Regardless of rankings, regardless of future bowl games and playoff berths, the stakes for the Iron Bowl are both simple and infinite. If you can give your fans an edge over the opposition at every cookout, church social, grocery store line and tee box in the state of Alabama for an entire year, well, that washes away a whole lot of sins. And right now, there are a couple coaches in sore need of the kind of divine providence that comes with an Iron Bowl victory.
It’s always been this way, every time Auburn and Alabama have squared up. Gene Stallings, national championship-winning head coach at Alabama and disciple of Bear Bryant, had a simple rule for coaching in Tuscaloosa. “If you want to be a successful coach at Alabama, you’ve got to beat Auburn,” he said in 2013. “You don’t have to beat them every year, but you have to beat them more than they beat you.”
The same rule applies on The Plains. You can fumble your way through an entire season at Auburn, but if you can close out the year with a win over those elitists from Alabama — even better, if you can ruin their title hopes — that buys you both good grace and job security.
Between the two of them, Alabama’s Kalen DeBoer and Auburn’s Hugh Freeze have coached in a grand total of one (1) Iron Bowl. That one was an instant classic — last year’s “Gravedigger” Alabama victory — but even the games that appear routine from outside Alabama carry epochal weight.
“To sit in this seat and to lose one like we did last year still doesn’t sit right,” Freeze said earlier this week. “I know that the Auburn faithful had to endure that, and we want to change that feeling in this building and for our great fan base in this state.”
“Ever since I’ve been here, I think I hear about it every day,” DeBoer said this week, “and understand what it means and the excitement.” All due respect to the head coach of the Alabama Crimson Tide, but he can’t yet really understand it. Not until kickoff, and not until the aftermath, one way or the other.
For coaches, the weight of the Iron Bowl looms like storm clouds in the distance. Former Alabama head coach Bill Curry failed to win the Iron Bowl in all three of his attempts for Alabama, including the first one ever played at Auburn’s Jordan-Hare Stadium, and he (allegedly) got a brick thrown through his window for his efforts. After the third loss, he decamped from Tuscaloosa for a lower-stress job leading the Kentucky Wildcats.
The opposite holds true, as well. Former Auburn coach Tommy Tuberville once won six straight over Alabama — his final victory came over first-year Alabama coach Nick Saban — and parlayed the name value from that success into a U.S. Senate seat a decade later. Freeze got the Auburn job in part because of his success in beating Saban back-to-back in the mid-2010s while at Ole Miss.
“It’s talked about, and not just told to me, but talked about amongst everyone in their homes, and it’s Thanksgiving weekend, so if you’re not at the game, you’re home watching it with your friends and family,” DeBoer said. “Heard stories of families being divided because of it in many different ways, so that’s what rivalry games are all about, and I know this is a rivalry that’s on another level.”
Freeze may have kept the wolves at bay with last week’s upset win over Texas A&M, but he would quiet them down nicely with a victory over Alabama. That would be Auburn’s sixth win of the season, making the Tigers bowl-eligible and quelling concerns that Freeze isn’t the guy to get this program back to national competitiveness.
DeBoer is walking an even higher tightrope. Alabama (8-3) hasn’t lost more than three games — or totaled single-digit wins — since Saban’s first year, when the Tide had an on-field record of 7-6. Yes, DeBoer is still in his first year, but an uninspiring record, a failure to make a 12-team playoff field, and a loss to Auburn? Honeymoon long over, trial separation already under consideration.
At both Alabama and Auburn, victory in the Iron Bowl is both necessary and sufficient for a head coach to claim success. National championships will get statues built of you, but wins in the Iron Bowl make day-to-day life a whole lot easier. Beat those blue bloods, or that cow college, on the other side of the state, and all’s right with the world. Lose, and it’s a long 364 days … with no guarantee you’ll be around to see the next one.
