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

So, there is this nonsense that Chizik was hired over Gill. Nonsense. Chizik was only hired after Auburn made the correct decision not to hire Gill. Why was it correct? Because you do not give a guy who played and coached most of his career in the Big 12 and has had one winning season out of three at the mid-major level carte blanche at an SEC program. You only get that after you have proven yourself in the SEC.

This is not exclusive to Gill. When Urban Meyer came to Florida, he had to hire or retain Charlie Strong and a bunch of other assistants that have strong SEC or Florida ties. When Nick Saban came to LSU, he left his entire staff at Michigan State. And so on.

It is also not exclusive to the SEC. Let's say you are applying to be head coach in the Pac-10. Go tell them that you want to win by running the football and playing defense like they do in the SEC and Big Ten, or they did in the Big 12 before Stoops.

Oh yes, and tell them that you will be bringing in Jim Bob and Hank Joe as your coordinators, and that to bring your team closer together, you all would go hang out at the annual rattlesnake roundup and partake in some good old fashioned mud-wrasslin' and pig castratin'!

The president and AD of that Pac-10 program will pat you on the back and say, "Sir, we know that you are going to be an excellent head coach one day. YOU JUST WON'T BE ONE HERE!" And that will be the end of it. That's precisely what happened with Turner Gill...a routine football decision where it was a bad fit between a qualified candidate and a desirable job.

(Yes, Turner Gill did want the Auburn job, and if it were the madhouse that everyone claims, he would have never even bothered, just as he told Washington State he wasn't interested last year and Iowa State the same this year...not saying that WSU and ISU are madhouses, but rather that Gill is very prudent and selective at where he chooses to interview.)

Now Gill has been told "bad fit" before. But this was one instance where it was true. With no ties to the institution, the region, or the conference, Gill would have had to give concessions to his potential employer before they would have any reason to be confident that he would succeed, and Gill refused to make those concessions.

So Auburn found someone who A) was a very good coordinator, B) had ties to the school, C) had ties to the area, and D) was willing to make those concessions and hired him.

We know that D) is true because the first thing that Chizik said after he was hired was, "We are going to get back to Auburn football." Gill wanted to get Auburn to Gill football, and while Gill football is good for Buffalo and may have worked for Nebraska, there was no evidence that it would work at Auburn.

You can fault Auburn for making a safe choice versus a risky choice. But why should Auburn have been the one to make all the concessions? Gill was the one looking for the job. Why couldn't Gill have been the one to recognize that he was the guy with meager credentials and no connections or ties being offered a chance to coach a top program in the SEC and made the very reasonable and routine concessions required to get the job?

Again, Nick Saban did the same to get the LSU job. Now while beating Ball State in the MAC championship game was great for Gill, it WAS NOT the same as going 9-2 at Michigan State with Plaxico Burress and little else, as Saban had just done.

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