Retired coaches returning to Auburn

[aubiefifty 16,753]

Auburn fires its coaches, but they're all coming back

Posted on June 19, 2017 at 6:37 AM

8-10 minutes

Auburn has a history of paying football coaches to go away, but they're all coming back in retirement.

Retiree Tommy Tuberville lives so close to the coach who replaced him at Auburn that he can pepper Gene Chizik's yard with golf balls.

Chizik is enjoying the retired life in Auburn few people can imagine. He called it quits at such a young age that his youngest son is still in high school.

Then there's Pat Dye, who might be the most relevant retired college football coach in the country. After Dye retired in Auburn, the university not only put his name on the football field, but they gave him an office in the athletics building. He remains attuned to the pulse of the program, glad-hands recruits and boosters and promotes Auburn's agenda on radio shows.

Not bad for a coach who was forced to step down in the wake of NCAA violations.

"The trustees called me and said, look, we want to name something after you," Dye said. "Would you rather have a building, or would you rather have the field? I said, 'That's a no-brainer. I come out the dirt. I like the dirt.'"

Shug Jordan is buried in Auburn, and Dye retired there long ago. Relative newcomers to the Auburn Coaches Retirement Club are Tuberville and Chizik, who both had huge success for the Tigers, and then took enormous buyouts to go away. But now they're back and have put themselves out to pasture in the Loveliest Village on the Plains.

"It's such a good place to live, and you grow close to it because most of us raised our families in those areas," Tuberville said.

Or in the case of Chizik, still raising his family. One of Chizik's daughters attends Auburn, and his son could be at the university in a few years. Retired at 55, Chizik can't start drawing social security for 12 more years.

Chizik retired from football in February after living away from his family for two years in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He was a successful defensive coordinator for the Tar Heels, but the time away from his family was too difficult. Now, he's a principal member of the Auburn Coaches Retirement Club, and life is like a cool glass of Toomer's Corner lemonade.

Of the school's four living retired former head football coaches, three are walking into that "Sweet Auburn!" sunset of life either in Auburn or on nearby Lake Martin. And the fourth, Doug Barfield, isn't far away. He lives in east Montgomery, which is only a 40-minute car ride from campus.

Barfield's grandchildren live in Auburn, so he's no stranger to the place.

In one of the quirkiest wrinkles of the college football universe, every living person who has been a permanent head football coach at Auburn except Terry Bowden could meet for lunch at Momma Goldberg's on Magnolia Avenue in less than an hour. Current Auburn coach Gus Malzahn is entering his fifth season with the Tigers, but the Auburn Coaches Retirement Club is always looking for new members.

Recent history has proven that it's difficult to survive at Auburn as a football coach, and that's especially true now in the time of Nick Saban, but Auburn fans apparently love their former coaches once they retire. The coaches many of the fans wanted fired over the years are now celebrated around town. And why not, most of the coaches Auburn has fired or forced out through the years have been successful.

Chizik went 14-0 in 2010 and won a BCS national championship.

Tuberville beat Alabama six times in a row, went 13-0 in 2004 and was a BCS blunder away from playing for a national championship.

Dye, who is in the College Football Hall of Fame, won four SEC titles, including three in a row. He coached Bo Jackson, and defeated Paul Bryant.

Since 1993, when Bowden went 11-0 while on probation, no football team in the country has more undefeated seasons than Auburn (three), and only one team, Nebraska, has just as many. But Auburn fans and boosters are a demanding bunch. If a bad season on the Plains coincides with success over at Alabama, that usually means a lucky Auburn coach suddenly has the financial ability to retire while his golf game is still amendable.

Every Auburn coach since Shug Jordan retired in 1975 has been fired or forced out. When those same coaches retire and return, they are beloved.

"It's a family-type atmosphere, and you're always welcome," Tuberville said. "I go back to games, and it's like I'm still there. Everybody knows you. And that doesn't happen at a lot of places. It still has the family touch."

Both Tuberville and Chizik have houses in Auburn and at Lake Martin. Their buyouts from Auburn helped pay for those residences, of course. When Tuberville was forced out, Auburn paid him $5.1 million. Auburn then replaced Tuberville with Chizik, who the university later paid $7.5 million to go away.

It's an interesting retirement plan, getting fired, but that's life in the crazy world of the Southeastern Conference, and especially down at Auburn. Do Auburn's former coaches ever get together for poker night and play with their house money? Not exactly.

