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

And why is that? Simple. Auburn is a Southern conservative (by higher education standards) agricultural school. Syracuse is a Northern liberal elite university. It is easy to depict Auburn as racist at worst or a bunch of ignorant rednecks at best. It is hard for these people, the media elites at ESPN and elsewhere, to either conceive that the sort of institution that they attended and sent their kids to is racist or incompetent.

So Auburn, the school that made the right decision for Gill and for itself in turning him down, gets skewered. Syracuse, the school that made the wrong decision, gets off scot-free just like Colorado did.

With Colorado, we were told that Rick Neuheisel was special. Which turned out to be, well, so not true. Neuheisel ran two strong programs into the ground and turned in a worse season last year than Karl Dorrell ever managed.

Now with Syracuse, they trot out Art Monk to repeat the nonsense that Gill didn't want the job, and it is unconditionally accepted by the New York media that gives a forum to Al Sharpton. (By the way, there was a black man on the Auburn board that interviewed Gill as well. Not that the media has told you that.)

Syracuse even put out the nonsense that Gill was trying to play them against Auburn. You mean the school that would have hired him on the spot had he consented to a staff of SEC assistants versus the school that a) could have hired him at any time after they fired their next Pete Carroll way back in mid-November and b) never had him as a serious candidate and c) was still nowhere near offering him a job?

Oh yes, and are we supposed to believe that schools regularly get in a huff and walk away from a candidate because he has an interview set up someplace else? Of course not. As a matter of fact, schools fight over hiring the guy that everyone else wants.

Yet everyone buys it. All of New York is convinced that Gill never wanted the Syracuse job to begin with, that Gill was trying to play Syracuse off against Auburn, and "who does he think he is" and claiming that he should have shown more interest in the Syracuse job in case he falls flat on his face at Buffalo, etc.

It really is unfair to Auburn. It is also unfair to the race issue. Why do we presume that racism only exists among lesser-educated people in the South, among people who go to and root for Auburn? That it does not exist among the Northern elites? That it may well be old money Wall Street blue-blood Northeastern types who bankroll Syracuse athletics that are opposed to a black man with a white wife, as opposed to Alabama cotton magnates?

Speaking of Al Sharpton and Spike Lee, they both say that the reason why they receive so much friction in an otherwise liberal media is that they expose the fact that there is just as much racism in the North among allegedly progressive people and institutions as there is anywhere else.

Had Sharpton held marches in Alabama instead of Bensonhurst, or Spike Lee made South Carolina instead of Brooklyn the subject of Do The Right Thing, they would have been celebrated. Instead, the very liberals who pretended to be so progressive on race reacted with rage when the mirror was shown on themselves.

After all, let's take a look at the Big East, which is mostly Northern institutions. What is their history of hiring black coaches? Well, it appears that they have had ONE in their entire history: Ron Dickerson. At TEMPLE. 1993-1997. Temple isn't even a Big East school anymore, that's how bad a job that was. So it has been FIFTEEN YEARS since the Big East hired its last black football coach to its WORST PROGRAM.

The truth is that Southern programs have a much better record than their Northeastern counterparts. There have been black coaches at Louisville, Wake Forest, and Mississippi State since Temple hired Dickerson, and there is currently a black coach at Miami.

Further, Charlie Strong turned down the Vanderbilt job, Gill could have had the Auburn job if he had wanted it badly enough, and Joker Phillips will be the next head coach at Kentucky. So why is the New York Times going after Auburn instead of looking at their own backyard?

Everyone owes Auburn an apology. (The AP share of the 2003 national title when the Reggie Bust—excuse me, Reggie Bush—investigation finally finishes would be a nice start. I know, I won't hold my breath.) And Syracuse deserves much more scrutiny than they have gotten.

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