If you were a starter at Auburn University in the late 80′s and early 90′s. Why?…perhaps the better question is why not…because it certainly seemed to motivate people to try hard and win that starting spot…..Now the same people are running that program again! Why?
The Fall of Bobby Lowder, and the Fallout at Auburn
If you’re sick of hearing about Cam Newton, bear with me. Because Cam Newton is a part of this story, but in many ways he is incidental to it. The story is Auburn University, specifically its athletic department, and the shadowy but undisputed influence on it by Robert “Bobby” Lowder for the last 25 years.
Cam Newton’s star is ascending, the Heisman nearly assured, and his future unlimited. A year from now he’ll be wealthy, and college will have served its purpose for this special athlete. Bobby Lowder is 67, and in decline. His personal, business and financial life is in shambles. He is being investigated, sued and will probably be prosecuted.
It looks now like the unraveling of Lowder’s business and personal affairs won’t be able to drag down Cam Newton. The Auburn University athletic department on the other hand, might not survive the fall of Bobby Lowder. They are inseparable.
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Let me say up front I’m not a secret “Bammer” or anything, really. I just waded into this story and this is what came out. Everyone knows I’m a Buckeye fan, which requires that I hate all SEC teams equally. If I were an Auburn fan though, I’d be furious at what
Bobby Lowder has wrought on my beloved program. All I’ve tried to do below is assemble events into a coherent narrative for the reader, and to be as faithful to the truth as I can be.
A quick note to the “everybody does it” crowd: No they don’t. Not every college program pays 200 grand cash for players. And for those others that do…this article isn’t about them. It’s about Auburn.
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There are potentially troublesome athletic boosters insinuating themselves into nearly every major college football and basketball program in the country, but you could say Bobby Lowder redefines the position. As a member of the Auburn Board of Trustees for 27 years, and the sitting chairman of the university Finance Committee, Lowder has essentially run Auburn athletics as his private preserve for decades.
Auburn football coaches, athletic directors…even university presidents, serve at his pleasure. A 1964 graduate of the school, Lowder and his parents have donated as much as $20 million to Auburn over the years, and several campus buildings bear their name. As a self-made CEO of a major regional bank with over $25 billion in assets, Lowder’s passion for his work was exceeded only by his passion for Auburn football. He has often been called the most powerful man in the State of Alabama.
Lowder has been the subject of profiles by ESPN.com and by Fortune/CNN-Money that are both worth the time to plow through for more background. The man apparently has his defenders, but they can meet in a phone booth. From the Fortune article:
…Lowder has made plenty of enemies over the years. His name might not be familiar outside Alabama, but he is easily one of the most feared, loathed, and some say misunderstood men to wield power in this state since George Wallace — the governor who first appointed him to the board in 1983.
Lowder has been accused of making backroom deals with governors and treating the Auburn football program like a private fiefdom. (Because of his influence over Auburn’s athletic program, three years ago ESPN named him the most powerful booster in college sports.)
At various times Lowder has been at war with Auburn’s faculty, its student newspaper, its alumni association, and some of his fellow trustees — developing a reputation along the way as a tyrant with a vindictive nature. It has been alleged that Lowder made a death threat to one board member he clashed with.
Former Alabama Governor Fob James tried to have Lowder removed from the Auburn Board of Trustees in the late ’90′s, but Lowder sued the Governor to stop him, and used his influence on the Board to prevent them from naming a successor. Lowder supported James’ political opponent in the subsequent election, and when his man, Don Siegelman, was elected Governor in 1998, the new Alabama chief executive promptly extended Lowder’s appointment to the Auburn Board for an additional 12 years, set now to expire in 2011. Siegelman was convicted in 2006 on bribery and mail fraud charges, and served two years in federal prison.
The Rich Tradition of Auburn Cheating
One sports web site titled an article on Lowder, “What if a Booster Ran an SEC School’s Budget?” Exactly. What could go wrong? At this point, the question is: What has gone wrong? Few would argue today that Lowder’s influence on Auburn athletics, while fanatically well-intended, has been a malign and destructive one more than it has served the university’s interests.
Lowder has by many accounts presided over a longstanding system of buying and paying Auburn football players through a network of surrogates including assistant coaches and other boosters. This is hardly just a matter of unsupported rumor, or of bad faith accusations by Auburn’s rivals (though there is plenty of the latter going on). The school has a track record of NCAA violations of this sort ever since Pat Dye Jr. was forced out as Athletic Director in 1991, and a year later as head coach, based on NCAA findings that Auburn was paying players.
And that doesn’t even count 1957, when Auburn went undefeated, but was not allowed to play in a bowl game owing to…you guessed it…previous recruiting violations. Since Bobby Lowder was 13 at the time, I guess we can’t hang that one on him.
Dye’s reign at Auburn was undone by Eric Ramsey, an Auburn player who secretly recorded his coaches talking to him about the cash payments and “loans” he was getting through the program, a scandal that resulted in a “60 Minutes” episode, and got Bobby Lowder busy looking for a new A.D. and a new coach.
The NCAA was particularly peeved with Auburn at the time, as they had already been on probation an unprecedented six times, and the two-year probation they earned for the Eric Ramsey case had to be delayed at its outset so the most recent two-year probation for previous violations involving basketball and tennis could expire. Take a number, football.
The Terry Bowden Years
Terry Bowden, at the time the coach at Samford University in Birmingham, took over the Auburn program after Dye. Lowder’s daughter Katherine, who happened to work in Bowden’s office at Samford, stuck her head into his office one day, and said “Dye is leaving and my dad wants you to be coach at Auburn.” That’s the way it works when you’re the SuperBooster, and you own the Board of Trustees and the A.D. (Lowder once reportedly said of David Housel, one of his many athletic directors, “He’s not a good A.D., but he’s my A.D.”)
