Is Auburn football’s history of meddling boosters changing? ESPN’s Cole Cubelic thinks so

ESPN college football analyst Cole Cubelic has seen his fair share of nuttiness when it comes to the booster situation at his alma mater.
When Cubelic played on Auburn’s offensive line from 1996 to 2001, he saw it first hand when Terry Bowden suddenly departed The Plains in the middle of the 1998 season.
Cubelic said he and the Tigers’ football team were in Opelika catching a movie, a routine they did the day before a game, when someone called his teammate’s Nokia cellphone and said someone had called into Paul Finebaum’s radio show to break the news that Bowden was out as the Tigers’ head coach.
Those with deep pockets who backed the Tigers’ program alleged that Bowden was having an affair with the daughter of a member of the same Board of Trustees that hired him. The rumors circulated at a rapid pace, forcing Bowden and his wife to issue a statement denying the allegations.
Bowden’s counter argument after stepping down was that he was told by boosters there was nothing he could do to save his job after Auburn’s 1-5 start to the season.
Yet, despite “resigning”, Auburn went on to pay Bowden’s $600,000 buyout, making the entire situation appear slimier than it already looked.
Since then, Cubelic has watched the same movie play at Auburn time and time again.
Tommy Tuberville’s time as head coach at Auburn was all but drama-free. In 2003, Auburn’s president, athletic director and two trustees flew to Louisville on a booster’s corporate jet the Thursday before the Iron Bowl to interview Bobby Petrino for the Tigers’ head coaching job — which wasn’t vacant.
The secret meeting went against contracts held by both Tuberville and Petrino and eventually led to the firing of Auburn president William Walker and athletic director David Housel.
Tuberville maintained his spot-on Auburn’s sideline until 2008, when he stepped down.
Though not as dramatic, some make the argument that Auburn’s divorce from Gene Chizik, who won a title two years prior to his firing, was the result of booster meddling, too.
Last season, Bryan Harsin alleged that an internal investigation was a personal attack. He was later ousted midway through the 2022 season.
All are evidence of decades of a power struggle. Three years ago, Finebaum said the situation at Auburn was the one of the worst cases of booster meddling he’d ever seen.
“That’s kinda the part that frustrates me the most,” Cubelic said in an interview with Barstool Sports’ Unnecessary Roughness podcast. “And I know we could find other places that have similar people or things that take place, but a lot of these Auburn fans get mad because Booster A or Booster B wants his way. He wants this or he wants that.
“The power struggle is real. It has been very real and I think a lot of that is because there have been between one and three individuals who have been behind it.”
But the slate feels clean now.
When the Tigers kick off against UMass on Sept. 2, it’ll be the first Auburn football game for first-year head coach Hugh Freeze. It’ll also be the first Week 1 game athletic director John Cohen gets to be a part of after being hired in late October of last year.
In his interview with Unnecessary Roughness, Cubelic endorsed Cohen, saying the former Mississippi State athletic director has done a good job navigating the unreasonable requests of deep-pocketed boosters.
“That’s where I think John Cohen is doing a nice job. The AD has gotta come in there and say listen, we’re going to give you a headset in your suite during the game, but it’s not going to work both ways,” Cubelic said. “You can pretend like it works and you can tell them what plays you’re calling, but you can’t do it.”
Auburn University president Chris Roberts is also relatively green after being named the institution’s 21st president last year.
At SEC Media Days in Nashville last week, Freeze told media members he felt aligned with Auburn’s administration from top to bottom.
“We have a brand-new president, and that president has a brand-new athletic director, and that athletic director and that president chose a new football coach,” Freeze said. “And we are as aligned as we could ever be... And we’re going to ride this bus together.”
Given the turbulent history at Auburn, that’s exactly what Freeze is supposed to say.
But for someone like Cubelic, who has been invested in Auburn’s football program for nearly three decades, to echo the same sentiment says a lot.
“We’ve seen some pretty good alignment at times, it’s kind of come and gone. But I just think right now that as far as people on the same page, that it’s as good as I’ve ever seen it, as good as I can remember,” Cubelic said in an interview with AL.com. “And keep in mind, I started really paying attention to Auburn football in probably, you know, mid 90s, early 90s. So this is this is as good as I can recall it.”