Auburn did what??

You gotta love sports sometimes. In what other world of entertainment do you have as many jaw-dropping moments as you do in sports?? Whether it is on the field or off the field, sports are always unpredictable. You never know what is going to happen next. Saturday night, we're over at a friend's house watching the Crosstown Shootout, enjoying the game, when all of the sudden the following headline shows up on the ticker on ESPN2:

"Auburn is expected to hire Iowa State head coach Gene Chizik."

WHAAAT?!! I almost fell off the couch. We immediately flipped over to ESPN News just to make sure we saw it right. And sure enough, there it is under the "Breaking News" section. Gene Chizik...new head ball coach at Auburn.

Just when you thought you had seen it all in college football, Auburn goes out and hires Gene freaking Chizik to take over their football program after he went 5-19 in two years at Iowa State. I still can't get over this hire. You have potential rising stars like Turner Gill and Skip Holtz sniffing around this job, and they jump into the pool with a guy who was close to getting fired by his former employer.

Here are some of the lowlights of the Gene Chizik era. Iowa State went 2-10 this year and went 0-8 in the conference. 0-8!! They lost to Baylor by 28! His only wins this year were against South Dakota State and Kent State. They lost their final ten games.

Not only was he not winning at Iowa State, he was on the verge of getting fired!! I get the impression that Chizik had one more year to turn it around before getting canned.

The reaction from Iowa State fans?? RELIEF! My god, how would you feel as an Auburn fan knowing that Iowa State fans are happy that the guy is leaving?

It would be like Penn State firing Joe Paterno tomorrow and hiring Charlie Weis a week later. I would literally be pouring champagne on myself right now if that happened. And that's basically what has happened at Auburn. They hired a coach who has never been successful as a head coach and who was about to get fired.

Maybe Gregg Robinson should send his resume to Auburn in a few years if/when Chizik inevitably gets fired. If they are willing to hire Chizik, why not go for the jugular and bring in Gregg Robinson after that rousing success he had at Syracuse?? Or maybe Ty Willingham!

Can you imagine Nick Saban's reaction to this hire?? He must have started laughing out loud. Auburn is so spooked by Nick Saban it's not even funny.

Is it possible that Chizik could work out at Auburn?? No doubt, and you never really know in sports. For all I know, he was in a bad situation at Iowa State that was going to take 5+ years for him to turn around, so maybe the Auburn job will give him the talent that he needs to win. Maybe Iowa State was just a bad fit. Maybe he's got better networks and connections at Auburn that will let him hire a better staff and get better players. He went to Florida for college, so maybe he's not comfortable in Iowa and needs to be back in SEC country to be successful. I'm not willing to discount that possibility. If he hires a great staff, recruits his face off, and gets his players to buy in, maybe he'll do well there.

But based on what we know about Chizik, this move is right up there among the worst hires in the history of college football. He's been a complete failure as a head coach so far, and now he's stepping into a hornet's nest in the SEC. The only move I would put down as a more egregiously bad hire was the Bengals' hiring of David Shula almost immediately after Shula got demoted from offensive coordinator to defensive backs coach by Jimmy Johnson with the Cowboys. But Chizik would be in that conversation for me (if you've made it into the "David Shula" category with me, that's the lowest of the low). It makes absolutely no sense to me, especially when you consider that there were a lot of good young coaches out there who they probably could have lured to Auburn. Turner Gill, Skip Holtz, Brady Hoke, etc. All guys who have won at their respective jobs and made their programs better.

Chizik took over a bad program and made them significantly worse. It's not like he's recruiting well or showing some slow signs of improvement. He's brought nothing to the table in Ames. And now he's headed to the toughest conference in football to compete against the likes of Urban Meyer and Richt and Saban and Petrino and Miles and Houston Nutt and now Lane Kiffin. Auburn just went from having a solid coach who was in the top half of coaches in the league to a complete unknown who may turn out to be among the worst.

And the fact that Tommy Tuberville was a legitimate success at Auburn (probably one of the best coaches in their history) is only compounding the problem here. Tuberville won games at Auburn and probably would have won games in the future once he settled the problems from this season. An absolute BEST CASE SCENARIO for Gene Chizik would be for him to be the next Tommy Tuberville at Auburn. A worst case scenario is that he runs Auburn into the ground, Saban completely takes over the state for the next decade, and Auburn football goes through a long term malaise that permanently puts them into the second tier in the SEC. Throw in the likelihoood that their recruiting is going to hit rock bottom this winter, and all bets are off on how bad this could potentially get.

I hate to be banging on Auburn because I like Auburn. They have a good program, and I've enjoyed watching them over the years. The Bengals have drafted a lot of good players from Auburn (Rudi Johnson, Takeo Spikes, Willie Anderson, Pat Sims, etc), so I've always had an affinity for the program. But somewhere along the line, they forgot that they are Auburn!! They are the second best program in their own state and probably the 5-6th most prestigious job in their conference at best. What is Auburn's upside?? I'd say that Tuberville was getting as much out of that program as anyone could. They are a 7-9 win program at their core that can have runs of success when the other heavy hitters in the league are down, but they are never going to be the elite program in the SEC (especially when programs like Alabama and Florida and Georgia are all "up"). I know they are worried about Saban, but why would you make a panic hire as an attempt to counteract Saban?? Why not ride it out with Tuberville until you have a great candidate lined up?? Does anyone really think recruits are going to be flocking to Gene Chizik over Nick Saban?

So what does this say about ND?? It seems like the coaching searches of 2008 were an absolute crapshoot. Auburn hires a coach with a 5-19 record. Washington hires an assistant. Tennessee hires a coach who has never been a head coach in college and got fired from his job in the pros. Clemson hires an assistant. All of these hires could turn out great, but chances are that several of them (if not all of them) will be complete busts.

