Many of the Tigers appeared to take the ULM game as a chance to work some of the kinks out while getting ready for the real season.

“It has been a long time since we all played together. Even in our scrimmages this fall, not everyone was out there,” senior quarterback Jason Campbell said. “Once the game time atmosphere kicked in, we started to readjust.

We made some mistakes, luckily they didn’t come back to hurt us. Playing this game today will help is in the long run.”