Editor’s note: This is the second in a two-part series examining the legacy of Auburn football coach Ralph “Shug” Jordan, 50 years after he announced he was planning to step down after the 1975 season. In Part 2, we examine the high and low points — and overarching inconsistency — of the half-century of Auburn football since Jordan’s retirement as head coach.

On April 8, 1975, the day the news broke that the upcoming football season would be his last as Auburn head coach, Ralph “Shug” Jordan invoked the words of one of the most distinguished leaders of World War II.

Jordan was himself a decorated war veteran, a U.S. Army captain who served with distinction in both Europe and the Pacific before becoming among the most-successful and respected football coaches in SEC history. Fifty years later, those words — borrowed in part from Winston Churchill — seem even more poignant now.

“If the past and the present choose to fight, bicker and quarrel, we’ll surely lose the battle of the future,” Jordan said. “I hope all Auburn people will unite to win that battle of the future.”

Jordan’s comments were apparently directed at those in the Auburn administration, whose competing agendas had led to news of the coach’s impending departure leaking out before he was ready. But perhaps he was also worried that the program’s future would be less stable than it had been during his 25 years as head coach.

It was certainly a prescient statement by Jordan. In the 50 years since he last coached at Auburn, the Tigers have been a volatile football program, enjoying some extreme highs and quite a few lows, but little consistency.

“It all comes down to leadership,” said Terry Henley, an All-SEC running back under Jordan in the early 1970s. “And when we’ve had our down moments as a football program, it is because there wasn’t the right kind of leadership.”

Perhaps most remarkably, Jordan remains the last Auburn head football coach who left on his own terms. Everyone else who has held that position in the last 50 years — and there have been seven others between Jordan and current head man Hugh Freeze — has either been fired or resigned under pressure.

That’s a fact unique to Auburn among its most-tenured SEC rivals. Of the nine other programs that have been in the conference since at least 1975 — Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, LSU, Mississippi State, Ole Miss, Tennessee and Vanderbilt — all have had at least one coach in the last half-century either retire or leave to take another job.

AUBURN COACHES SINCE JORDAN

Auburn had gone 10-2 in 1974, its seventh winning season in eight years. But the Tigers slipped to 3-6-2 in Jordan’s final season, and wouldn’t be a serious national contender again until Pat Dye’s 1983 team won the SEC championship.

“When Jordan made his announcement, it’s almost as if he cast a pall over the program,” said Paul Finebaum, who was hired at the Birmingham Post-Herald in the fall of 1979 and has covered every Auburn coach since in newspapers, on radio or on television. “And I think his statement foretold what was going on. There was obviously division.

“And what’s so strange in the next 50 years, it’s just been a collection of incredible peaks and valleys. And it’s not like there hasn’t been success; there has. There has just not been a continuum of success, where either a coach left to go somewhere else, or a coach found a way to the finish line without complete and total embarrassment. There is a really nasty trend that I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anywhere else.”

‘Instead of a smooth transition, it was helter-skelter’

The half-century Auburn rollercoaster ride began with the appointment of Jordan’s successor, offensive coordinator Doug Barfield. Rather than conduct an outside search, the school’s athletic brain trust — school president Harry Philpott, athletics director Lee Hayley and several key trustees — gave notice that Barfield was set to take over in 1976 on the same day Jordan announced he would coach one more season before retiring.

The 39-year-old Barfield had been on the Auburn staff for three years, and had directed a 1974 Tigers offense that had nearly doubled its point output from the previous season. But he was nowhere near as experienced or long-tenured as defensive coordinator Paul Davis, an Auburn assistant since 1967 who had coached in the SEC for nearly 15 years.

“Instead of a smooth transition like they all planned, it was helter-skelter,” said Auburn graduate and football historian David Housel, who served as the school’s sports information director from 1981-94 and its athletics director from 1994-2006. “… I wasn’t in the room, but everybody who was in the room pretty much said the same thing. One trustee stood up said, ‘Why do we need to have a search? We’ve got a good man on staff. Let’s just give it to Doug Barfield.’

