They crave their football in Alabama. In a state where radio stations count down the hundreds of days until the first kickoff, Alabama hands out the state’s coveted Iron Bowl football trophy at a basketball game.

So as the winning Iron Bowl coach, Nick Saban took the microphone last March before a sold-out Alabama-Auburn basketball crowd in Tuscaloosa to accept the adulation for beating Auburn. Alabama fans had waited through six long years of counting Tommy Tuberville’s fingers as each Auburn victory over Alabama accumulated.

“This is an honor to have this trophy in our possession this year,” Saban told the crowd, “and for many years to come.”

If the state of Alabama in 2008 had been an electoral map, the color would have shifted dramatically from blue to red — or better yet, crimson. Just as the late Tim Russert succinctly explained Florida’s influence on the 2000 presidential election, the tide turned between Alabama’s two major college football programs in ’08 for one simple reason.

Saban.

Time will dictate whether Saban’s one-liner proves to be correct. What can’t be debated is how Alabama improved from 7–6 in 2007 to being within one SEC Championship Game victory of playing for the national championship in 2008. What can’t be debated is how suddenly Auburn deteriorated from a consistent nine- or 10-game winner to a 5–7 record that resulted in the departure of Tuberville, the Tigers’ longtime coach.

When he was introduced as Alabama’s coach in January 2007, Saban drew a line in the sand when he said, “We have an opponent in this state that we work to dominate 365 days a year.” By day 696 of the Saban Era — the date Alabama routed Auburn 36–0 to complete a perfect 12–0 regular season — the goal had already been met.

“I don’t think this thing will go one way continually very long,” former Auburn coach Terry Bowden says, “unless there’s a Bear Bryant, which we’re about to find out.”

Inevitably, Alabama and Auburn fans can’t help but see in Saban the beauty or misery — depending on your loyalties — of Bear Bryant. In his second season, Bryant ended a five-game Auburn winning streak and went on to win four straight in the series, a stretch that included his first national championship.

“I think Auburn’s got a big mountain to climb,” says former Dallas Cowboys executive Gil Brandt, who closely follows Saban’s career and whose son attends Auburn. “It’s one thing if you’re competing against somebody. But it’s another thing if you’re competing against somebody who is very good at what he does. Nick is as good as it gets at what he does.”

To take on Saban, Auburn hired Gene Chizik, who not long ago was considered a rising coaching prospect after he was the defensive coordinator at Auburn and Texas during perfect seasons. But Chizik’s hiring last December was initially met with confusion at best and animosity at worst, largely due to his 5–19 record at Iowa State. The nation saw video of Auburn Athletics Director Jay Jacobs leaving an airplane and getting booed by a heckler who disagreed with the selection of Chizik.

“Initially I thought if you lose Tommy Tuberville, you better make a big splash with the next hire to justify what you’ve done,” ESPN analyst Tom Luginbill says. “I think when they realized there’s not this big name they went with what they know and who they’re familiar with. It was a hire of convenience. I thought the hire was better than other people felt it was because I’m looking at it from a resource difference between Iowa State and Auburn, and the opportunity to get the job done.”

In the eyes of former Auburn coach Pat Dye, who remains a prominent figure in the state, Tuberville and his staff had grown stale in recent seasons.

“I think people have a tendency to get a little stale,” Dye says. “I like (Chizik’s) new enthusiasm and all the people he’s brought in. Football goes in cycles. We were probably headed into a down cycle and this might stop it. Alabama’s been through the same thing.”

To understand how the rivalry reached this point requires a history lesson. Tuberville was nearly ousted in 2003 when, on the eve of the Iron Bowl, Auburn officials secretly met with then-Louisville coach Bobby Petrino. Word leaked out. Tuberville became a martyr within the state and rewarded Auburn immediately.

Auburn enjoyed a perfect 2004 season but was left out of the Bowl Championship Series national championship game. The Tigers went 42–9 overall and 26–6 in the SEC between 2004 and ’07, a period when Alabama was 29–21 overall and 15–17 in the SEC while digging out of the aftermath of major NCAA sanctions.

Some people believe Auburn failed to capitalize in recruiting on its perfect season and Alabama’s demise. For years, Tuberville excelled at finding the right fits for his smash-mouth, defensive-minded team that sometimes won ugly but accumulated plenty of wins to justify the approach. Auburn had a higher-ranked recruiting class (according to Rivals.com) than Alabama in five of the six years between 2002 and ’07; Auburn averaged a No. 11 ranking, and Alabama was at No. 22.

Brandt, who now analyzes the NFL Draft for NFL.com, thinks Auburn should have done better. He assigns value points for schools based on where their players are drafted. For example, a school receives 10 points for a top-10 pick, nine points for a pick between 11 and 30, eight points for a pick between 31 and 60, and so on. Between 1999 and 2008, Auburn was assigned 99 value points (fifth in the SEC) and Alabama had 76 (seventh).

“I would say when you’re on top, if you recruit the right guy, you should be able to continue to have the Ronnie Browns and Carlos Rogers and Cadillac Williams and Jason Campbells on your team,” Brandt says.

Brandt suspects Auburn became complacent and recruited players who were easier to sign. Luginbill says Auburn for years did a great job understanding what battles it could and could not win, and rather than wasting resources, targeted a smaller number of elite players with better odds of signing them.

