Business is business in big-time college football
by Tony Basilio
Auburn Head Football Coach Tommy Tuberville has undergone quite a media makeover in recent weeks. Roughly two weeks ago, he was the beleaguered underachiever of the SEC coaching ranks, a half-bright Usurper who had on more than one occasion at Auburn U. snatched defeat from the inexorable jaws of victory.
Now, in light of a failed coup attempt by rogue boosters and a few bloodthirsty jackals in the university administration, Tuberville is the new Patron Saint of Persecuted Coaches. But the miraculous nature of his transformation notwithstanding, I find myself constitutionally incapable of mustering so much as a single tattered shred of compassion for St. Tommy. Because every time I take the measure of his present circumstance, I can't help but think back to his arrival in Opelika, and to his despicable treatment of the Auburn Six.
The Auburn Six were a handful of clean-cut kids who saw their football dreams sheared off at the follicle by St. Tommy's mean ambition. Willie Northern was a redshirt freshman and former high school All-American; Roman Nelson was a junior fullback who had started two games for Terry Bowden the previous season; Sophomore Brandon Taylor was a reserve offensive tackle; Manning Sumner was a redshirt freshman lineman whose father played at Auburn; Brian Parchinski was also a redshirt lineman; while Shaw Bushong was a redshirt freshman tight end.
These six young men, all of whom were in good academic standing and none of whom had been involved in any sordidness off the field, were all dismissed from the team in the spring of '99. It was one of St. Tommy's first acts as the new Auburn coach. And he didn't stop with filching their scholarships; he robbed them of dignity, defending his actions with the following sleazy public declaration: "When you inherit guys, you have to make decisions. They just weren't fitting into what we are trying to do. Some of these guys we wouldn't have recruited.... I told everybody that we'd evaluate everybody. This is a business. I told players that they have to show us that they can play".
"I didn't know what to do when they told me I was getting my scholarship pulled," deposed player Bushong later responded. "None of us did anything wrong. They've only known me for one quarter. They didn't give me a fair chance."
One of the ironies of it all is that, Tuberville has been given a pretty fair shake during his tenure on the Plains. In five seasons at Auburn, St. Tommy has led the Tigers to a pretty pedestrian 37-25 (Previous coach Tommy Bowden lost his job after going 47-16-1).
In 10 years as a head coach (first at Ole Miss, and now at Auburn), the has averaged only seven wins per season. And under his watch in 2003, an Auburn team pegged as a pre-season top-five bumbled oafishly to yet another 7-5 campaign. Even given the recent "Coup De Saint" engineered and then botched wretchedly by Auburn University President William Walker, no thinking individual could in good conscious grant Tuberville victim status.
To be sure, the failed coup was a sleazy bit of business, a round of back-slicing among treacherous screwheads, men who would slit their grandmothers' throats for performance bonus and a wet bar in the administrative limo. To wit: on the Thursday prior to the annual Auburn/Alabama classic, Walker, a couple of Board of Trustees Members and Auburn AD David Housel met with Louisville Head Coach Bob Petrino to discuss the latter's possible ascension to the Auburn football throne.
The summit constituted an act of consummate bad faith, on several levels. It took place in utmost secrecy, and Tuberville was never apprised of the meeting by either Housel, Walker or Petrino, the latter of whom was his personal friend and former assistant. The Auburn brass didn't even have the professional courtesy to let Louisville know they were talking to their head coach. Call this the Auburn Six, part II: Six Degrees of Greed and Betrayal.
Perhaps Tuberville said it best back in that spring of '99, when he tossed aside the original Auburn Six like so much human refuse: "This is a business." Thus spake St. Tommy.
Big-time college football is a business, all right, a business fraught with levels of baseness and treachery that would make even the most contemptible corporate greedheads bury their lesioned skulls in shame. It's a business in which any means are justified by all ends; a realm where money not only corrupts, but trumps every last vestige of reason and common sense.
The most colossal irony of all is that 10 months ago, Auburn gave Tuberville a raise to $1.6 million per year; such was its confidence in his gridiron leadership; in fact, that the administration also gave him a buyout clause of $4 million in the unlikely event of termination.
So when Tuberville was seemingly twisting in the wind a couple of weeks back, he was actually contemplating a fate which would have left him either (a) a wealthy man with a major college football team to coach or (b) an even wealthier man, one who was also a martyr in the Church of Unholy Nonsense. If you listen closely, you can hear the original Auburn Six singing bitter hymns.
Tune in and talk sports with "The Tony Basilio Show" each weekday from 3-6 p.m. on the network (670 WMTY-AM, 850 WKVL-AM, 1140 WLOD-AM, 1290 WATO-AM, or 1400 WGAP-AM).
December 4, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 49
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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