Coach of the Year - A Season for the Ages

He knew it was over. Tommy Tuberville and his whole staff would soon be shown the door, despite four consecutive winning seasons, four bowl games and share of thee division titles in five seasons at Auburn University.

One more game, against archrival Alabama, and they would all be out looking for new jobs.

“I had already put in my application to be a greeter at Wal-Mart,” he would later joke.

Laughter helped. Gallows humor under tough situations usually eases the pain. So does resilience, faith and the reinforcement of assistant coaches and players who refused to back down in the face of adversity.

“We all got together as a coaching staff and said, ‘If the kids are going to learn anything from this, let’s teach them how to handle adversity,’” Tuberville says. “Of course, it doesn’t get any worse than that for a coach, people trying to run you off.”

Just two days before the Alabama game, the university president took a private jet loaded with the athletic director and two members of the board of trustees and flew North with the specific intent on hiring a new coach to replace Tuberville.

“Coaches know,” Tuberville said. “I knew. I couldn’t get anybody to talk to me. Couldn’t get any answers.”

What he could get, however, was the attention and support of his players. Two days later, Auburn finished up a disappointing regular season with a 28-23 victory over Alabama.

“Things could have easily gotten out of hand, but the way he kept his composure and stayed humble has carried over to this year’s team,” Auburn quarterback Jason Campbell said. “He could have blown up, but he showed us how to handle adversity.”

One year later, Tuberville’s Tigers took a 12-0 record, a No. 3 national ranking and an SEC championship into the Sugar Bowl against Virginia Tech. The Bowl Championship Series system left Auburn out of the national championship picture, favoring No. 1 USC and No. 2 Oklahoma, but it can’t take away what Auburn has accomplished this season - both on and off the field.

“It started last year with Coach Tub,” running back Carnell Williams says. “The things he went through, the way he handled that whole situation, we saw that and knew he was special. We rallied around that.”

Defensive ends coach Terry Price says, “ (Tuberville) was kind of the rock we all looked up to as coaches. He never wavered. He never faltered. He never showed any signs of the things that were getting to him, and that was great for us as assistant coaches to look up to a guy like that. He deserves this season, because he’s worked hard to get this program where it is today.”

That is why Tuberville is Schutt Sports 2004 Division I-A Coach of the Year presented by American Football Monthly, an award Tuberville is eager to share with his coaches, staff and players. Every award-winning coach says it, but Tuberville means it. If any team ever truly rallied around a cause and pulled together for a single purpose, it’s the 2004 Tigers.

“It’s a very special team, a very spiritual team,” Tuberville says. “They love each other – and love isn’t a word you use very often around this game. It’s a very physical sport, a demanding sport, with all weight lifting and training and hitting and all the male egos, but this team genuinely loves each other, and they express it and they show it.

“In 30 years of coaching, I’ve never seen anything like the way this team has rallied around each other. We went through some tough times last year when I knew I wasn’t going to come back. But two of the reasons I did come back after the whole ‘Jetgate’ deal was that the players stayed behind us 110 percent and the fans did as well.

“These players grew up a lot in those two weeks. I think they learned a lot from the situation I was in about how to do things, how not to do things and how to focus on what’s important. We were playing Alabama last year during this big charade and our players were able to focus on it because of (team chaplain) Chette Williams and our coaches talking to them, telling them ‘this isn’t about us’ and reminding them it’s about team. We told them ‘don’t win for us. Win for yourselves, for each other. This is the biggest game of the year. This is our championship.’

“We haven’t lost a game since then. That was a major growing point for our players and our staff about learning from a tough situation.”

The entire incident, which led to Tuberville’s emotional decision to stay and accept a renewed commitment from the university and forced the university president out of his job, turned out to be one of many critical turning points in an extraordinary year for the Auburn football program.

The next one came in January ‘04 when three star players and team leaders, running backs Ronnie Brown and Williams and cornerback Carlos Rogers, would all decide to pass up the NFL draft and return for their senior seasons – even if it meant Williams and Brown would have to share the ball and the spotlight and Rogers would spend his senior season wondering if quarterbacks would ever throw his way.

Neither Williams nor Brown finished the season with the stats they could have reached if they had been the main focus of the offense, but both went on to earn first-team All-SEC honors and increase their NFL stock because of their improved blocking and receiving skills, as well as their unselfish attitudes, team leadership and eagerness to play on special teams. Rogers also made the most of his senior season, earning All-America honors and the Jim Thorpe Award as the nation’s top defensive back.