But as Auburn’s offense continued to decline, Tuberville realized something needed to change. Auburn radically shifted to Tony Franklin’s spread offense prior to the 2007 Chick-fil-A Bowl, in part to recruit better wide receivers. The timing occurred as Alabama was preparing to land the nation’s No. 1 wide receiver, Julio Jones, who caught 58 passes for 924 yards as a freshman last season.

Auburn’s spread offense became a disaster. There was dissension within the staff and among the players toward Franklin, who was not permitted to bring in any assistants to help coach the offense as he wanted. Just as important, Auburn didn’t have the skill players, particularly at quarterback, to have immediate success with the offense.

As Alabama continued to win last season, the level of patience at Auburn decreased for a team picked to win the SEC West. It reached a boiling point when the Tigers lost to Vanderbilt for the first time since 1955. Franklin was fired during the middle of the subsequent game week. The Tigers went 5–2 with Franklin, including a bowl victory over Clemson from the previous season, and 1–5 without him. Tuberville resigned with a $5.1 million buyout soon after the Iron Bowl loss.

“When he made the drastic deviation offensively, it ultimately ended up sealing his fate,” Luginbill says. “He was never going to be able to convince the power brokers for more time to adapt the spread. I think he realized they probably weren’t going to be that much better personnel-wise offensively in 2009, so it was either going to end then or end now.”

For the near future, Alabama enjoys a head start in recruiting. Rivals.com rated Alabama’s 2008 and 2009 recruiting classes No. 1 in the nation. Auburn was ranked 20th and 19th in those respective years. Given the turmoil at Auburn and that Chizik recruited without a full staff, Auburn did an “absolutely sensational job” with its 2009 class, Luginbill says. Now, can Auburn close the gap after enjoying an edge not so long ago?

Most recruiting analysts believe the state of Alabama doesn’t have enough talent annually to fill both schools’ classes. Before Saban arrived, the state’s top recruits were pretty evenly divided between Alabama and Auburn. Auburn had five of the state’s top 11 players during Saban’s first recruiting class, which he had a month to put together. Saban landed the state’s five highest-rated players and 13 of the top 17 in 2008, and then signed the top seven in Alabama and nine of the top 12 in 2009. Auburn’s highest-ranked in-state signee in 2009 was rated 11th in Alabama.

“What Alabama needed after all the string of coaches they’ve had was a guy running the show who would be a relentless and tireless recruiter,” Luginbill says, “and that meant dominating the state and the SEC by knowing the best areas.”

In Alabama, that means the Mobile area, home of JaMarcus Russell, Pat White and countless others. Mobile is so important that as Signing Day approached last February, Tennessee hired Alabama assistant Lance Thompson — the Crimson Tide’s recruiter in Mobile — and boasted about it. Alabama turned around and hired Auburn’s Mobile recruiter, assistant James Willis, who initially was not retained by Chizik from Tuberville’s staff.

The Alabama-Auburn rivalry is nothing if not reactionary. So Auburn reacted, too. Shortly after Signing Day, Chizik announced a plan for retaking the state of Alabama in recruiting. Auburn is dividing the state into seven territories, each of which is assigned its own coach. With Chizik visiting homes, too, Auburn will have eight different coaches in players’ houses across the state.

The shift is night and day from Tuberville, who had about half that number assigned to Alabama and was not concerned with national recruiting rankings. Auburn now has a recruiting coordinator, Curtis Luper, who has declared his goal to compile the No. 1 recruiting class in the country. Tuberville traditionally built rosters with about two-thirds of the players coming from out-of-state, usually from Georgia and Florida.

“I’m not against recruiting out of state, because we’ve certainly had our share of those players over the years,” Dye says. “But I’ll say the kids from the state of Alabama are easier to coach and it’s harder for them to not be successful, just because of the mentality of the people in this state and the families they’re from. It’s harder to go home and give up.”

There will be challenges to Auburn’s plan, though. Luginbill says Auburn should accept signing about five of the right elite players in Alabama and spend as much time as possible in Florida and Georgia. Chizik grew up in Florida and once coached at the University of Central Florida.

“I think Florida and Georgia are absolutely pivotal states to Auburn’s success,” Luginbill says. “Seven assistants in Alabama do seem like an awful lot. When you’re Auburn in that state, you’re not just taking on Nick Saban in recruiting. You’re taking on 60 years. You’re taking on folklore, tradition, power.”

Which is what Alabama fans must have had in mind during the 2008 season and as Saban claimed Iron Bowl supremacy — now and for years to come — in a basketball gym in March. Dye concedes that Saban could produce a successful run like he enjoyed at Auburn or that Steve Spurrier had at Florida. “But we don’t need to worry about Alabama at Auburn,” Dye says. “We need to worry about Auburn. We’ve won six straight years and all of a sudden there’s a power shift? I don’t know you can say that. Time will tell. That’s the only thing that’s accurate.”

History tells us time waits for no one in the Alabama-Auburn rivalry. Somewhere in Alabama there’s a radio station counting down the days until a new chapter begins in a way of life that never ends.

This feature appears in the 2009 Athlon Sports Southeastern magazine. Click here to purchase your copy.

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