Jacobs: Auburn football is a couple years away
In our unofficial series of going from office to office throughout the Auburn athletic complex, recorder and notebook in hand, we stumbled into the biggest office, athletic director Jay Jacobs’, earlier this week.
Currently, we’re piecing together a Q&A for Sunday’s newspaper. Don’t expect anything groundbreaking from the AD, but it’s always good to hear from the man who makes all the final decisions in the world of Auburn athletics now and then.
If there were such a thing as a “red button,“ it would be on Jacobs’ desk—right next to the overflowing bowl of Reese’s cups.
Anyways, we found this comment Jacobs made about his expectations for Gene Chizik’s first few years at the helm. They were surprisingly realistic.
We liked that, so we figured we’d share it as a sneak preview of sorts.
We’re a couple years away. We were preseason to win the West last year and won five ballgames. That, alone is tough. It’s tough for the players, tough for everybody to get back to that winning side when you’re picked to win the West. Then, you have a coaching change and it’s tough for everybody. To have those two things together makes it more difficult. The competition in this league is the best in the nation.
But I can tell you this, the way Gene and his assistant coaches are working, hard and smart, and the kind of football players we’re recruiting, it’s going to take a couple years, but we’ll be back where we should be not only on the field, but we’ll continue to represent Auburn University in a positive way; by the caliber of the young men we bring in here and the caliber of men we produce when they come out of here. We’re going to continue to grow them physically, mentally and spiritually and that’s what Gene’s staff is doing.
What about the people who want to be satisfied NOW?
That’s the business we’re in. Nobody knows anything about delayed gratification—that’s the business we’re in. One of the greatest things about all of us as Auburn fans is our passion for Auburn. We want to win and want to be successful. I had the opportunity to be on successful teams and I expect this team to be successful. I just know because I’ve been here over 20-something years and I’ve seen this program, I just know that we’re a couple years away from being the caliber team that we should be—what all of us as Auburn people expect and deserve.
But I know we have the right guy and the right assistant coaches getting us back to where we want to be and doing it the Auburn way.
Again, nothing earth-shattering, but some pretty honest stuff from the most important cheerleader for Auburn sports.
We’ll have more cutting-room floor clutter Sunday when the final product runs in the fishwrap.
(Photo credit: Todd Van Emst)