The next turning point came when Tuberville sat down with his offensive coaches and decided to bring in a new offensive coordinator. When Bobby Petrino left following just one season at Auburn, Tuberville wanted to keep his offensive scheme intact and promoted offensive line coach Hugh Nall to coordinate the offense and brought in Steve Ensminger to coach the quarterbacks and help call the plays. While the Tigers showed marked improvement in their final two games of the season, it was an awkward situation that Tuberville had to fix.

“Hugh and I sat down and discussed the situation and came to the conclusion that we were going to have to bring someone else in here,” Tuberville says. “He agreed that we needed someone who could come in with the ability to run and throw the ball with the personnel we had.”

More important, Nall went out of his way to make the change work. From the interview process to hire veteran assistant Al Borges as the new offensive coordinator, to off-season meetings, spring practice and the actual season itself, Nall has been an example of class and professionalism for coaches and players.

“We couldn’t be 12-0 right now without the way Hugh and Steve handled the entire situation – from the demotion to the change of positions to the interview process to hiring a new coordinator and accepting the change in philosophy to the working relationship the coaches all had together,” Tuberville says. “Al also had to do his part. He had to fit in as well, but it starts with Hugh Nall and Steve Ensminger. The relationship couldn’t have been better. All three of them are professionals.”

Borges did his part exceptionally well. Tuberville interviewed some of the brightest young offensive minds in college football, but Borges proved to be the right fit for many reasons. Instead of arriving with preconceived notions about his background in the West Coast offense, Borges adapted his ideas to Auburn’s personnel and circumstances. As Auburn’s fourth offensive coordinator in four years Borges agreed to take on Auburn’s terminology to make the adjustment easier for the players and coaches, especially Campbell, a fifth-year senior who had endured enough coaching changes and criticism to ruin many quarterbacks.

“Al deserves a lot of credit for the way he’s handled it,” Tuberville says. “I’ve worked with some guys over the years who stuck their chests out and made it all about them, and they’re not with us anymore, but Al hasn’t done that. You can’t have that. That’s one thing that separates this staff from staffs that aren’t as successful at similar programs.”

The entire summer proved to be another turning point. It didn’t take long before strength and conditioning coach Kevin Yoxall noticed more players than ever before working overtime in the volunteer workouts. It wasn’t just quarterbacks, backs, receivers and defensive backs, either. It was linemen and linebackers pushing themselves through individual and group drills and actually running their own organized plays late into the evening.

The spiritual character of the program also moved to a new level. In Tuberville’s first year at Auburn he hired a former player and ordained minister, Chette Williams, to be the team chaplain, knowing full well that team character and chemistry is no longer something that can be assumed in this day and age. With the freedom to attend all practices, team and staff meetings and be an ever-present force within the program, Williams has served as a father figure, big brother, mentor, advisor and pastor to the players, coaches and staff.

The spiritual and character aspect of the program was already taking hold when it strengthened its grip over the summer. Before Williams knew what had happened, between 60-70 players were attending a voluntary Bible study once a week at a local restaurant. Williams saw players opening up to each other in a hold new way, praying together, holding each accountable and crying, hugging and lifting each other up. The Tigers are convinced those close bonds carried over to the off-season workouts and into the season.

“He understands these players from the day we recruit them, their problems, their strengths and their weaknesses,” Tuberville says. “He works on all of those things for the four or five years the players are here and he has been one of the major reasons for our unselfish attitude, the belief in team.

“You can’t not go through college and build a philosophy for life or a winning college football program in this day and time without talking about being unselfish, because there’s so much that these kids see on TV, that they see in the pros, that they see in the recruiting services that build up all these 17- and 18-year-old to a level where they’re going to fail no matter what they do.

“Once those kids step on our campus they’ve got to have someone, other than coaches, who will put their arms around them and Chette Williams has been that guy and he’s been a blessing for us.”

Tuberville and his staff also did their part to show the way by constantly pointing forward instead of dwelling in the past and pointing fingers at their accusers.

“I thought the best thing that we did last year after all this stuff had happened was that we sat down as a staff and made a decision between all of us that we were not going to look back,” Tuberville says. “If these players were going to learn anything from this coaching staff about this it is that they put it behind them and they didn’t look back. And I told the coaches we were going to do that, we weren’t going to have any hard feelings towards anybody because this is a business, we have a job to do, we can’t worry about the past we have to worry about the future. Our coaches have done a good job with that and we’ve handled it exactly that way.

“And hopefully if our players learned anything from that is, hey, these guys handled adversity and they never let it bother our plans for what we were going to do in the future. Because, again, this is a business and I understand sometimes you might have to go through some things like that, maybe not to that degree, but I learned from it myself personally. Did I want to go through that? No. But after it was over with, it was probably the best thing for this program, this university and everybody involved. I’ve talked to everybody involved in the situation and we all agree that what’s best for Auburn is to look forward.”

