Sept. 29, 2017
Each Friday during the 2017 football season, AuburnTigers.com will feature a column from Auburn historian and Athletic Director Emeritus David Housel to commemorate the 125 year history of Auburn football. We hope you enjoy!
The Jordan Era of Auburn Football, as it was called, almost never happened. Here is the story:
After Auburn's 0-10 season in 1950, a year in which Auburn scored only 31 points, worst in history, the people wanted a change in coaches.
But there seemed to be little movement in that direction until one particular alumnus got involved: Gordon Persons, the new governor of Alabama.
Persons was very outspoken in his desire to see a new football coach at Auburn, but President Ralph B. Draughon, for whom the library is named, shot back: "That's not a decision for the governor to make; that's a decision for the president of the university to make."
He may have been buying time or he may have had a later meeting of the minds with the governor. Whatever the reason, Draughon fired Earl Brown on February 11, 1951 and the search for a new football coach, Auburn's third in seven years, was about to begin.
That search would be led by G.W. "Jeff" Beard, the longtime athletics business manager whom Draughon had named Athletics Director in the hope that he could bring order out the chaos Auburn's athletics program had become.
To Beard there was only one man for the job: Ralph "Shug" Jordan, football line coach and head basketball coach at Georgia. These were days in which assistant coaches had responsibilities in more than one sport. Jordan may have been head basketball coach, but his main responsibility was line coach of the football team.
When they were students together in the late twenties and early thirties, Beard and Jordan, closer than brothers, would gather after Jordan finished work at Miss Cora Hardy's Boarding House and talk about their dreams for Auburn.
They dreamed that Auburn would field competitive teams in all sports, especially in football. They dreamed of the day when Auburn would have sufficient facilities to host its home games in Auburn rather than in Birmingham, Mobile, Montgomery and Columbus. They dreamed of Auburn's future, never knowing that one day they would have the opportunity to make those dreams realities.
Beard contacted Jordan and said it was time to come home, time to go to work on those dreams they had so long ago. "We need you," Beard said, "I need you..."
Jordan was hesitant, and he didn't jump at the opportunity.
He had applied for the job in 1948 when Brown was hired, but Auburn, his beloved alma mater, shunned him in favor of yet another Notre Dame man.
"If they don't think an Auburn man can get the job done, they ought to close the place down," he said.
Still hurt and perhaps angry about what happened in 1948, Jordan refused to apply for the job. Finally Beard talked him into writing a one sentence letter: "I hereby apply for the head football coaching job at Auburn."
There was still one issue that needed to be resolved. Jordan insisted on a five-year contract rather than Auburn's standard three-year contract. A coach needs five years to get his program established, Jordan reasoned. In the past, Auburn would give a three-year contract then fire the coach after his first bad year. Jordan was having none of that. He knew it would take time to rebuild a once proud program.
But there were other problems. Auburn was broke—busted—and Beard was not sure he would be able to find the money needed to field teams that September. Auburn's athletics department at that time was run by an Auburn Athletics Association. While it was affiliated with the university, the university had no financial responsibility to meet athletics expenses and overruns.
Beard and Jordan went to Auburn National Bank, now AuburnBank, to see Bobby Blake, their friend and a member of Auburn's 1937 Bacardi Bowl team. Blake gave them an unsecured $100,000 loan, unheard of in those days, so they could buy uniforms and equipment to field a team in 1951. It was that close and that sparse.
"I didn't loan that money to Auburn," he later said. "I loaned it to Jeff and Shug because I knew I could trust them."
Jordan's effect on Auburn Football was readily evident. Gone was the "woe-is-us" attitude that had often characterized the football program in recent years. In its place was something new, something entirely different.
Jerry Bryan of The Birmingham News recorded the first day of fall practice in 1951 this way:
Ralph Jordan stood by the window of the athletic department supply room glumly looking out at the falling raindrops. A local thunder shower broke over the Plains Saturday morning, and Auburn's first official practice was washed out.
But as the morning advanced, the clouds rolled away, bright sunshine came out and the boys were underway on Drake Field.
Could this be prophetic? With clouded prospects at the outset would the Plainsmen come rolling in under blue skies and bright sun later in the season?
It was indeed prophetic.
Auburn defeated Vanderbilt 24-14 in Jordan's first game as head coach. Vanderbilt, a power in the SEC at that time, had beaten Auburn 41-0 the year before. For the rest of his life Jordan said that win over Vanderbilt was one of his biggest victories. "It gave Auburn people hope that an Auburn man could do the job," he said.
Jordan's insistence on a five-year contract proved wise. After a surprising 5-5 record in 1951, his second team went 2-8. Under the old way of doing business at Auburn he would have been fired. But this was a new day. With that five-year contract, Auburn couldn't afford to fire him.
The next year, 1953, Auburn finished 7-2-1 and was invited to its first bowl game in 15 years.
A new era, destined to be one of the greatest in Auburn history, had begun.
And it almost didn't happen.