Tommy Tuberville

This is a guest opinion column

Eight years ago, Tommy Tuberville wanted to come home.

After Jay Jacobs stepped down as Auburn’s athletic director in 2018, I was among those who quietly helped Tuberville explore the possibility of leading the athletic department. It wasn’t a publicity stunt or an exercise in nostalgia. Tuberville genuinely believed that after spending a decade navigating the Southeastern Conference, rebuilding Auburn football, winning an SEC championship and leading the Tigers to an undefeated season in 2004, he was uniquely positioned to restore one of college athletics’ premier programs.

From what I’ve been told, Auburn’s leadership ever seriously entertained the idea. To many within the university’s power structure, Tuberville simply wasn’t the right fit. Some reportedly laughed at the suggestion.

Looking back, that decision says far more about Auburn’s judgment than it does about Tommy Tuberville.

Today, the same man Auburn wouldn’t trust to oversee its athletic department has served in the United States Senate, speaks regularly with the President of the United States and has emerged as the frontrunner in Alabama’s race for governor. Whether he ultimately wins is up to Alabama voters, but the irony is difficult to ignore. The man Auburn dismissed as unqualified to lead its athletic department may soon chair the very Board of Trustees that once refused to seriously consider him.

Would Tuberville have succeeded as athletic director? No one can answer that with certainty. But one thing is clear: he wasn’t approaching the opportunity casually.

Matthew Davis, the former Director of Tigers Unlimited Priority Programs who participated in many of Tuberville’s planning meetings, recently told me that the former coach had developed a comprehensive vision for the department.

“Coach had thought through every need the athletic department had,” Davis recalled. “He was prepared to raise the money, build the facilities Auburn needed to compete with and was already thinking about how NIL would eventually change college athletics.”

Whether that vision would have succeeded is impossible to know.

Instead, Auburn’s trustees never seriously engaged in the idea, and Tuberville’s vision never advanced beyond informal conversations.

What we do know is this: the people who dismissed him haven’t built a record that inspires confidence.

That’s worth remembering as Auburn celebrates another record-setting fundraising year.

Auburn University has every reason to brag about its latest fundraising milestone. Raising more than $93 million in a single fiscal year is an extraordinary accomplishment and a testament to the remarkable loyalty of the Auburn Family. At a time when college athletics is being reshaped by NIL, revenue sharing and conference realignment, Auburn’s donors continue to demonstrate a willingness to invest at the highest level.

But before university officials congratulate themselves too enthusiastically, they ought to ask a much more difficult question.

What exactly are Auburn’s donors buying?

If Auburn’s problem were money, this would be a very different conversation.

But Auburn has never lacked resources.

Auburn has lacked judgment.

Because while Auburn continues setting fundraising records, the university’s football program has become one of the worst investments in major college athletics.

Since firing Gus Malzahn following the 2020 season, Auburn is just 4-26 against ranked opponents. During that same period, the university has cycled through Bryan Harsin and Hugh Freeze, spent tens of millions of dollars on coaching buyouts, and once again finds itself searching for the person who can restore one of college football’s proudest brands, this time hanging its hopes on Alex Golesh.

One bad hire can happen to any athletic department. Two can perhaps be explained away. But when failed coaching searches, expensive buyouts and declining results become the defining characteristic of an administration, the conversation has to shift from the coaches to the people making the decisions.

That, more than anything else, is Auburn’s problem.

Over the last decade, Auburn has spent millions paying Gene Chizik, Gus Malzahn, Bryan Harsin and Hugh Freeze not to coach football. Every one of those departures was presented as a necessary step toward a brighter future. Every new hire was introduced as the leader who would finally restore Auburn to national prominence. Every coaching search generated another wave of optimism and another appeal to donors to stay the course.

Yet after all of that spending, Auburn found itself right back where it started, looking for another football coach while asking the Auburn Family for another record-breaking investment.

