Terry Bowden admits to paying players at Auburn

When Terry Bowden was hired in 1993 to coach Auburn, he was a bright and audacious young (mid-30s) coach eager to make his legendary father proud and make a name for himself.

Everything changed within his first week. An assistant coach from the previous staff, whom Bowden was told he had to retain, walked into his office and placed a black ledger on his desk. It was a list of players who were being paid.

This is how we do it around here, Bowden was told.

This story has been told throughout the years and has almost become folklore, with too many incorrect iterations clouding reality. Auburn officials have always denied it, the NCAA could never nail it down and the statute of limitations on infractions has long since passed.

But here's the catch: I've seen the ledger.

Saw it 13 years ago when Bowden—now the coach at Akron—was a studio host for ABC's college football coverage and lived in my hometown. I went to his house one sleepy spring morning, expecting to talk about why such a successful coach had walked away from it all. He sat behind the desk of a makeshift office in his master bedroom, pulled out the ledger and plopped it on his desk.

Just like it had happened to him.

I saw the names, saw the money, saw the way players were recruited and what they were paid.

"See that!" Bowden said that day. "The look on your face was the same look on my face when I first saw it."

Bowden told the assistant coach, "Pay off the players that were promised and never do it again."


Terry Bowden
Terry BowdenAndy Lyons/Getty Images

Yes, he cheated. You wouldn't have?

You would have instead blown up the program days after signing the biggest contract of your life, days after telling your wife this job—this fit—might just eventually be the spot to retire?

Another coach tells a story about getting a call from an assistant coach from the previous staff. The caller said a fellow assistant from that staff—one who, unlike him, the new coach had retained—was tipping off players to drug tests. The offending assistant was the program's ace recruiter, knew the state better than anyone and had countless contacts with key high school coaches. He was the lead recruiter on three players from the same high school—all three being recruited by the team's rival and all three with the type of elite talent that could facilitate a quicker turnaround.

"If he's tipping off players, what else is he doing?" the coach remembers thinking. "But we needed those three players."

A year later, the assistant coach left for another job. Four years later, only one of the three elite recruits the new coach compromised his values for had made a significant impact.

"It was a minor miracle [the assistant] didn't get us in trouble with the NCAA in the year he was with us," the coach says. "We were just as lucky two of those three [players] didn't do the same."

This is the no-win, all-risk decision coaches face.

For that coach, it didn't come back to bite him.

But you want to know how things went so bad so quickly at Baylor? Look no further than how and why the team got so good so quickly. When you take chances on players with character issues (see: defensive end Sam Ukwuachu), the odds are not in your favor.

The ideal situation, coaches say, is taking chances on a few players early and putting the program in position to win games it wouldn't otherwise. The more you win, the easier it is to get players who aren't character chances. Eventually, consistent winning takes over.

"That works in two places," one coach says. "At the major schools—the 10-20 best programs—and in a coach's head."

https://www.saturdaydownsouth.com/auburn-football/report-terry-bowden-admits-to-paying-players-at-auburn/