According to an interview Bowden gave in 2001 to Paul Davis, the editor of The Tuskegee News, he tried his best to end the payments to players when he arrived at Auburn, but was undermined and eventually forced out by Lowder for not going along to get along with the program’s pay-to-play scheme. Bowden negotiated a $1.8 million buyout package, and as a condition of his deal, agreed to a confidentiality clause that prohibits him from discussing Lowder, the Board, the Athletic Dept. or player recruiting.
Convenient, but Bowden at least unburdened himself to Davis about the corruption at Auburn before clamming up. Near the end of his days at Auburn, Bowden says he was “checking my house for bugs”.
The Bowden interview linked above can be found in numerous places on the web in basically this same form. I attempted to verify with Davis the accuracy of the transcript, but have not as yet received a reply. So, as with anything sourced this way, take it for what it’s worth. If it helps give it credibility, know that USA Today reported on Davis’ account of the interview in a 2003 article. Here’s part of what Bowden told Davis in 2001 about the way it worked at Auburn when he was head coach there (1993 to mid-season 1998):
We paid then $12,000-$15,000 to sign. We sign about four every year that we pay.(Former assistant coach Rodney) Garner paid most of the players. He was paid when he was a player at Auburn.(Stacey) Danley is the assistant compliance guy, and he was paid when he was a player. I broke the rules. I said pay it off, and it will never happen again.
(Asst. coach Wayne) Hall said “OK, but you will change your mind.” Katherine came to Auburn as my assistant, but she worked for Colonial. We were real close. I told Lowder “We have cash all over.” Lowder said “I told Wayne not to collect more than we had to have to pay the players.” Wayne had a safe in his house where he kept the money. Within two weeks of me being hired they told me about paying Jelks.
Nothing was done without Lowder knowing. I will go under oath and say that Lowder looked me in the eyes and said, “I didn’t want Wayne to collect more money than we needed to pay the players.” I was hiding a dirty secret. We were paying (star running back and current Washington Redskin) Steve Davis and his cousin the fullback.
It took about two years to get it all cleaned up. Most the guys we were paying weren’t any good and weren’t helping us win games. Steve Davis was the exception.
Here is how it works, fifty to 60 men give $5,000 per year. Wayne would collect it. These are all good men. They didn’t ask questions. The coach tells them that everybody cheats so we have to. My first two years we went 11-0 and 9-0-1.
Jetgate
From Dye to Bowden and then to Tommy Tuberville, Lowder always had his eye on his next coach. In 2008, after Tuberville had lost five of six SEC games down the stretch, Lowder dispatched his interim President, his AD Housel, and a couple of Board members in the Colonial BancCorp corporate jet to Louisville to meet secretly with then-Louisville coach Bobby Petrino, and offer him the Auburn job. The plane was identified, and word of the meeting leaked. The Iron Bowl with Alabama had yet to be played, and Lowder had undermined his coach in an incident that came to be called “Jetgate”.
Petrino wisely turned Auburn down, but Tuberville was justifiably angry, and Lowder was justifiably criticized for his ham-handedness. It wasn’t long though, before Tuberville was out, and Lowder was back searching for a coach he could control.
Academic Misconduct Embarrasses Auburn
The increasingly brazen and unseemly influence of one particular Auburn trustee was brought to light yet again in 1999, when Lowder set about settling personal scores by defunding Auburn academic departments using his power as Finance Committee chair. He eliminated the respected Auburn PhD program in Economics, as one example, and reorganized the journalism department that he claimed had generated negative stories about him. His micromanagement of university affairs eventually drew the attention of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS), the accreditation body for SEC schools.
The ensuing SACS investigation resulted in a one-year probation for Auburn, and cited Lowder’s influence in the Pat Dye payola scandal, the Bowden firing, and the stacking of the Auburn Board with Lowder cronies, board members of Colonial BancCorp, Lowder’s bank, and recipients of loans from Colonial, to an extent that the “independence” of the board was in question. Not only had Lowder’s nearly unlimited power at Auburn brought disgrace to their athletics programs, but it had brought the entire university to the brink of losing their academic accreditation.
William Muse, the President of Auburn University at the time of the SACS accreditation investigation was summarily fired by the
Lowder-controlled Board not long after that episode. Years later, Muse spoke with Paul Davis, the aforementioned Alabama newspaperman, who reported that Muse, Bowden, and even Davis lived in fear of what Bobby Lowder could do to them…
I spent many hours with Dr. Muse, a good man. We talked early on by phone, from my office to his. He then became concerned that his phone was tapped and asked that I call him at home. Then he became fearful about using his home phone. Those were tough days. Jim Martin, also a former president, had me meet with him face-to-face off campus. Former Coach Terry Bowden had his home checked for electronic bugs. I finally decided to do the same.
Threats I received were so scary that I called the FBI and met with agents in my office. During those days, my newspaper building burned to the ground under mysterious circumstances. The stakes were high at Auburn and for Mr. Lowder.
One day over lunch in a downtown restaurant, I also asked Dr. Muse why he just didn’t go public, tell the whole, sordid story, get fired and get it over with. I knew he was going to be fired sooner rather than later. I think he did, too. “It’s just useless to have a public brawl. He (Lowder) has too much power. Who wins? Who loses? Would it help Auburn?,” he asked me–or maybe himself.
In a 2009 article, Davis characterized Lowder’s effect on the university like this:
John Dean once told President Nixon: “There’s a cancer growing on the presidency.
Ditto for Auburn. Nixon’s cancer was Watergate. Auburn’s cancer is Lowder.