Tommy Tuberville: A Dollar Short

Of all the big-name coaches to lose employment in 2008, Tommy Tuberville gave America the best example of how college football coaching can closely resemble the national economy, and more specifically, the sagging auto industry. A coach's surprising downfall wasn't so much the product of a failure to deliver results as it was a lack of executive responsibility and decision-making poise.

It's not fair, mind you--few things in the world of SEC football coaching are--but there is an unmistakably potent symbolism surrounding Tuberville's resignation after 10 solid seasons as the pilot of the Plainsmen. In the year of the bailout, a man not inclined to run away from a challenge was made to submit to a larger reality he didn't control.

At the end of his sideline stay in Jordan-Hare Stadium, Tubs was told by the world of pigskin politics that it was time for him to go. Just why did this dogged and generally successful competitor, who held onto his job with legendary tenacity after a stormy 2003 season, get pushed aside now? It couldn't have been his 85 wins, good for an average of 8.5 victories a season (many of those seasons being 11-game sojourns, and not 12). It couldn't have been his six-game winning streak in the Iron Bowl, a game that--if lost--can push out successful coaches like Bill Curry, whose 1989 SEC title didn't seem to matter that much at rival Alabama. It couldn't have been his spectacular 2004 season, in which Auburn went undefeated and had an even better case for a shared national title than it did in Pat Dye's magnificent 1983 campaign.

No, the toppling of Thomas Tuberville occurred for a deeper reason, a reason not that different from the three-ring circus involving General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler.

Want to know why the Auburn outlook turned from faith to fatigue, and from trust to tension, in this last leg of Tuberville's tenure as the top Tiger? Very simply, Tuberville burned through offensive coordinators the way the Big Three auto makers have burned through cash in recent months. Despite having just one hugely crummy season--not enough, on the merits, to get him axed in a fairer world--Tuberville resigned because he was no longer seen as the man in charge of his ship. Too many panicky, reflexive, knee-jerk decisions with respect to his offensive tacticians drained away the last reserves of patience possessed by both the power structure and the proletariat on the Alabama plains.

When confidence crumbles, leadership is lacking, and history repeats itself, a football family can only take so much. He didn't deserve this fate--not when he won so consistently in the face of better-endowed and ascendant programs at LSU, Florida, Georgia, and (once again, after a break during the DuBose-Franchione-Price-Shula years) Alabama--but Tuberville knows why he's no longer Auburn's head coach today.

When a head coach fires one offensive coordinator after a particularly bad season, it's good leadership. But when that same head coach fires second and third coordinators not too many years later, the same act--robbed of its virtuous elements--begins to be seen as proof of an inability to hire the right guy in the first place. Instead of building a better automobile after many years of strong sales, Tuberville thought he could cosmetically redefine the branding at Auburn and win with a different marketing approach. The late-2007 flirtation with Tony Franklin's spread turned out to be the most conspicuous and--not surprisingly--the most dramatically devastating example of this dynamic.

By sampling and then discarding a number of coordinators--with former colleague (and soon-to-be backstabber) Bobby Petrino departing for Louisville after the 2002 season--Tuberville, a defensive guru, lost the ability to convince his fan base that the Tigers would be an elite team every year. Auburn outfits might have been bowl-bound SEC West contenders every season, but as long as these coordinator conflicts continued, 10-win seasons--indicators of a particularly powerful program--would only arrive on an occasional basis, and in the SEC, that's not enough at a school that has come to expect supreme success. The smooth run of 2004-'06 under Al Borges brought Auburn its period of sustained high-level excellence, but as soon as Borges lost his play-calling mojo in 2007, Tuberville encountered a final series of fights--with Borges and, soon afterward, with Franklin--that ultimately knocked him to the coaching canvas.

The revolving door at the offensive coordinator position--and the scattered, impulsive way Tommy Tuberville dealt with that part of his coaching staff--robbed Auburn of needed consistency, and made the program appear unsteady heading into 2009 and beyond. For all he had done to stabilize the Tigers in the decade since the soap-operatic departure of Terry Bowden, Tuberville ran into his own death valley of drama. By gobbling up offensive coordinators and then spitting them out a short while later, the Auburn coach who won so consistently for a long time suddenly saw the landscape shift, and this time, his own head was on the chopping block.

It was said for many a year in America that "What's good for General Motors is good for the country." The same was true for Tommy Tuberville at Auburn. But it's a different world now, in so many ways. Right or wrong, fair or foul, a winning coach could no longer run through offensive coodinators like water. A brain drain occurred at a proud football program, and as a result, the man called Tubs was drowned by the flood he himself created on the plains of Alabama.