Former Auburn coach Tommy Tuberville issues statement after 2004 Tigers claim national championship
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Former Auburn head coach Tommy Tuberville is now, according to the program, the head coach of the 2004 national championship Auburn Tigers.
Auburn announced on Tuesday that it’s now claiming 9 national championships instead of the 2 it previously claimed. Before Tuesday, only the 1957 and 2010 Auburn teams were recognized as national champions. But now, according to a report from On3 on Tuesday morning, the school is also recognizing the 1910, 1913, 1914, 1958, 1983, 1993 and 2004 Tigers as national championships.
The last team on that new list of champions was coached by Tommy Tuberville, who’s now an Alabama U.S. Senator. But a couple decades ago, he was the coach of an Auburn team that finished 13-0 overall and 8-0 in the SEC yet wasn’t awarded with a national championship. That changed on Tuesday, with Auburn saying that it’s claiming titles that are consistent with the NCAA’s official standards for recognizing championships.
On Tuesday, Auburn got right to work with new signage displaying those new national — and conference titles — at Jordan-Hare Stadium. Then Terry Bowden, the head coach of the 1993 team, made a statement on the program now recognizing his team as national champions.
Tuberville took his turn, too, saying that there is no doubt the 2004 Auburn team was the best in college football. He said the players, coaches and fans deserve to be looked at as national champions.
Here is the video of Tuberville’s statement, with what he said was the “great news that we’ve been waiting for for 21 years”:
Tuesday was a different sort of day at Auburn, with plenty of reaction in all circles to the program’s new titles. Tuberville wanted to take his turn to celebrate the 2004 team, just like Bowden did.
Cory Nightingale, a former sportswriter and sports editor at the Miami Herald and Palm Beach Post, is a South Florida-based freelance writer who covers Alabama for SaturdayDownSouth.com.
