'Simply a legend': Auburn hosts Pat Dye Reunion Game

AUBURN, Ala. – As an All-American two-way player at Georgia, Pat Dye’s first encounter with Auburn came when he competed against the Tigers in the Deep South’s Oldest Rivalry from 1958-60.

Twenty years after his playing career ended, Dye, then coaching at the University of Wyoming, returned to the Southeastern Conference when Auburn offered him its head coaching job after the 1980 season. 

Looking back four decades later, Dye said he knew he was the right fit when he read the famous words written by Auburn’s first football coach, George Petrie. 

“When I picked up the Auburn Creed and read it, I didn’t know anything about Auburn,” Dye recalled in 2019. “I said, ‘Damn, this is me. This is what I believe. I believe in hard work.’

“And I got on down there a little further and the line in there that resonates the loudest with me – ‘having a spirit that is unafraid,’ – now you think about that. Having a spirit that is unafraid. I said, ‘This is me.’ And it kind of took off from there.”

At the 30th anniversary of the 1989 Iron Bowl, Dye reminisced with the players he coached on his fourth and final SEC championship team. 

“There’s not a morning or a day goes by, every day, I think how I have been blessed by my experience and being part of this institution, and I didn’t have anything to do with building it and making it like it is,” Dye said on the eve of the 2019 Iron Bowl. “I just bought into what they already believed.”

More than 250 of Dye’s former players will return to the Plains this weekend for the Pat Dye Reunion Game when Auburn hosts Ball State. 

Dye’s Auburn teams were 99-39-4 from 1981-92, including the 1983 national championship and SEC championships in ‘83, 1987, 1988 and 1989.

“Pat Dye revolutionized Auburn Athletics,” said Auburn University Board of Trustees member Jimmy Rane, the founder and CEO of Great Southern Wood Preserving, Inc. 

Friends and business associates for 40 years, Rane attended Dye’s introductory news conference in 1991. “He left no doubt about what he was about and what he intended to do. The reporter asked him, ‘Coach, how long is it going to take you to beat Alabama?’

“With a cold-eyed, steel look, he looked at him and said, ‘Sixty minutes.’ You knew damn well he meant business. From that day forward until he stopped coaching, that’s the attitude and grit he brought to Auburn’s program.”

Auburn named its playing surface after Dye in 2005, the same year the legendary coach was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame.

“His players loved him and the fans loved him because you knew he was tough, but you knew he also loved you and he loved Auburn,” Rane said.

“For my people my age, Coach Dye put this program on the map of what it could become,” Auburn head coach Hugh Freeze said. “The way he led men and the stories you hear from his players, he developed Auburn men. He’s simply a legend.”

Dye served as Auburn’s athletic director from 1981-91 and was instrumental in bringing the Iron Bowl to Auburn for the first time in 1989, a 30-20 victory considered one of the most important events in program history.

After that epic triumph, Dye told the victorious Tigers, “Tonight’s what our program’s all about. Ain’t no easy way in life, and it wasn’t easy out there tonight, but you were prepared for the task.” 

Six months before he passed away on June 1, 2020, at the age of 80, Dye reminisced with the players on Auburn’s 1989 team. 

“We weren’t the favorites,” Dye said at the team’s 30-year reunion on Nov. 29, 2019. “We might have been the underdogs. But that’s all right. Every morning I woke up all my life I’ve been an underdog. I had two older brothers, one of them two years older than me and one of them four years older than me. I got my (tail) whipped every day. I never liked it. 

“Failing won’t hurt you. You don’t like it. It hurts you, but if you’ve got the right kind of stuff in you it’ll make you work a little harder next time. And that’s what we’re made out of.”

It was, in a sense, Coach Dye’s last team meeting. One more opportunity to motivate, to encourage, to share his love for Auburn. 

“Have you ever heard any of our opponents say, ‘Auburn outsmarted us?’” Dye asked. “You never heard of Auburn outsmarting anybody while I was coaching, but we beat their (tail) to a pulp.

“Not only that, you could bet against them the next week and you’d win your money because they wouldn’t be able to get them all on the field.” 

Quentin Riggins, a senior captain on Auburn’s 1989 team, recalled the scene in the locker room after the Tigers defeated Alabama by 10 points on Dec. 2, 1989, the culmination of Dye’s decade-long fight to bring the Iron Bowl to the Plains from Legion Field in Birmingham. 

“He had no problem letting us see his emotion as we exceeded his expectation and that was a beautiful thing,” Riggins remembered. “Coaches have to push you. They have to push you beyond what you think you can do, and he did that a lot.

“He used to say to us, ‘Leave it all out on the field.’ To me, that’s how he lived life. He left it out on the field. That’s going out there every day and putting it on the line and working and sweating. And it’s okay if you have some tears along the way because celebration will come.” 

Dye recalled recruiting the players 35 years earlier, when these men in their 50s were still teenagers.

“The guys who came through this program and the mamas and daddies that let me in their homes to recruit the kids to become a part of this institution, I’m grateful for them,” he said. “Because I knew every time I went through the front door that I was going to present them with a chance to have a better life, if they stayed and played and went to school here.

“That’s true with all of the students, that’s not just football players and athletics. Be proud of the fact that you’ve got an Auburn background. The right kind of kids are coming to Auburn and it didn’t surprise me at all to see Auburn’s student body is the happiest student body in America.”

Members of the 1989 team wiped away tears as their coach continued, perhaps reflecting on the bonds they’d formed in their youth, back when preseason camp consisted of four-a-days. 

“There’s a lot of love in this room,” Dye said. “Not just me to the players or players to me. It’s players to each other. The love that you’ve got for Auburn University. Nothing that you could give me means any more than how much you care about this institution and what It’s meant for all of us, and meant to all of us.”

Now it wasn’t just the players who were crying. Through tears, the coach who had given so much to his school somehow still felt indebted.  

“I could live another 80 years,” Dye said, “and I could never do for Auburn what Auburn has done for me.” 

Jeff Shearer is a Senior Writer at AuburnTigers.com. Follow him on X: @jeff_shearer