Was Auburn Racist Over Turner Gill? NO! Now SYRACUSE, on the Other Hand...

Auburn did not refuse to hire Turner Gill because he was black or because he had a white wife. Quite the contrary: Auburn University badly wanted to hire the man. He was high on their list, one of the first persons that they interviewed, and they brought him in hoping to introduce him as their coach that very same day.

So what happened? Gill and Auburn had serious disagreements over how the program was to be run. In things ranging from hiring of assistants to general philosophy, Auburn wanted to run the program the Auburn way and Gill wanted to run it his way. Once Auburn discovered this, there was no point in continuing discussions.

That is why Gill's interview is being described as "outstanding and brief." Outstanding because they were very impressed with Gill—brief because they knew that he was not their guy.

Do not claim that this is just some line contrived by Auburn people to justify their decision. Why? Because it was the same reason why Mike Leach of Texas Tech and Gary Patterson of TCU, two men incontrovertibly more qualified than Gill, were never considered.

Also, do not claim that Auburn wanted to give Gill less freedom than they would have given a comparable white head coach, or that they wanted a frontman of any race for the boosters and interests behind the scene, such as the notorious Bobby Lowder.

First off, the media tagged Lowder as a bad guy because of his role in running off Terry Bowden. Before Terry Bowden, no one outside of Auburn circles knew or cared about the guy. But after Bowden's exit, he and the faction that opposed him was labeled with every caricature of the typical Southern football factory.

Why? Because the media loved Terry Bowden. He represents everything that the media likes about and wants in a football coach (let's just say that he was beloved for precisely the same reason as was Rick Neuheisel), and the media presumed that the Lowder faction wanted Bowden out because of a resistance to change.

The truth is that Bowden was only hired because of his last name and was soon exposed as a horrible football coach for reasons that will not be recounted.

But instead of pointing out that the Lowder faction was vindicated after not one single other college program would touch Terry Bowden with a 10-foot pole (yes, Bowden has applied for other jobs, lots of them, including some rather undesirable ones, and the fellow is now working for Yahoo), the media still blame that faction for everything bad (or should I say everything that the media disagrees with) ever since.

This includes the 2003 fiasco with Tommy Tuberville. Why was it a fiasco? Because it didn't succeed.

Yes, Tuberville was a winning coach. So was Ron Zook when Florida fired him. So was Jim Donnan when UGA fired him. So was Bob Toledo when UCLA fired him. So was Frank Solich when Nebraska fired him. So was John Cooper when Ohio State fired him. So were Paul Hackett and John Robinson when USC fired them.

So what is so unusual about firing a winning but underachieving or otherwise flawed coach and trying to get a better one? Nothing at all. But the media took the occasion to attack the Lowder faction because they were still mad at them for forcing out Terry Bowden.

See, during the early years of Tommy Tuberville's era at Auburn, the other SEC powers were down for one reason or another, and Tuberville took advantage of it to recruit the most talented team in the SEC. What did Tuberville do with that great advantage? Go 9-4 in 2002 and 8-5 in 2003, including back-to-back humiliating losses to obviously less talented but better coached intrastate rivals UGA.

The culprit: Tuberville's meddling with and complete mishandling of the offense. By 2003, Tuberville had gone through his third offensive coordinator in four years, wasting the future NFL QB and three future NFL RBs in his backfield (not to mention a great offensive line and very good WRs).

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