Rebel, Rebel: Coach Tuberville, Senator Tuberville

You can take the coach out of Ole Miss, but you can’t take Ole Miss out of the coach.

“Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game, and dumb enough to think it’s important.”
—Eugene McCarthy

In the late fall of 1994, the University of Mississippi—better known as “Ole Miss”—dismissed Billy Brewer as head coach of its football team after the NCAA found him guilty of ethical misconduct. As a penalty, sanctions were imposed on the university for the next four years, hampering its ability to recruit.

Just before the start of the 1995 season, Brewer was replaced with the defensive coordinator at Texas A&M, who’d recently won a national championship in the same capacity at the University of Miami: Tommy Tuberville.

Tuberville is from Arkansas. He played safety for Southern Arkansas State College—go Muleriders!—and prior to taking the reins at Oxford, Mississippi, his only head coaching gig was at tiny Hermitage High School in Hermitage, Arkansas (population: 850). He’d always been an assistant, never the top guy.

The football program he inherited in Mississippi was a mess. It took every ounce of coaching wizardry Tuberville possessed to lead Ole Miss to a winning record (6-5) and a victory over arch-rival Mississippi State in the 1995 Egg Bowl. But Tuberville was not only dealing with fallout from the Brewer imbroglio. He also had to contend with the Civil War.

Ole Miss, you see, was a bastion of what we can charitably call “revisionist antebellum sentiment.” Uncharitably, the campus was overtly and proudly racist. It is located in Mississippi, where local hero Jefferson Davis resided and served as U.S. Senator before assuming the presidency of the Confederacy during the Civil War. It was the site of the Ole Miss Riot of 1962, when angry, violent whites refused to allow James Meredith, the university’s first Black student, to enroll in classes; President Kennedy had to mobilize some 30,000 troops to quell the violence, in what remains the most military ever marshalled under the Insurrection Act of 1807. The team is (still) called the Rebels. The mascot was, for many years, a white-mustachioed figure named Colonel Reb. And students cheered on the home team by waving Confederate flags.

Even the name “Ole Miss” is not, as I’d long assumed, a cutesy term of endearment for the university. As Neil Henry explained at WaPo in 1986:

“Ole Miss,” is rooted in a distant time and state of mind. Originally picked as the title of the school’s yearbook in 1897, the term was taken from “the language of the antebellum ‘Darkie’ who knew the wife of his owner by no other title than ‘Ole Miss,’” according to an October 1936 issue of the school newspaper, the Daily Mississippian. “. . .It connoted all the admiration and reverence accorded womanhood of the Old South.”

The university has made great strides since Tuberville patrolled the sidelines, but in the mid-90s, Colonel Reb—and everything he represented—was alive and well at Ole Miss. As Charles Ross, professor of history and African American Studies at the University of Mississippi, told AL.com, of watching football games in the 90s: “You could see it on the TV, the sea of Confederate flags. For an African American, it struck me as a place that wasn’t most welcoming.”

After a humiliating defeat in the 1997 Egg Bowl—Ole Miss had failed to score—Tuberville shifted the blame from his own subpar coaching to another issue, complaining to the university chancellor, Robert Khayat: “We can’t recruit against that flag.” That flag, of course, was the Confederate battle flag.

“In the state of Mississippi, the best football players are black,” Tuberville reportedly told Ole Miss alumnus Harold Burson, founder of the elite PR firm Burson-Marsteller. “With the flags on campus, we’re not getting our share of Black players that are going to other schools.” At Burson’s suggestion, and with great reluctance, Tuberville held a press conference, urging fans to leave the Confederate flag back in the dorm room on game day. When that didn’t work, Khayat split the baby by prohibiting sticks at the stadium—effectively banning the flag without banning the flag.

Tuberville raised no moral objection to the culture at Ole Miss. He knew the history of the place when he took the job, abandoning the Aggies before the start of the Texas A&M season (they went 9-3 without him, incidentally, good for second in the Southwest Conference, so he wasn’t really missed). He was totally cool with all of the Old South stuff. Tradition, right? It was only when the overt racism at Ole Miss affected him personally that he took action—and only then, at the behest of one of the savviest PR guys to ever draw breath. With regard to the flag controversy, Tuberville did the right thing for the wrong reasons.

Here’s my favorite Tuberville story: In his fourth season at Ole Miss, and the first after Khayat’s stick ban, he led the team to the same mediocre 6-5 record, with the same 3-5 conference record, that he did in his inaugural campaign. When his name began to pop up in rumors about vacancies at other, more prestigious colleges, he was both adamant and colorful about staying put: “They’ll have to carry me out of here in a pine box,” he insisted. A week after saying that—and two days after getting shellacked by Mississippi State in the Egg Bowl—he left for the head coaching gig at Auburn, in Alabama; he didn’t even stick around long enough to coach the Rebels in the Independence Bowl. (Without Tuberville patrolling the sidelines, Ole Miss clobbered favored Texas Tech, scoring three fourth-quarter touchdowns; as a ball coach, Tubs wasn’t exactly Bear Bryant.)

