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.<\/p>\n
All They Did Was Win: Shootouts, Shockers & Cambacks on the Road to Auburn\u2019s Improbable 2010 National Championship, was published Sunday by White Rocket Books. It\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n
As with their previous books, All They Did Was Win<\/a> 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. <\/p>\n \u201cI told John I think we invented that,\u201d Plexico said in a recent interview with AL.com. \u201cIt\u2019s funny, I\u2019ve read a lot of sports books, and they don\u2019t really do it that way. I\u2019ve 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd then we were trying to do the We Believed<\/a> 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\u2019s totally cheating, but it works really well.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Chizik\u2019s 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 \u2014 and ultimately fruitful \u2014 decision to sign quarterback Cam Newton, a junior-college transfer who\u2019d left Florida under a cloud at the end of the 2008 season. <\/p>\n With help from SEC Defensive Player of the Year Nick Fairley and a large cast of role-players, Newton went on to lead Auburn \u2014 which was ranked No. 22 in the preseason \u2014 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. <\/p>\n \u201cI included the word \u2018improbable\u2019 in the subtitle,\u201d Plexico said. \u201cAnd I had a couple of people say, well, why did you put that there? And I said, because that\u2019s why it\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n \u201cSo yeah, I think that\u2019s 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\u2019s what makes it such a good story.\u201d<\/p>\n Underneath the entire national championship narrative was the saga of Newton, whose father, Cecil, had been accused of shopping his son\u2019s 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).<\/p>\n That, of course, infuriated (and continues to infuriate) Alabama fans, who refused to believe Newton wasn\u2019t bought and paid for. For Auburn to contend for and win its first national championship since 1957 upset Crimson Tide fans\u2019 worldview, Plexico said.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s like Alabama had decided as a fan base that Auburn just could not and would not win the national championship,\u201d Plexico said. \u201cAnd so if (Auburn) did, we had to have been doing something wrong. Your world can\u2019t operate in a logical fashion if that\u2019s not true.<\/p>\n \u201cTheir universe doesn\u2019t work if that\u2019s 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\u2019t make sense.\u201d<\/p>\n 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 \u201cCamback,\u201d 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\u2019s touchdown pass to Philip Lutzenkirchen with 11:55 remaining. <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cWe were originally going to (write about) just the Iron Bowl,\u201d said Plexico, a college history and political science professor who has also written several science fiction and fantasy novels. \u201cBut 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.<\/p>\n \u2018So 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\u2019t 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\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n If you purchase a product or register for an account through a link on our site, we may receive compensation. By using this site, you consent to our User Agreement<\/a> and agree that your clicks, interactions, and personal information may be collected, recorded, and\/or stored by us and social media and other third-party partners in accordance with our Privacy Policy.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Fifteen years after Auburn won one of the more unlikely national championships in college football history, a new…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":59164,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[412,146,85,46],"class_list":["post-59163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-books","tag-books","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59163"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59163\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/59164"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}