“A number of Auburn people wanted Paul Davis. And a number wanted Doug Barfield because of his offense. And that was the division Coach Jordan was talking about. And I do not think it ever healed until Coach Dye came (in 1981).”

Barfield’s first Auburn team went 3-8, losing six of its final seven games after early-season victories over Tennessee and Ole Miss. The Tigers improved to 5-6 — including a win over Georgia — in 1977, but lost the Iron Bowl to Alabama 48-21 to finish with a losing record for the third straight season.

Things got better again in 1978, with a 6-4-1 finish that included a 22-22 tie against a very good Georgia team. The 1979 Auburn team was Barfield’s best, going 8-3 and losing by only seven to an Alabama squad that would go on to win its second straight national title.

Barfield’s 1980 team went winless in SEC play, including a 42-0 loss to Tennessee and yet another defeat to Alabama — Auburn’s fifth straight during his tenure and eighth in a row overall. He was asked to resign by school president Hanly Funderburk, and did so on Dec. 1.

“I am not one to stay where I am not wanted,” Barfield said at the time. “… We do not have the united front and the unity of purpose among Auburn people that we need. This division has rendered us ineffective.”

Barfield was then and remains now a sympathetic figure, with many arguing he did as well as could be expected considering he shared a conference and a state with an Alabama program that was on an all-time run under Paul “Bear” Bryant. The Crimson Tide team won eight SEC championships and three national titles during the 1970s, and lost only three conference games from 1971-79 (one of them to Auburn).

With Barfield out, Auburn officials this time chose to conduct a real search for their next football coach. And their No. 1 target was a huge name — Georgia head coach Vince Dooley.

Then 48-years-old, Dooley had played quarterback at Auburn under Jordan in the late 1950s and had been the Tigers’ freshman team coach from 1961-63. But in December 1980, he had just completed an undefeated regular season and was set to face Notre Dame in the Sugar Bowl with a shot at Georgia’s first national championship since World War II.

“Dooley was having so much success that there were people in my high school in Sylacauga that were wearing Georgia stuff, not Alabama or Auburn stuff. That was weird,” said Van Allen Plexico, an Auburn alum who has written a number of books about Tigers athletics and co-hosts the AU Wishbone podcast. “That’s when you knew he was doing well. But I was never convinced because we knew he had Herschel Walker. We knew they were contending for national championships. So I was like, ‘well, it would be cool to have him, but I know I wasn’t sure he was gonna leave all that to go to 5-6 Auburn.”

‘Alabama didn’t want us to hire him’

Plexico wound up being correct, but the Dooley hire very nearly happened at Auburn. Several newspapers, including the Macon (Ga.) News and Birmingham Post-Herald, published banner headlines in early December 1980 that Dooley had accepted the Auburn job or was expected to do so.

But a few days later, Dooley announced he was staying at Georgia. He admitted to having felt the pull of his alma mater, but remained with the Bulldogs, won a national championship that season and coached another eight years in Athens before moving into administration.

Auburn then pursued Florida State’s Bobby Bowden, but was also rebuffed. As Plexico and co-author John Ringer wrote in First Time Ever, their 2023 book about the 1989 Iron Bowl, then Alabama Gov. Fob James — a former Auburn football star — threw up his hands and told the other members of the coaching search committee “go hire who you want.”

They landed of course on Dye, a former Georgia star and Bryant assistant at Alabama who had coached five years at East Carolina before spending the 1980 season at Wyoming. It has been long been rumored that Bryant eyed Dye as his eventual successor, a transition that would be difficult to pull off if Dye went to arch-rival Auburn.

After going 5-6 in 1981, Dye began a sustained run off success at Auburn that perhaps exceeded even Jordan’s greatest moments and has not been approached since. In eight seasons from 1982-89, the Tigers averaged 9.5 victories, won or shared in four SEC championships and beat Alabama six times (he also went 5-3 vs. Dooley).

