Tubs, We Hardly Knew Ye

And that was a very, very good thing.

Go to hell and get a job.

That’s what the current junior senator from Alabama had to say to UC fans in the last month of his four-year slog as their head football coach. That was after he’d driven the program into the ground and taken millions of their dollars for a job that, by the end, he could not have cared less about. Get a job, indeed.

Tommy Tuberville was the Bearcats worst coach in a generation. He won with Butch Jones’ players. He lost with his own. Ask Tristate-area high school coaches how many times they actually saw Tubs at their schools. You could count those visits on the fingers of one hand.

He was a disingenuous pitchman, whose loyalty was as thin as a dollar bill. Sound familiar?

From The Ringer:

His first head coaching job came at Ole Miss. In 1998, he said that he would die as the school’s head coach, famously declaring on his radio show that “they’ll have to carry me out of here in a pine box.” Two days later, Tuberville left to take the head job at Auburn.

Fans printed shirts featuring Tuberville’s face and the words “Liar, Liar” on them.

Tuberville left Texas Tech in 2012. He famously sneaked out of a dinner with recruits so that he could accept a job at Cincinnati. “The waitress brought our food out, and we thought he went to the bathroom,” said Devonte Danzey, who was considering Tech but later committed to Auburn. “The next day, [Tuberville] announced he was going to Cincinnati.”

By the time he left here, no one was lamenting a betrayal. They were too busy popping champagne corks.

Past is prologue.

This week, at a pro-Trump rally in rural Nevada, Tubs proved that not only was he a mediocre football coach at UC, adept mostly at banking paychecks, he had an impressive habit of channeling Archie Bunker. (Lookimup, kids.)

Tubs declared to those in attendance that the Democratic Party is “pro-crime, they want crime. They want crime because they want to take over what you got. They want to control what you have.”

That silliness was strictly warm-up rhetoric.

“They want reparations," said Tuberville. "Because they think the people that do the crime are owed that! Bullsh--! They are not owed that."

Translation: Black people are criminals.

If you’ve listened to Tubs over the years, you might have detected a pattern. He has a habit of saying equally brilliant things.

In 2019, he said of Middle Eastern immigrants, “They’re taking over, and if we don’t open our eyes, it is going to be over with. They’re bringing all kinds of diseases with them that we don’t understand,” he said of immigrants from Africa and the Middle East. “They’re not educated.”

The Ringer, again:

Slate interviewed four former Auburn players about Tuberville; when asked about his support of Trump, all four brought up the disingenuousness of their coach winning over the trust of young Black men and then supporting a president who has refused to condemn white supremacists. “What does that say about somebody who has always thought this way to make millions of dollars off the same people the president is intending to overlook or mistreat?” former Auburn defensive tackle Tommy Jackson said. “It’s shameful. It’s downright shameful.”

That’s the thing. How many Black football players who played for Tuberville feel buyer’s remorse now? I’d bet a whole lot of them. The percentage of Black players on your average big-time college football team is more than 40 percent. Tuberville made millions riding on their backs. To him, they were all criminals.

They wanted handouts, doncha know.

Well.

Any UC fan watching Tubs’ last season in Clifton — and the three lopsided Ls in bowl games that preceded it — would have to wonder who was getting the handouts. Hint: It wasn’t his players.

We use the term “racist’’ too freely now. It’s a powerful word. It shouldn’t be uttered casually. In this case, it’s appropriate.

How do we elect people like Tommy Tuberville?

It’s an easy answer in quasi-am football. We “elect’’ them because they win. Winning whitewashes all. But to run our country?

Are the folks of Alabama so narrow that they voted for this guy because he once went 13-0 at Auburn? This is the same person who in 2020 identified the three branches of government as “the House, the Senate and the executive.”

Do some us dislike Democrats so fiercely we gladly trade competence for power?

Stupid question, I know.

And then there is Herschel Walker. He’s as qualified to be in Congress as I am to win the Heisman. Tuberville snuck out of the Texas Tech banquet. Walker denounced abortion after he asked a former girlfriend to obtain one. Allegedly. Other than playing football, calling himself a Republican and having a pulse, Walker isn’t qualified to run a bake sale. Yet here we are.

These are serious, existential matters. We treat them like they’re Saturday in the park.

Get a job, indeed.

If a country lives long enough, it gets the face it deserves. What’s the face of America in the fall of 2022?

Tuberville and Walker?