The Southeastern Soap Opera

So who's to blame for coaching fiasco of '07?

...it's this guy.

The SEC knows drama
Tommy Tuberville, the man that started it all, a man despised by most, unless of course it’s regarding possible coaching vacanccies at their respective schools. In 1998 Tommy Tubberville left the Univesity of Mississippi for an opportunity to coach at Auburn. To this day Ole Miss fans are still sore. At the time, the rest of us turned up our noses and said, “Man, that’s pretty low. Who would leave a school for another team in the same conference, let alone the same division?” Who indeed? Today, almost a decade later there are now 5 coaches in the SEC that were at one point in time the head coach of another SEC team.

Steve Spurrier, who played, coached, and won a National Title at UF, now coaches for South Carolina in the same division of the same conference as his alma mater. Urban Meyer took the job at FL knowing he would have to live in the OBC’s shadow, then found out he would have to face him every year. Meyer has since been able to get out from under SOS’s shadow by capturing his own National Title with solid coaching and a little help from the Zooker’s stocked cabinet.

Nick Saban, like Spurrier, left college to pursue an NFL coaching career. He snuck out the back door in Miami after emphatically stating that he would not be the Alabama head coach, only to join up with the Crimson Tide to form an Axis of Evil and transform them for a perennial mid-level rivalry game to an ultra-mega-super-arch-rivalry game for LSU fans. It was the best thing to ever happen to Les Miles’ popularity in BR. All of the fence post sitters simultaneously jumped on the ‘Fear the Hat’ wagon and are now riding it all the way to the ship. Winning the BCSCG would do even more to help Miles, but it will be a long time before you can utter the name Nick Saban in Baton Rouge without getting flashed a dirty look, no matter how much he did for the program.

One would think that after last year’s off-season nothing that crazy would ever happen again, but if that’s what you thought- you have since been proven wrong. In a coaching fiasco rivaled only by this year’s regular season more drama continues to unfold. Part of which began in the off season and has now carried over. Houston Nutt disappeared from Fayetteville faster than a fart in a tornado after he upset the #1 ranked LSU in TS at night, then reappeared at Ole Miss the very next day. Who could blame him? After sex scandals, whiny momma’s boys, coaches quitting, and player transfers the program had imploded. Even though a raise and contract extension were offered, there were few Nutt supporters left in R-Kansas. And that’s not all.

It all comes back full circle to where it all began, with the Riverboat Gambler. In 2003, Auburn’s president William Walker and athletic director David Housel secretly met with Tommy Tuberville’s former offensive coordinator, Bobby Petrino, to replace him. Tuberville found out about the coup, and it was swashed. After the Auburn debacle Petrino, a student of Saban’s “How to get a raise plan,” flirted with several other schools, including LSU, to leverage raises out of Louisville, and finally left for the greener pastures of the NFL. Only they weren’t greener, so what did he do? He took another page from Saban’s book without looking at the results, and backed into the SEC West, leaving yet another NFL team in shambles. And you can bet Tuberville will have a warm welcome in store for him when the Razorbacks travel to Jordan-Hare Stadium next October.

So what happens next? Prediction: Mississippi State fires Croom next season after another 3 win season and hires Ron Zook to complete the SEC West- the most incestuous coaching pool in all of college football. The stakes have been raised. As if it wasn't hard enough before, can you imagine how tough the SEC will be next year. No one escapes with less than 2 losses.