In his dual role as coach and athletics director, Dye’s crowning achievement was moving the Iron Bowl out of Birmingham — where it had been played for more than 40 years — and taking it to Auburn’s Jordan-Hare Stadium for the first time in 1989. More importantly, he made Tigers players and their fans believe that they didn’t have to take a backseat to anyone.

“I think what sold a lot of us on Coach Dye was that Alabama didn’t want us to hire him,” Plexico said. “… And just his whole demeanor — he was tough and hard-nosed and wanted to run the ball. And his voice and accent, he just sounded like he should be at Auburn. … Even his first year, when we went 5-6, instead of losing 42-0 to Tennessee, we lost 14-10. And then once he beat Alabama the first time (in 1982), it was like euphoria.”

But as the 1980s ended and the 1990s began, cracks formed in Dye’s Auburn stronghold. The coach’s health began to falter — he suffered from hemochromatosis, a condition where iron builds up within the body and leads to organ and tissue damage, as well as pain and fatigue — and the NCAA specter rose again. A former Auburn player, Eric Ramsey, released secretly-recorded audio tapes of him discussing a pay-for-play scheme with members of the coaching staff.

Auburn finished 5-6 in 1991, its first losing season since Dye’s first year. With the Tigers on the way to a 5-5-1 finish in 1992 and facing massive NCAA sanctions — which would ultimately cost them bowl eligibility in 1993 and 1994 — Dye resigned on the eve of the Iron Bowl, a 17-0 loss to eventual national champion Alabama.

“We lost our mental and physical toughness,” Dye wrote in his 2014 memoir After the Arena, “and when you do that in the Southeastern Conference, you’re doomed.”

A period of booster interference, contentious hires

The search for Dye’s replacement was not a smooth one, as Miami’s Dennis Erickson, North Carolina State’s Dick Sheridan and Georgia Tech’s Bill Lewis all turned the job down. Terry Bowden, Bobby’s 36-year-old son and then head coach at Samford, wound up with the job.

Bowden took a probation-riddled Auburn team to an 11-0 record and an Iron Bowl victory, then went 9-1-1 in 1994. The Tigers slipped to 8-4 in both 1995 and 1996 before an SEC West title in 1997, but the bottom fell out the following year.

Unable to receive assurances he’d be retained following a 1-5 start to the 1988 season, Bowden resigned in late October. Defensive coordinator Bill Oliver served as interim coach the rest of the way, as the Tigers limped to a 3-8 finish.

The Bowden era was when the idea of booster interference began to become synonymous with Auburn football. The two most-prominent names mentioned in that regard were banking executive Bobby Lowder and lumber magnate Jimmy Rane (the state’s only billionaire), both powerful members of the school’s Board of Trustees.

Auburn made what can only be viewed as a successful hire to replace Bowden, pilfering Tommy Tuberville from SEC rival Ole Miss. Tuberville won 85 games and seven Iron Bowls in 10 seasons with the Tigers, including a 13-0 finish in 2004 that would have resulted in a national championship — or at least a chance to play for one — in just about any other season.

Tuberville also endured his own interference, the infamous “JetGate” scandal of 2003. Housel, school president William Walker and trustees Earlon McWhorter and Byron Franklin flew to Louisville to week with Cardinals coach Bobby Petrino without first firing Tuberville (Lowder was not on the flight, though his private plane was used for the trip).

Newspapers in Alabama and Kentucky uncovered the plot and Tuberville kept his job. He stayed another five years before, by all accounts, his distaste for recruiting proved to be his undoing in the face of Nick Saban’s emerging dynasty at Alabama.

Walker resigned a few months after JetGate, and Housel retired the following summer. Lowder remained on the board until 2009, though his influence diminished following the scandal and in the wake of the banking collapse of 2008 (on the other hand, Rane’s stature among the Auburn behind-the-scenes operators continued to grow, as did that of Birmingham business executive Raymond Harbert).

