Who are the past Auburn football head coaches of this carousel?
Everybody is going to have a hot board of candidates. But let's try to find the types of coaches the Tigers have hired in the past.
AUBURN — Auburn has fired Hugh Freeze, which means it’s Hot Board season.
For those of you who might be new to a coaching search, a Hot Board is a list of candidates for a job posted by a media outlet. Those lists will evolve over time. At first, it’s an early grab bag of candidates who make sense or might have had some early whispers before the firing was official.
Since we try to do things a little bit different around here, let’s go with an alternate approach to the Hot Board for Auburn football: If the Tigers hire a head coach like they have in the past, who might they target?
Who could be the next Pat Dye? Who feels like the new Gus Malzahn? What about another Tommy Tuberville or another Gene Chizik? And who looks like, well, what Bryan Harsin and Hugh Freeze might have looked like before their hires?
That’s the goal of this exercise. We’ll look at Auburn’s past head coaches — starting with Dye — and try to find some of the attributes they had as candidates that line up with names who could be on the move during this wild coaching carousel.
These aren’t perfect comparisons. Some are stronger than others. A few are stretches, admittedly. No one is a 1-to-1 comparison. Also, comparing a potential prospect to a past Auburn head coach doesn’t mean they have had the same amount of success — nor would they have the same success (or lack thereof) on the Plains.
This also isn’t an exhaustive list. You won’t see James Franklin or Alex Golesh on here, because they didn’t feel like good comparisons to past Auburn coaches. There’s also not room for a wild card like a disgruntled Dabo Swinney, for example.
But here are the potential candidates that remind us the most of the head coaches Auburn has had in its history.
The Pat Dye: Tulane HC Jon Sumrall
former SEC player and assistant coach
previous experience in Alabama
successful small-school head coach
defensive-minded
in his 40s
When Auburn hired Dye before the 1981 season, his previous head coaching experience was going 48-18-1 in six seasons at East Carolina before a lone 6-5 season at Wyoming. Before that, Dye played at Georgia and spent nine seasons as a defensive assistant coach at Alabama.
Sumrall played high school football at Grissom in Huntsville before a three-year career as a linebacker at Kentucky. After a career-ending injury, he was a graduate assistant at Kentucky before spending more than a decade coaching in the FCS and Group of 5. He was first the linebackers coach at Ole Miss before three successful seasons as a co-defensive coordinator back at Kentucky — including a 10-win campaign in 2021.
Having been on the staff at Troy for back-to-back double-digit win seasons as an assistant coach, the Trojans made him a first-time head coach in 2022. Troy had just gone through three straight losing seasons. Sumrall immediately went 12-2, then 11-2, with back-to-back Sun Belt championships. Then he made the jump to Tulane — another former employer — where he is currently 15-7 overall and 10-2 in the AAC.
According to several trusted people in the industry, the 42-year-old Sumrall has a clear goal of becoming a head coach in the SEC soon. Like Dye, he’s a young, defensive-minded coach who wants to make the jump back to the conference where he was both a player and an assistant. He knows this league and knows Alabama.
Going with Sumrall would be a departure from the last several hires for Auburn, which has prioritized offense. But Sumrall has a classic, old-school football coach personality and would be hungry to prove himself at this level. The fit makes sense. In time, Sumrall could bring Auburn football back to what it once was.
