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Thursday, December 4, 2008
Letting Tuberville go a risky move for Auburn
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In 1999 Tommy Tuberville was given the same mandate as every other new Auburn head coach: Make Auburn consistently competitive for the SEC championship and keep the Tigers even—if not ahead—in the rivalry with Alabama.
In the nine years before the 2008 season, it’s fair to say that Tuberville had successfully carried out his marching orders. He averaged nine wins a year, was 49-23 in the toughest league in college football, won or shared four SEC West titles, won the 2004 SEC championship with a 13-0 team, and was the consensus national coach of the year in 2004.
Going into this season Tuberville had not only stayed even with Alabama, he had dominated winning seven of nine including an unprecedented six straight. Auburn has three head coaches in the college football Hall of Fame: Mike Donahue, “Shug” Jordan, and Pat Dye. None ever beat Alabama six straight times.
But the lessons we learned from the recent dismissals of Phillip Fulmer (Tennessee) and Sylvester Croom (Mississippi State) were reaffirmed on Wednesday when Tuberville was forced to resign after 10 seasons. In college football, like any other business, you have to react to what the competition is doing or risk falling further behind.
And let’s be clear. This is not an action by Auburn. It is a reaction. The powers that be at Auburn can rationalize all they want, but if Alabama was not 12-0 and ranked No. 1 in the land, Tommy Tuberville would still be the head coach of the Tigers this morning. He would have been given a chance to fix the problems that caused a 5-7 season. Those problems were almost entirely of Tuberville’s making. He screwed up with the entire Tony Franklin/spread offense episode. He knew that.
Last Saturday I spoke to Tuberville on the field less than an hour before the kickoff against Alabama. He thought he was in pretty good shape in terms of keeping his job. His plan was to hire a new offensive coordinator who would re-establish Auburn as a power football team and let that guy bring in some assistants to help implement the offense. Some people in power had obviously let him know that he would probably survive.
But from his body language I could tell that he needed to keep the game close and be competitive against the Crimson Tide.
Auburn did neither losing 36-0, the Tigers’ worst defeat to Alabama since 1962. And when Tuberville’s post-season evaluation by the president and the athletics director stretched from Monday to Wednesday, there were obviously some problems. By early afternoon on Wednesday it became clear that a move had been made.
Tuberville will be fine. He’ll get half of his $5.1 million settlement in 30 days and the rest within 365 days. He can sit out a year and become a free agent at the end of next season. He’s one of the best I’ve seen at handling the media and would be snapped up by the TV boys immediately.
Auburn? That’s another story. History tells us that timing is the most important thing when it comes to taking that job. Pat Dye came in 1981, the year before Bear Bryant retired. Tuberville came in 1999, when Gene Stallings was gone and Alabama had begun its self-destructive run of four coaches (DuBose, Franchione, Price, Shula) in 10 years.
The timing is not right for the next coach at Auburn. Alabama will play for the 22nd SEC championship in its history Saturday afternoon. Win that one and the Crimson Tide will play for its 13th national championship. And by any objective measure, Nick Saban’s program is at least one year ahead of schedule. He and his staff are going to dominate recruiting in that state.
Get his hire wrong and Auburn could, like Alabama, go off on a string of new faces desperately trying to catch up with a Crimson Tide program that is clearly getting ready to go on a big roll.
Based on the comments I’ve seen, there were a lot of fans who were tired of Tuberville and just wanted something new. They want to get excited again with a fresh face who will give them hope. Auburn will hire a good coach and he’ll have a great press conference and those fans will be wringing their hands in anticipation of what is to come.
That was the way Nebraska fans felt in 2004 when Bill Callahan was hired as head coach. Frank Solich had averaged over nine wins in six seasons and had played for the national championship in 2001. But he just wasn’t sexy enough when compared to Mack Brown (Texas) and Bob Stoops (Oklahoma). Callahan, an NFL guy, was a fish out of water and went 27-22 and put the program into a severe hole.
Most fans are rational but a lot fans are like teenaged boys. They are always convinced that there is a prettier girl in the next room and that if they could take her to the prom instead of their old date, life would be perfect.
But here is the other part of that equation that fans don’t like talk about or ponder: If you move out a proven, if flawed, head coach in the desire to take your program to another level, you sometimes get that wish. But that next level is down, not up.
That is where Auburn is right now. This is a hire the school must get right or the Tigers could be in the football wilderness, relative to Alabama, for a long, long time.
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