"You see each other," Tuberville said. "Everyone has their own ways, and obviously there are age differences."

There's a retired Auburn coach living in or near the campus for just about every decade: Chizik (55), Tuberville (62), Dye (77) and Barfield (81). Malzahn is 51 years old. His buyout after this season is $4,475,000.

Of the living members of the Auburn Coaches Retirement Club, Tuberville says he and Chizik are the closest with one another both in friendship and proximity. Chizik once worked on Tuberville's staff, and Chizik then replaced Tuberville at Auburn in 2009. Tuberville now jokes that a clean shot with his driver will send golf balls into Chizik's yard at the lake.

Not that he's tried that.

"But it's just a good place to live," Tuberville said, "and it's not just coaches. I saw a graph the other day, and in 10 years it's going to grow like 30 to 40 percent, one of the highest growing places in the state of Alabama."

Tuberville was so inspired by the love he received from Auburn upon his retirement that he strongly considered running for governor of the state. Here's an interesting twist of fate: having your retirement funded by Auburn boosters, and your campaign for governor.

One member of the Auburn Retired Coaches Club in particular, Dye, still wields considerable power in Auburn.

When Dye decided to retire, he held a meeting with key members of the university and carved out a position inside the university that would help the school raise money and raise its profile. The football coach from 1981 to 1992, Dye has served Auburn well in retirement.

"When I retired, I told them, look, I'm going to live in Auburn the rest of my life," Dye said. "We're going to do this thing right, or we're not going to do it."

Dye says having the football field bear his name is the honor of a lifetime, but his work for the university and the football team isn't merely titular. Most recently, he went on the radio and floated the idea of Auburn football moving from the Western Division of the SEC to the East. A week later at SEC spring meetings in Destin, Fla., Auburn athletics director Jay Jacobs echoed Dye's thoughts.

With a fiery personality, Dye remains a power player at Auburn after all these years, and he isn't interested in talking about how many former coaches live in town or at the lake.

"I'm more interested in these kids that we're recruiting, and who's coming to Auburn, and doing what I'm doing to help them," Dye said. "They don't grade your paper based on where you were born and raised, and what kind of car you drive and what kind of clothes you wear. They look down inside of you, and it's who you are on the inside that they care about."

The ethos of the Auburn Coaches Retirement Club is simple, and so is the admission fee. Members just flash an old Auburn pay stub at the clubhouse door. The group's official handshake will remain a secret.

[corchjay 5,311]

@augolf1716 and I were discussing this exact topic in the Chizik thread just a couple days ago.  Guess the beat writers read AUFamily. 

[auburn4ever 1,266]

Any time Jacobs fires a head coach, Auburn not only has to pay him, but Auburn also dishes out big money to all assistant coaches. In all, I wonder just how much money Auburn has paid the former coaches starting with Terry Bowden. I bet it is enough that we could have paid a big amount and hired a true winning coach every year instead of what Auburn/Jay Jacobs has been hiring.

[AUld fAUx@ 2,584]

34 minutes ago, auburn4ever said:

Any time Jacobs fires a head coach, Auburn not only has to pay him, but Auburn also dishes out big money to all assistant coaches. In all, I wonder just how much money Auburn has paid the former coaches starting with Terry Bowden. I bet it is enough that we could have paid a big amount and hired a true winning coach every year instead of what Auburn/Jay Jacobs has been hiring.

TBH, seems rather wasteful, and potentially more expensive than our current practice.

[corchjay 5,311]

37 minutes ago, auburn4ever said:

Any time Jacobs fires a head coach, Auburn not only has to pay him, but Auburn also dishes out big money to all assistant coaches. In all, I wonder just how much money Auburn has paid the former coaches starting with Terry Bowden. I bet it is enough that we could have paid a big amount and hired a true winning coach every year instead of what Auburn/Jay Jacobs has been hiring.

Do you want to play the big business game in college football or not?  Some great examples of not wanting to are Sewannee Tulane multiple texas schools...

[AU64 10,122]

17 minutes ago, corchjay said:

Do you want to play the big business game in college football or not?  Some great examples of not wanting to are Sewannee Tulane multiple texas schools...

Just wondering what "true winning coach" we could have hired that we did not hire?    

Meanwhile.....every one of those "losers" we hired had at least one undefeated season, or played for a national championship or won a few Division championships and / or were ranked #1 in the polls at some time during their time at AU...and of course they were not all hired by JJ.