Scarbinsky: New Auburn football staff shows it's a young man's game

[AUChizad]

Thank heaven for Phillip Lolley.

His return to the Auburn coaching staff does something almost as important as completing the staff eight weeks after Gene Chizik started piecing it together.

It gives the staff at least one assistant coach who's older than the head coach.

And the head coach isn't old. He's four months younger than me.

Chizik is 47, which makes him a puppy in Bobby Bowden years. With the exception of the 54-year-old Lolley, Chizik went for energy and enthusiasm over age and experience in hiring his assistants.

Consider the ages of the other Auburn football staffers:

Ted Roof: 45. Gus Malzahn and Curtis Luper: 43. Tracy Rocker: 42. Jeff Grimes: 40. Trooper Taylor and Tommy Thigpen: 38. Jay Boulware: 36.

That means the average age of the Auburn assistants is 42.

That means they're less likely to get offended if a player wears his cap backwards and more likely to wear their own caps that way.

"They all bring something to the table," Rocker said. "No doubt, a lot of them bring energy. Everybody has a little humorous side to them.

It makes it fun."

Hey, if you're going to recruit a teenager, you have to relate to him, and if you're going to relate to a teenager, it helps if you're young enough to remember when you were one.

Age is relative, of course, and there are exceptions to birth dates as destiny. You can be an old soul in your 20s or be young at heart in your 50s.

But generally, you are what the scoreboard of life says you are, and it says the new Auburn staff has more get-up-and-go than the Tommy Tuberville staff that got up and went, slowly, with plenty of creaking in the joints on its way out the door.

Average age of the Tuberville assistants: 46.

The best thing about the Chizik staff, if you believe the Tuberville staff had lost a step, is that it's drastically different. If you're going to make a change, make a change.

Chizik did, and he went far beyond picking fruit from the Pat Dye family tree.

"Everyone comes from different places," Rocker said, with the exception of Luper and Taylor, who both came from Oklahoma State.

"That's what I like about it. As a coach, you can be somewhere so long that you get too set in your ways."

A true fact: There are as many Tuberville guys on Chizik's staff as Dye guys, and both are in short supply.

There's one of each.

Lolley first came to Auburn to work for Tuberville. Rocker first came to Auburn to play for Dye.

Rocker was an especially inspired choice for this staff. If you're going to hire only one man from that rock-ribbed era, might as well choose the best defensive player in Auburn history.

The only thing most of Rocker's new colleagues have in common is this:

They're Chizik guys.

They're at Auburn because of him.

That should help inspire the kind of loyalty a head coach needs, especially a head coach who hasn't proven himself as a head coach.

"The true test of the staff will be when things are bad," Rocker said. "Sticking together."

These Auburn assistants haven't had time to form cliques or play favorites, as Tony Franklin said the Tuberville staff did.

Chizik's assistants have been so busy recruiting, or arriving, they've barely had time to introduce themselves to one another.

And because they're outsiders, they haven't had time to be shocked or awed by Nick Saban and his Alabama staff, which is no small thing.

Besides, the younger you are, the more you believe you can take on the world.

So welcome to the new faces of Auburn football.

They may be young, but say this for them: They're all older than Lane Kiffin. And, so far, they act like it.

(Super Friends)

[Saniflush]

They may be young, but say this for them: They're all older than Lane Kiffin. And, so far, they act like it.