It turns out the Tigers had a lot to look forward to. Over the course of the season the offense developed into a productive passing team and learned to make the best use of all of its weapons behind a solid line. Meanwhile, defensive coordinator Gene Chizik and the defensive staff took a unit that was supposed to be too small and too inexperienced after the loss of five starters in the front seven and developed it into the nation’s leading scoring defense, allowing 11.2 points per game.

The turning points during the season became a multitude of defining moments for the Tigers. In a 10-9 win over fourth-ranked LSU, Campbell completed a 14-yard pass to Courtney Taylor on fourth-and-12 to sustain the game-winning drive, then followed it three plays later on third-and-12 with a 16-yard touchdown pass to Taylor.

In a 34-10 victory over 10th-ranked Tennessee, the Tigers jumped out to a 31-3 halftime lead and never looked back. In the games Auburn was supposed to win, both in and out of conference, the Tigers didn’t waste time pulling away for a one-sided victory. Against fifth-ranked Georgia late in the season, they showed a national television audience what they were made of with a 24-6 victory. On the road at archrival Alabama, the Tigers overcame an emotional Crimson Tide team and a 6-0 halftime deficit to win 21-13.

The Tigers topped it all off with a 38-28 victory over Tennessee in the SEC championship game. The next day, they learned that USC and Oklahoma had been selected to play for the national championship in the Orange Bowl, leaving the Tigers on the outside looking in.

Once again, Tuberville’s response set the example for the way his team would handle their anger and disappointment.

“We can’t accomplish anymore than what we accomplished,” Tuberville says. “We consider ourselves the best team in the country. That’s what matters.”

In the process, Tuberville, his staff and his coaches have taught a lot of lessons about what should really matter in football. It’s a team game, where coaches bring together young men of different races, religions and socio-economic backgrounds and teach them lessons about hard work, character and resilience in the face of adversity.

Auburn wouldn’t be 12-0 and champions of the SEC without those lessons.

“It’s all about our players and coaches and what they went through,” Tuberville says. “I just enjoyed the year, watching them week to week.

It feels good after 29 years to be recognized and accomplish something like this season. That’s what I’ve been working for all my life, to make a difference in kids’ lives. We were successful on and off the field and I think touched a lot of people across the country with the true meaning of a football team.”

The chemistry on Auburn’s coaching staff is no accident. It helps that five of coach Tommy Tuberville’s assistants have been with him 10 years at both Ole Miss and Auburn. Joe Whitt has been at Auburn through three head coaches since 1981 and defensive coordinator Gene Chizik just completed his third season at Auburn.

“The No. 1 criteria for a successful coaching staff in college football is that you have to be together,” Tuberville says. “You all have to believe in the same things. You have to work and live together. You have to be able to put in 15-18 hours a day together. If you’re not on the same page you’re going to have problems. You can have disagreements and arguments, but in the final say-so everyone has to be on the same page. If you have a group that does that and believes in what you’re doing together then you’ve got a chance.”

It helps that the coaches on the Auburn staff work and play together, doing everything from participating in interviews for new staff members and other important decisions to hanging out together socially with families.

“We treat this as a business where the head coach and the coaches all do things together,” Tuberville says. “Obviously I have to have the final say, but there also has to be a tremendous amount of unity within your staff. There has to be a family atmosphere, and if you don’t have that then you’re going to have problems that are going to creep up during good times and bad times.

“Most of these guys have been with me for 10 years and we’ve been through some tough situations. We started two programs from the bottom up and we’ve won, and won consistently, and a lot of it is because this staff works together and believes in each other.

“We try to create a family atmosphere. We do things away from the office as much as we do at the office, with our families and cookouts and other things. I believe in that. I believe the more you get together away from the office the more you understand about each other. You’re always going to have problems, just like any family, but when there’s a bond you can work things out a lot easier if everyone understands each other more.”

That staff chemistry and cohesiveness was evident following the 2003 season when Tuberville asked offensive line coach Hugh Nall to give up his offensive coordinator duties and moved quarterbacks coach Steve Ensminger to tight ends so Auburn could bring in a new offensive coordinator who would also coach quarterbacks. Both Nall and Ensminger helped in the hiring of offensive coordinator Al Borges, another coach who has fit well into Auburn’s staff.

“Ego is one thing that can ruin a coaching staff,” Tuberville says. “You’re going to have egos. Everyone’s got one, but you can’t have selfish egos.

It only takes one guy on your staff that has any kind of ego where he’s all about himself instead of the team, that guy’s going to run your staff. I don’t have it. I’m not going to have it. If I ever get any kind of feeling toward that, that would be a big reason for a change.

“This year’s success is all about being unselfish, with both the coaches and the players buying into that.”