“The easiest and most convenient thing to say about Auburn is that they’ve had these two or three power brokers that have done such harm,” Finebaum said. “And by the way, I’ve written that and I’ve said that. Everybody has said that. But as I’ve studied it over the years and really gotten to know a few of those people, I believe that one of those people in particular, and maybe two — Bobby Lowder and Jimmy Rane — actually knew what they were talking about.

“I’ve always argued that Lowder did so much more good for Auburn than bad, that he was so intuitive and so instinctive and so smart. He made a blunder or two — and so has Rane — but I would trust them over the collection of athletic directors who couldn’t shoot straight or presidents who have interfered or trustees who have interfered, trying to stop the most powerful trustees.”

The search for Tuberville’s replacement also appeared poorly executed, with Gene Chizik — the defensive coordinator on Auburn’s undefeated 2004 team — hired despite a 5-19 record at Iowa State. Chizik shocked the football world by winning a national championship with the Tigers in 2010, though many observers give much of the credit to an otherworldly season by Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback Cam Newton.

Chizik’s program went off the rails with an 0-8 finish in conference play in 2012, and he was fired. Gus Malzahn, the Auburn offensive coordinator in 2010 who had by that time wisely moved on to become head coach at Arkansas State, took over.

Malzahn seemed like an obvious choice at Auburn, though the school first Kirby Smart, who was then Alabama’s defensive coordinator. Talks with Smart broke down after insisted on staying at his current job through the Crimson Tide’s national championship run; Auburn athletics director Jay Jacobs was not comfortable with that, Smart told ESPN in 2017. (In retrospect, Smart might have won big at Auburn, but he almost certainly would have still jumped to Georgia when the job at his alma mater came open two years later.)

Ralph Jordan Jr., son of the former Auburn coach and a past president of the school’s alumni association, said part of the problem at his alma mater is that some people — including those with money and influence — sometimes care too much. He recalled something Julian Holmes, another former Auburn Alumni Association president, once told him.

“He used to say that, ‘You know, Auburn people all think they know what’s best for Auburn. And they’re all very opinionated about that. Sometimes it puts them at odds with fellow Auburn people,‘” Jordan told AL.com. “I said, that’s kind of the story everywhere I’d worked or anything else.

“But then he said, ‘the really good news here on Earth is that people don’t live forever.’ I don’t think he had anybody in particular in mind, but I think what he was saying is some people get kind of dug in.”

A ‘solid year’ wasn’t good enough

Auburn won the SEC championship and played for a national title in Malzahn’s first season, but had only sporadic success thereafter. His 2017 team won the SEC West, and he beat Alabama three times in eight tries — a record far better against Saban’s juggernaut than most of his contemporaries.

The COVID-marred 2020 season marked the end for Malzahn, a 6-5 finish that included blowout losses to Alabama and Georgia. After a 31-20 loss to Texas A&M on Dec. 5, Malzahn said he believed a victory over Mississippi State in the upcoming regular-season finale would still result in a “solid year” given the circumstances.

Malzahn tried to walk those comments back a few days later, but the damage was done. He was fired at the end of the regular season, setting off a bizarre power struggle from which Auburn still has not recovered.

On one side were the old guard — allegedly led by Rane — who wanted veteran defensive coordinator Kevin Steele installed as permanent head coach (he was interim coach for the Tigers’ bowl game loss to Northwestern). On the other were school president Jay Gogue and athletics director Allen Greene, who wanted a break from the norm and to hire someone with no previous ties to Auburn.

Auburn ultimately hired Boise State’s Bryan Harsin, the first Tigers head coach with no work history in the state of Alabama or the SEC since the pre-Jordan era. Louisiana head coach Billy Napier (now at Florida) and Clemson defensive coordinator Brent Venables (now at Oklahoma) were also connected with the search, though it has been widely reported that both expressed reservations during the interview process as to who was really in charge of the Tigers’ football program.

