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Former American Press sportswriter Carl Dubois blogs about the games people play, in and out of sports, and the people you meet between and outside the lines.

Carl is an award-winning reporter and columnist living in the Willamette Valley in northwest Oregon, near Portland. He is sports editor of the News-Register newspaper in McMinnville, Ore.

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Chizik wants success for Auburn, not the spotlight for himself

Posted July 24, 2009 at 9:26 am
Filed Under People, Sports | Leave a Comment

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HOOVER, Ala. — Gene Chizik, back in the conference after coaching at Iowa State, appeared at SEC Media Days this morning for the first time and said his focus is on elevating Auburn’s profile, not his.”I’ve got three children and my wife, so I get plenty of attention when I go home,” said Chizik, who is beginning his second go-round at Auburn.

This time he’s the head coach, not an assistant, but Chizik said he sees no reason to try to be more of a colorful character to attract more eyes and ears.

“I don’t have to go out and try to gather attention for myself. This isn’t about me. It’s about Auburn,” he said.

Chizik described the period since his hiring in December as “a whirlwind of seven-plus months.” He isn’t entirely new to his new surroundings, as he last coached at Auburn in 2004, when the Tigers were undefeated.

“That’s the last memory I have of Auburn,” Chizik said, “and that’s a great memory.”

He said he’d like to get the Tigers back to that level. Toward that end, he kept some coaches from the previous Auburn staff and let others go, filling in the vacancies with people he said he hoped could form the best coaching staff in the country.

His new offensive coordinator is Gus Malzahn, who was at Tulsa after being on Houston Nutt’s staff at Arkansas. Chizik, a former defensive coordinator, said he and Malzahn have a good shared vision of how the offense should fit into his goals for the team and for the program.

Auburn, 2-6 in the SEC last year, has slipped behind Alabama as the premier program in the state, a distinction Auburn held for most of the decade. There are billboards trying to rally support for the Tigers, but Chizik seemed out of the loop in terms of assessing Auburn’s approval rating in the outside world.

“To be honest, I don’t know what public opinion is,” he said.

If you see something — a billboard, a commercial, whatever — from Auburn, it’s because the university and athletic department think it’s in the best interests of the program, Chizik said.

The inevitable questions about the relative merits of the Big 12 Conference as compared to the SEC prompted Chizik to say he thought the Big 12 was “leaps and bounds better than what it was five years ago, from top to bottom.” He went on to list a series of checkpoints — stadiums, passion, pride, and “all of the things that make college football great” — that for him make the SEC second to none.

“There is no greater conference,” he said. “Do I think this is the best conference in the country? I do.”

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