Another opportunity wasted... Auburn just being Auburn.

Auburn is getting a bum rap on coach hire

We could have gone in a new direction. We could have given an opportunity...for both Auburn and Turner Gill.


From Phillip Marshall...
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Auburn is getting a bum rap on coach hire

I remember sitting at my kitchen table as a 13-year-old in Birmingham in 1963 and seeing my father shed very real tears for four little African-American girls who died at the hands of unspeakable evil when the 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed.

I remember, as a junior high school student, being taunted and even spat upon because I said I thought it was right that African-American kids should be able to go to our schools and our parks and eat in our restaurants.

I believe it is appalling that, considering who plays the game, only four out of 119 Division I-A college head football coaches are African-Americans.

We all have prejudices, but race has never been one of mine. Not even for a day. I credit my father for raising me that way. I say those things so that what I’m about to say won’t be misinterpreted.

Auburn is getting a bum rap.

It is getting a bum rap from one of its own former basketball stars, Charles Barkley. It is getting a bum rap from national columnists and reporters who hurl ugly charges without a shred of evidence, showing their own prejudices. It is even getting a bum rap from some of its own supporters.

Auburn could have made a statement by hiring Buffalo’s Turner Gill, an African-American, to be its head football coach. That would have been a good thing. But athletics director Jay Jacobs and those who helped him in his search decided instead to hire Gene Chizik, a good man and a good coach. He has enthusiastic support from many African-American young men who played for him.

There’s plenty of room for disagreement over whether that was the right choice. But there is no evidence that Auburn made its decision based on race.

Why were Tennessee, Syracuse and Clemson not ripped to shreds for not hiring African-Americans? Where was the outcry when Nebraska, Gill’s own alma mater, passed over him last season?

Auburn had serious interviews with two African-American candidates – Gill and Rodney Garner. That, in itself, is more than most schools do. So now Auburn is racist because it didn’t hire one of them? Yet, the other 115 schools that have white coaches aren’t?

Someone needs to explain that to me.

Gill finished second in Auburn’s deliberations. Some believe he should have been first. And there’s nothing wrong with that feeling. Some believe Auburn wasted an opportunity. And there’s nothing wrong with that feeling either.

But the sad thing is that Auburn, as it turns out, would have been better off if it had not interviewed Gill at all.