What we learn from all of this is that, in addition to having no moral compass, Tuberville has no loyalty. His word is meaningless. The guy will say or do anything to help himself. He doesn’t give a rat’s ass about anyone else. At the same time, he’s both charismatic and persuasive—good college coaches have to be killer recruiters; that’s half the job—and he has name recognition among the college football set, which is extremely popular in the Deep South. All of which makes him the very model of a modern Republican politician. ChatGPT could not have devised a more GOP GOP senator than Thomas Hawley Tuberville.

All of these qualities have been on full display in Tuberville’s two-plus-year stint as U.S. Senator. On the 2020 campaign trail, he won Trump’s endorsement, which helped him defeat the sniveling Jeff Sessions in the Alabama Republican primary. (Sessions, comically in retrospect, tried to use Tuberville’s less-than-full-throated endorsement of the Ole Miss “stick ban” against him, as some sort of racist litmus test.)

As Senator-elect, Coach Tubs famously could not name the three branches of government; contrary to popular belief, he said “the House, the Senate, and the Executive” and not “offense, defense, and special teams.” During the besieging of the Capitol on January 6, 2021—a few days after taking office—he was called up by the hapless Rudy Giuliani, who left a message for him on someone else’s phone urging his support in the ongoing coup attempt. Not that he needed much prompting; he did everything in his power that day to kibbosh the counting of the vote and sabotage the process of peaceful transfer of power. He’s also pushed back hard on any legislation that would prohibit members of Congress from making stock trades—perhaps because he is reportedly one of the most egregious violators of the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act of 2012.

With regards to racism, Tuberville has shown his true colors. And his true colors are white, white, and white. At a rally for Trump in October 2022, he accused Democrats of being “pro-crime.” He continued: “They want reparation because they think the people who do the crime are owed that. Bullshit!” The president of the NAACP denounced the comments “flat out racist, ignorant and utterly sickening.” (That Tuberville was at an event lending his vociferous support to an obvious lifelong criminal who has since been four times indicted makes the “pro-crime” comments even more preposterous.) Tuberville also [checks notes] indignantly defended white nationalism. As the AP reports:

“We are losing in the military so fast. Our readiness in terms of recruitment,” Tuberville said, according to the station’s transcript of the May 4 interview. “And why? I’ll tell you why. Because the Democrats are attacking our military, saying we need to get out the white extremists, the white nationalists, people that don’t believe in our agenda.” When asked if he believed white nationalists should be allowed in the U.S. military, Tuberville responded, “Well, they call them that. I call them Americans.”

Tuberville stood by this position—which caused his own brother to publicly call him out—until, a day after refusing to back down on his apparent esteem for white nationalists during an interview on CNN—he finally put out a statement conceding that, yes, okay, fine, white nationalists are racist, whatever.

You can take the coach out of Ole Miss, but you can’t take Ole Miss out of the coach.

All of this ugliness would not be national news except that this deplorable ex-ball coach is the senator single-handedly holding up all the promotions in the U.S. military, making all of us—even the white nationalists he loves so dear—less safe. This is my opinion and also the assessment of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who last week said: “Starting today for the first time in the history of the Department of Defense, three of our military services are operating without Senate-confirmed leaders. This is unprecedented, it is unnecessary, and it is unsafe.”

Liz Cheney went further, calling Tuberville out on Twitter: “Senator @TTuberville is doing significant damage to American military readiness and national security. His hold on DOD nominees is directly aiding America’s enemies, and raising serious questions about whose side the Senator is on. Senate leaders need to end this now.”

Tuberville claims to be doing this as some sort of antiabortion protest. But are we sure? We know, from his coaching career, that he has no scruples or moral qualms. They certainly know it at Ole Miss, his old stomping grounds, where the former coach was lustily booed when he returned to the campus as an analyst with ESPN in 2017—20 years after he left, and they still haven’t forgiven the old turncoat!

Tommy Tuberville is now, in Washington, what he was then, in Mississippi: an opportunist, willing to say whatever is necessary to stay in power; a carpetbagger, willing to move from place to place for greener pastures, with no concern over whose lives he hurt in the process; and, whether it’s the Confederate States of America or the Russian Federation, a staunch supporter of enemies of the United States.

The coach needs to go. This time, there is much more at stake than victory in the Egg Bowl.

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Photo credit: Floor of U.S. Senate, from Senate website. Tuberville at Ole Miss, AP file photo by Rogelio Solis.