Imagine any other organization operating this way. If a Fortune 500 company hired four CEOs in a little more than a decade, paid each of them millions of dollars to leave, watched its market position steadily decline and then celebrated because investors kept supplying more capital, shareholders wouldn’t applaud management. They would demand accountability.

Auburn’s donors deserve no less.

To be fair, not everything has gone wrong. Bruce Pearl transformed Auburn basketball into one of the nation’s elite programs, while he was there. The Tigers won a national championship in men’s golf, and student-athletes across the department continued to excel.

Those accomplishments deserve recognition.

But they also highlight an uncomfortable reality about life in the SEC. Athletic directors at football schools are ultimately judged by football. It’s not because golf, basketball or girls’ softball don’t matter. They do. It’s because football is the economic engine that makes everything else possible. Football fills stadiums, drives television revenue, fuels donor enthusiasm and finances virtually every other sport on campus.

Measured by that standard, the Allen Greene era simply didn’t deliver, and the John Cohen era isn’t fairing any better.

Greene’s defining football decision was the hiring of Bryan Harsin, a move that unraveled almost from the beginning. The football program fell further behind its rivals, relationships between the administration and influential boosters deteriorated, and Auburn found itself spending even more money to undo a mistake that many questioned from the day it was announced.

John Cohen was brought in to right the ship, but his inability to lure Lane Kiffin away from Ole Miss, and to settle for Hugh Freeze, who was more interested in playing golf than coaching football, proved catastrophic.

Which brings us to one of the most intriguing “what ifs” in Auburn’s recent history.

When Jay Jacobs stepped down as athletic director in 2018, what if Auburn’s board of Trustees had listened to Tuberville’s plan as he quietly explored the possibility of returning to the university as athletic director. It wasn’t an unreasonable idea. Wisconsin had already demonstrated what was possible when Barry Alvarez transitioned from legendary football coach to athletic director, and Tennessee would later follow a similar path by appointing Phil Fulmer. Both universities recognized that someone who had successfully built a football program might also possess the experience necessary to oversee one.

Tuberville believed he could do the same at Auburn. Having recruited against Nick Saban and building Auburn into a championship contender, he understood something that many career administrators never fully appreciate: at Auburn, football isn’t simply another sport within the athletic department. It is the foundation upon which the entire department rests.

The idea never received serious consideration, maybe in part because Tuberville was also committed to trimming the fat of a bloated department.

Few decisions age as poorly as the ones made with absolute certainty.

If Tuberville is elected governor, he would serve as chairman of Auburn’s Board of Trustees, the very institution that once concluded he wasn’t qualified to oversee its athletic department.

Had Auburn hired Tuberville in 2018, Alabama’s political landscape almost certainly would have unfolded differently. Jeff Sessions may well have returned to the United States Senate, and in all likelihood, Will Ainsworth would be on his way to the governor’s mansion. Instead, Auburn’s decision helped alter not only the trajectory of its athletic department but, indirectly, the course of Alabama politics.

History has a way of humbling institutions that become too confident in their own judgment.

Would Tommy Tuberville have restored Auburn football? No one can answer that question. Auburn never gave itself the opportunity to find out. What we do know is that the path the university chose instead produced Bryan Harsin, Hugh Freeze, millions of dollars in buyouts and a football program that continues searching for its identity.

None of this is intended as a criticism of the Auburn Family. Quite the opposite. Auburn’s donors have done everything the university has asked of them. They have funded facilities, coaching salaries, NIL initiatives, buyouts, and now record-breaking fundraising campaigns because they believe in Auburn and because they desperately want to see the football program return to national prominence.

Auburn’s donors have never been a problem, and their generosity has never been in doubt.

The judgment of the people entrusted with that generosity is another matter entirely.

Raising $93 million is an extraordinary accomplishment.

Turning those dollars into championships is the job.

Until Auburn proves it can do that consistently, every record-setting fundraising announcement will be accompanied by a question that deserves an honest answer:

What, exactly, are Auburn’s donors buying?