Harsin’s tenure was an outright disaster, with rumors of locker room disharmony and a mysterious athletic department investigation at the end of 2021 that cleared him of any wrongdoing but didn’t save his job for long. He was fired midway through his second year with a 9-12 record, and SEC veteran Hugh Freeze was hired prior to the 2023 season.

Freeze’s first two years at Auburn have yielded final records of 6-7 and 5-7, giving the Tigers four consecutive losing seasons for the first time since the pre-Jordan era. The current coach has made headway in recruiting — signing Top 10-rated classes in both 2024 and 2025 — but fans might begin to lose patience if he doesn’t soon show better results on the field.

If Freeze is ever going to unite the Auburn fan base, he might take cues from one of his long-ago predecessors, as well as the man whose office is across the street from Jordan-Hare Stadium at Neville Arena.

“My dad really enjoyed living in Auburn and the long, lifetime friendships with Auburn alumni and fans,” Ralph Jordan Jr. said. “Just getting out and mingling with Auburn people seemed to recharge his batteries. And certainly Friday night pep rallies before ballgames, he never missed a one. That was his chance to get out and entertain and interact with the student body.

“Bruce Pearl is probably the closest we’ve had to that at Auburn recently. What he’s done with the basketball program is nothing short of amazing. And I think Hugh is going to be of that same stripe.”

Plenty of volatility, but still high expectations

Two questions remain, however.

First, how volatile has Auburn been in comparison to its SEC counterparts? And second, what should expectations for the Tigers really be on a year-to-year basis?

To answer the first question, we simply should consult the data. Not counting interim coaches, Auburn has had nine full-time head football coaches since 1975 (counting Jordan). That’s a lot, but fewer than fellow SEC powers LSU (11), Alabama (10) and Florida (10), and only one more than Tennessee (8). (Georgia has been remarkably stable, with just five head football coaches since the mid-1960s.)

HEAD FOOTBALL COACHES SINCE 1975

Auburn has also won seven SEC titles and a national championship in the last 50 years, but also has 14 losing seasons and has won a good-but-not-great 64% of its games overall in the span. Florida, to pick one SEC counterpart, has nine conference championships and three national titles, and has won 68% of its games since 1975.

WINNING PERCENTAGES SINCE 1975

Auburn, of course, suffers by sharing the state with Alabama, with 17 SEC championships, nine national titles and only five losing seasons since 1975. Georgia, the Tigers’ other arch-rival, has 43 winning seasons, nine SEC championships and three national titles in the last 50 years.

CHAMPIONSHIPS WON SINCE 1975

There are those in the Auburn fan base who believe there is no reason the Tigers cannot achieve the year-to-year greatness of Alabama under Bryant and Saban or Georgia under Dooley and Smart. Auburn certainly did so in the height of the Dye years (and for parts of Jordan’s tenure), so why couldn’t it happen again?

But while there have many years of frustration for Auburn football in the last half-century, there have also been some remarkable, magnificent seasons — 1983, 1989, 1993, 2004, 2010, 2013 and 2017 among them. Plexico said he’d much rather endure the swings of following the Tigers rather than to root for other programs with a lower ceiling.

“I have probably a different opinion than some people,” Plexico said, “but I think that in terms of football, Auburn is naturally an 8-4 program. But every now and then we can attract the right mix of players — like with Cam Newton and Nick Fairley (in 2010) — and get to the max. Then we kind of regress to average again. Sometimes we even fall below average, if there are issues with the coach or off the field. I think our program is just prestigious enough that we can attract difference-makers and have one of those magical seasons.

“And so it’s just going to bounce up and down, as much as I’d love to stop bouncing and stay up. But I’d a thousand percent rather be what we are than be someone who is always pretty good but is never going to play for a championship. I will absolutely endure the lows to be able to get to the highs that not a lot of programs ever reach.”

Creg Stephenson has worked for AL.com since 2010 and has written about college football for a variety of publications since 1994. Email him at [email protected].