Fifteen years after Auburn won one of the more unlikely national championships in college football history, a new book detailing that magical season hits the shelves.

All They Did Was Win: Shootouts, Shockers & Cambacks on the Road to Auburn’s Improbable 2010 National Championship, was published Sunday by White Rocket Books. It’s the sixth book on Auburn football or basketball by the team of Van Allen Plexico and John Ringer, the duo behind the popular AU Wishbone podcast.

As with their previous books, All They Did Was Win includes a mixture of original and archival interviews, as well as first-person narrative by the authors. Both Plexico and Ringer are Auburn graduates and lifelong Tigers fans.

“I told John I think we invented that,” Plexico said in a recent interview with AL.com. “It’s funny, I’ve read a lot of sports books, and they don’t really do it that way. I’ve read some entertainment books that sort of do it that way. I think the idea originally came to me, it was two things colliding. There’s an oral history of Saturday Night Live that I thought was really well done, where they interviewed all the different actors and comedians and all. And I liked that format where the book talks for a while and then people in it talk.

“And then we were trying to do the We Believed book as kind of a version of our podcast series that we did, where we looked at Auburn history in a compressed way. And when we did that, using our podcast as sort of the spine of that book. We already had us giving our commentary, so we just kind of transcribed it over. And I thought, you know, this works really well because the book can tell the sort of unbiased part of the story, but we can still put our opinion in there. It lets us kind of be objective journalists and opinionated columnists at the same time. So it’s totally cheating, but it works really well.”

All They Did Was Win actually begins in the aftermath of a different undefeated Auburn season, when the 2004 Tigers went 13-0 and won the SEC championship but were denied a shot at the national title because USC and Oklahoma were also both undefeated and ranked ahead of them. It details the swift decline of Tommy Tuberville in 2008, followed by the shocking hiring of Gene Chizik as his successor.

Chizik’s first Auburn team in 2009 went 8-5, nearly beating eventual national champion Alabama at Jordan-Hare Stadium at the end of the regular season. It was in the following offseason that Chizik and the Tigers made the fateful — and ultimately fruitful — decision to sign quarterback Cam Newton, a junior-college transfer who’d left Florida under a cloud at the end of the 2008 season.

With help from SEC Defensive Player of the Year Nick Fairley and a large cast of role-players, Newton went on to lead Auburn — which was ranked No. 22 in the preseason — to a 14-0 record and the national championship. He turned in one of the more-dominant seasons in college football history, winning the Heisman Trophy and leading the Tigers to numerous heart-stopping victories.

“I included the word ‘improbable’ in the subtitle,” Plexico said. “And I had a couple of people say, well, why did you put that there? And I said, because that’s why it’s a story. Auburn was not considered a favorite to do anything and Chizik was halfway a joke to the media. You know, 2009 was pretty good and encouraging, but still, nobody was looking for that.

“So yeah, I think that’s what makes it a story, is trying to figure out how this improbable cast of characters, Gene Chizik, Gus Malzahn, Ted Roof, Cam Newton with all of his baggage and a bunch of guys that never even came close to the NFL, somehow came together at just the right time to catch lightning in a bottle and go 14-0, win a Heisman Trophy, win the national championship, win the SEC and come from behind in over half the games. It absolutely was improbable in every which way, and I think that’s what makes it such a good story.”

Underneath the entire national championship narrative was the saga of Newton, whose father, Cecil, had been accused of shopping his son’s services to Mississippi State during the recruiting process. Auburn actually declared Newton briefly ineligible in the days leading up to the SEC championship game, but he was reinstated after the school and the NCAA found that neither he nor his father had accepted any impermissible benefits from Tigers coaches or boosters (the NCAA investigation was closed in 2011, with no proof of wrongdoing by Auburn uncovered).

That, of course, infuriated (and continues to infuriate) Alabama fans, who refused to believe Newton wasn’t bought and paid for. For Auburn to contend for and win its first national championship since 1957 upset Crimson Tide fans’ worldview, Plexico said.

“It’s like Alabama had decided as a fan base that Auburn just could not and would not win the national championship,” Plexico said. “And so if (Auburn) did, we had to have been doing something wrong. Your world can’t operate in a logical fashion if that’s not true.

“Their universe doesn’t work if that’s true. It jumps off the rails. And so they had to think that Auburn was cheating. They had to think that Cam Newton was dirty. They had to think he took money. Otherwise, the world doesn’t make sense.”

The climax of the season and the book is of course the Iron Bowl, in which Auburn rallied for a 28-27 victory at Bryant-Denny Stadium in Tuscaloosa. In what has forever since been known as the “Camback,” the Tigers trailed 21-0 in the first quarter and 24-7 at halftime before outscoring Nick Saban and Alabama 21-3 in the second half and taking the lead for good on Newton’s touchdown pass to Philip Lutzenkirchen with 11:55 remaining.

It was the only time Auburn ever beat Saban in Tuscaloosa, and happened to be a year after the Crimson Tide had won the national championship. It was also one of four games the Tigers won after trailing at halftime and one of six they won by a touchdown or less.

“We were originally going to (write about) just the Iron Bowl,” said Plexico, a college history and political science professor who has also written several science fiction and fantasy novels. “But what makes that Iron Bowl so special is not just that Auburn came back from 24-7, but also that they did it to preserve everything they had done before it and keep that going.

‘So everything about it was just a miracle. The other thing that I really wanted to get across in it, by the time we were done, was I thought that Gene Chizik was the right man at the right time. I don’t know if Steve Spurrier or Urban Meyer or Nick Saban could have gone 14-0 with that team, but Gene Chizik was exactly the right person. I mean, was he the right person in 2012? That’s a whole other question. But he was absolutely the right person to kind of be a general manager for a bunch of seniors in 2010.”

NOTE: Plexico will sign copies of All They Did Was Win at Auburn Oil Booksellers on Saturday, the day Auburn hosts Georgia at Jordan-Hare Stadium.

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