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You have to be careful not to put too much stock in awards. Not long ago, Gene Chizik was named national coach of the year after guiding the Auburn football team to an undefeated season and the BCS championship.
Two years later, after the bottom dropped out as the program went winless in the SEC, he was fired.
Jay Jacobs hired and fired Chizik, which makes the Auburn AD uniquely qualified to put his own latest piece of hardware in perspective. Jacobs was named Thursday by the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics as one of four winners of its Football Bowl Subdivision AD of the Year Award.
He was the only SEC AD so honored this year.
The recognition for Jacobs comes at an interesting time for a man who was hired what seems like ages ago in 2004. He's the longest-tenured AD in the dog-eat-dog SEC West, and only Kentucky's Mitch Barnhart and Vanderbilt's David Williams have been at their posts longer in the league.
There's something to be said for surviving in that job in that division in that league for more than a decade. It's an accomplishment all by itself.
Another positive: According to NACDA, you can't win AD of the year if your school has been hit with probation or cited for lack of institutional control on your watch. So far, so good on that front. Auburn's last probation, against its men's basketball program, was levied not long before Jacobs took over.
But for all the good things that've happened on the Plains with Jacobs as AD, for all the championships won in various sports, money raised and facilities built or upgraded, his overall grade remains incomplete for two reasons: Gus Malzahn and Bruce Pearl.
One of the most visible ways to measure the performance of Power 5 ADs is to check the performance of the football and men's basketball coaches hired on their watch. Success in softball and equestrian is wonderful, but it pales in comparison. The perception of Jacobs is shaped to a great degree by the records of Malzahn and Pearl.
By that standard, the jury is still out on all three of them.
Malzahn won the SEC championship and came up one stop short of the national title in Year One, but he's 11-13 in the SEC the last three years. Pearl has improved the hoops program in many ways, but he's 15-38 in the league, and his Tigers will play on the first night of the SEC Tournament as one of the bottom four seeds for the third straight year.
Of course, the program was in the bottom four for five straight years before he arrived, but many observers expected Pearl to lift it out of that particular rut by now.
We've seen what Malzahn and Pearl are capable of accomplishing at their best. By that standard, both of Jacobs' most prominent hires still have plenty of work to do. They'll approach the most important seasons of their Auburn tenures during the 2017-18 academic year.
Neither coach has been an unprecedented success or an unparalleled failure. Both of them have turned the arrow in the right direction based on their latest seasons, although progress has been painfully slow.
Which way they trend in the next year should have a real impact on their boss and his ability to go deep into a second decade on the job.
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