At the end of the day, even if it is possible (likely?) that ND may not have any clue what they are doing, it will probably benefit us in the long run that we made the decision to keep Weis around for next year. If ND had fired Charlie Weis, the coaching search would have been an absolute train wreck. It would have made the Auburn coaching search look downright shrewd. And the result of a coaching search would have led to a hire that divided the fanbase and killed all the momentum in the program. Recruiting would have taken a complete nose dive, and there were no hires out there that would have made fans excited about this program.

Bringing back Weis gives ND all kinds of options. We get an entire year to really start making critical evaluations of the good young coaches out there, it gives us time to see if any big coaching moves shake out in the offseason (college coach to the pros or some other big move), and it also gives us one last look at Charlie Weis to see if he can revamp his staff and start winning games next year with an experienced team. I have admittedly lost faith in Charlie, but there's at least a glimmer of hope out there that he will right the ship and correct the problems with this program. If ND could get tougher up front, mix in more of those young d-linemen, and get some big stuff from Cierre Wood in the running game and on special teams, maybe this team makes the leap next year. We're already on the hook for $20 million to Weis or whatever. We might as well find out for sure what he's got, and buy some time to get the right coach if Weis isn't the answer. Rushing out and hiring Jim Grobe does us no favors.

Tommy Tuberville---Gone!

Bold move by Auburn to dump Tommy Tuberville. Not sure where I stand on this one. I can understand where Auburn is coming from, but there is a lot of risk with this move.

On the one hand, I know Auburn fans have been frustrated with Tuberville for years, and this season gave them an opportunity to make a clean break from Tuberville. Tuberville botched this season with the half-baked move to the spread offense, and they got slaughtered by Alabama. I think there was always a lingering feeling down at Auburn that they could do better than Tuberville. Tuberville is a good coach but not a real flashy guy and not a dynamic offensive coach.

On the other hand, he went 85-40 in the SEC!! What do people down there expect??? Do they think Auburn should be winning 10+ games a year in the SEC?? Auburn is a very good program obviously, but look at all the other programs down there. Florida, Bama, LSU, Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina, etc. Auburn is not the best program in the SEC and probably never will be. They are the little brother school in the state of Alabama, which isn't exactly the best state for high school talent in the region. Auburn obviously has great talent, but is their talent so good that they should expect to always beat teams like Florida and LSU?? Cmon.

Here is Tuberville's record year by year:

1999 Auburn 5–6 2–6 5th—West — —
2000 Auburn 9–4 6–3 1st—West L Citrus Bowl 20 18
2001 Auburn 7–5 5–3 2nd—West L Peach Bowl — —
2002 Auburn 9–4 5–3 2nd—West W Capital One Bowl 16 14
2003 Auburn 8–5 5–3 3rd—West W Music City Bowl — —
2004 Auburn 13–0 9–0 1st—West W Sugar Bowl † 2 2
2005 Auburn 9–3 7–1 2nd—West L Capital One Bowl 14 14
2006 Auburn 11–2 6–2 2nd—West W Cotton Bowl 8 9
2007 Auburn 9–4 5–3 2nd—West W Chick-fil-A Bowl 14 15
2008 Auburn 5–7 2–6 4th—West
Auburn: 85–40 52–30

By my count, he went 5-3 in bowl games, won 11+ games twice, won 2 SEC West titles, one SEC championship, produced 6 ranked teams in 10 years at Auburn (including 4 top 15 teams in a row until this past year), and I believe that he went something like 7-3 against Alabama. His typical year was an 8-4/9-3 type season with a bowl win. Should they be building statues of him on campus?? No, of course not. But is someone like Mike Leach going to come into the SEC West and suddenly start cranking out a bunch of top 5 teams?? I'd love to say yes, but I'm not sure I buy it.

At the end of the day, Tuberville produced results fitting for an Auburn head coach. He turned them into one of the top 4-5 programs in the conference during his tenure, and there was a stretch for a few years where you could argue that Auburn was the best program in the conference or at least in the conversation.

I know he had a bad year in 2008, but isn't there something to be said for letting the guy work through his one bad year?? I don't know, I'm not privy to all that was going on at Auburn. Maybe players were packing it in, maybe recruiting was suffering, maybe he had lost the fans. But this move seems like a rush to get him out the door when there isn't really an obvious candidate out there for the job. If this season had happened last year when Bobby Petrino was available, I would have understood it. But are Auburn fans really ready to hitch their wagon to Mike Leach and expect him to carry them to a bunch of SEC West titles and wins over Nick Saban?? Is the spread really what Auburn fans want?? That's not the Auburn football that I know. The power running game with Rudi Johnson and a physical defense Auburn. That's the Auburn I know. Tuberville knew that type of football.

Some of these SEC programs have lost their minds. Know your role. When there are 5 superpower programs in that league, it's tough to dominate that league for any extended period of time. Especially at a school like Auburn that isn't even the most famous program in its own state. I'm not saying you can't win a league title at Auburn. You can when you have the right combination of seniors and talent. There are windows at places like Auburn to be successful, especially if other big names in the league are struggling. But forcing a fairly successful coach out after one losing season seems like a risky move. There's just not a whole lot of upside for Auburn football, but they could certainly spend many years in the doldrums if they botch this next hire. And without an obvious candidate there for them to hire, they could easily blow this hire.

It will certainly be interesting. Maybe the new coach at Auburn will take that program to new heights. I like Auburn football, and I hope it works out for them. I hope that Leach or Muschamp wins bigger than Tuberville did. But as long as Nick Saban and Urban Meyer are around, I think Auburn football has a ceiling no matter who the coach is.