During a January blizzard on a recruiting trip to Youngstown, Ohio, J.B. Grimes received a call from Auburn associate head coach Rodney Garner that would alter his itinerary.
"'Hey, J.B., Herb [Hand] just left and went to Texas, would you be interested in coming back?'" Grimes remembers Garner asking. "And I said, 'Sure!'
Grimes, who led Auburn's offensive line to great success from 2013-15 before coaching at Cincinnati and Connecticut, had flown out of Hartford earlier that day.
"I had packed for a three-day recruiting trip that would start on Tuesday," Grimes said. "I was going to recruit Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, and then fly back to Hartford late Thursday night for a recruiting weekend. That was the plan."
After Garner's initial call, offensive coordinator Chip Lindsey contacted Grimes, followed by head coach Gus Malzahn. In a matter of hours, Grimes was headed back to the Plains.
"Quite honestly, I have not been back to Connecticut yet," Grimes said. "I left on Jan. 16, and I have not been back. Everything has a way of working out for the best. Man plans and God laughs. I'm really happy to be back, and I'm coaching a lot of familiar faces as well."
When Malzahn became Auburn's head coach in 2013, he brought Grimes with him from Arkansas State. The Tigers led the nation in rushing in 2013, winning the SEC Championship. In Grimes' three seasons at Auburn (2013-15), the Tigers averaged 34.2 points per game.
In 2016, Grimes joined his son, Nick, on Tommy Tuberville's staff at Cincinnati. When Tuberville stepped down after the season, J.B. Grimes became the offensive line coach at UConn.
"Every once in a while it's like déjà vu," he said. "I go out there in practice one day, I look at Brett Whiteside, our football operations guy, and I say, 'This is weird. It's like I never left.' I was gone two years, but it's like I never left.
"My wife, Jennifer, and I, we really love Auburn. We love the city of Auburn, but more than that, we love what Auburn's all about. The kind of people you deal with at Auburn. I love this atmosphere here. We're extremely happy to be back. I really can't believe it happened. I'm as amazed as everybody else."
'I've got to develop them': offensive line coach J.B. Grimes works with Calvin Ashley during Auburn's 2018 preseason camp. Photo: Todd Van Emst/Auburn Athletics
With four decades of coaching experience, the Arkansas native offers down-home analogies when describing the process of forming an effective O-line.
"You don't just throw an offensive lineman into the grease and pull him out like you do a piece of fried catfish," he said. "You've got to put him in the oven. You've got to bake him awhile.
"That's the reason they put 'Coach' in front of my name. I've got to coach these guys. I've got develop them. Rome wasn't built in a day, and you don't take an offensive lineman and 25 practices, and him say he's ready for prime time. But that's just not the way it works with offensive linemen. You have to develop those guys."
"We're extremely happy to be back."
— Jeff Shearer (@jeff_shearer) August 16, 2018
🗣 @CoachJBGrimes on returning to coach @AuburnFootball OL
"It's like I never left." pic.twitter.com/xX9am8aTLq
Jeff Shearer is a Senior Writer at AuburnTigers.com. Follow him on Twitter: