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The inevitable became imminent Friday, when Auburn’s Allen Greene resigned from his post—a move unheard of for an athletic director secure in his role, but Greene was never truly secure in that role.
Close to the end of a contract that was set to expire in January 2023, Greene’s tenure has been rocky and the ground under him changed rapidly. A month before he was hired in January 2018, then-football coach Gus Malzahn received a seven-year extension at the end of the 2017 football season from school president Steven Leath (who secured his job in May 2017). Some presidents aren’t very hands-on with athletics, but Leath was. Malzahn received that extension after securing a spot in the SEC championship game in a rematch against Georgia with a College Football Playoff berth on the line. Auburn lost, but Malzahn had bought equity back and signed a new deal with a massive buyout.
The boosters who wanted him out couldn’t really get rid of him after such a great season even if they wanted to, and the new deal also helped fend off an open job at Arkansas (Malzahn’s home state, where he was a high school coaching legend and assistant for one year with the Hogs). None of the above is Greene’s fault, it was a vacuum of athletic department leadership that nature abhors, so Leath stepped into it.
With a coach thought to be sewn up for the foreseeable future, Greene mostly took charge of the rest of the athletic department. Within 18 months, he did not exactly make friends in the department due in large part to cutting budgets across the board 10%, including to a baseball team that had just made the College World Series and a men’s basketball team that had just made the Final Four, increasing tensions with its head coach, Bruce Pearl. By mid-2019, Leath was out, replaced by former president Jay Gouge, and Malzahn made it through the 2019 and ’20 seasons before being fired in December 2020.
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Influential boosters orchestrated a palace coup and ran Malzahn out of his job with a hefty buyout that came with it. They tried to put their own guy into the job but backed down after—in part—a social media campaign spooked them. In the Auburn tradition of one leadership void after another, Greene stepped in and ran a conventional search that landed with an unconventional name in then-Boise State coach Bryan Harsin. Harsin’s hire is not why Greene no longer has his job, but it certainly didn’t help. And there have been rumors about Greene’s involvement in multiple other administrative searches across the sport as it became increasingly apparent he wouldn’t get a contract extension. Greene also saw some of his power in the athletic department wane after the university’s COO, Lt. Gen. Ronald Burgess, was brought in to help oversee athletics.
In February 2022, boosters were back again trying to drum up anything that would stick to fire Harsin. He stood firm on the money owed to him, nobody found anything concrete after an internal investigation and Harsin remains head coach. Many sources expected Harsin and Greene to be let go together after the season if the Tigers had a rough year on the field, but the end came now and Greene departs to, as the release put it, “explore other professional interests.”
If you’ve followed along thus far you’ll know that Auburn functions via dysfunction almost exclusively. This current spate of tumult comes from the artist that gave us such hits as JetGate, Cam Newton’s recruitment and a probation scandal that cost the program a shot at a title in the early 1990s—and that just scratches the surface.
Auburn has another new president, Christopher Roberts, and again the question begs: What type of program does it want to be, and who is really in control? Auburn is no stranger to scandal or dysfunction but there is one common denominator over the last 40 years you have to give to them: winning.
There will be usual suspects if Auburn opts to go in-house: Tim Jackson, head of Auburn’s booster organization or compliance director Rich McGlynn. Former NFL CIO and Auburn alum Michelle Mckenna is also a name to know as the search gets going. Auburn could also opt to go the search firm route and pull in another outsider, but it’s unclear how much has really changed on the inside.
There’s a best case scenario here where Auburn seriously contends for the SEC West on the back of a good defense and it makes firing Harsin politically untenable, just like Malzahn in 2017. The football program moves on amicably and tensions are cooled. A new AD could enter that situation in conjunction with a flourishing men’s basketball program and there’s some modicum of stability.
But if Auburn does poorly on the field and the folks who don’t like Harsin push to get their way, there could be a brand new AD either trying to hire a new coach in the midst of massive headwinds they may not fully understand or an AD coming into a job with a new head coach they had no say in hiring, plus all the issues that can come if that head coach isn’t the right guy.
This is Auburn. Which one do you think is more likely?
