Southern Comfort? Not in this house

AUBURN, Ala. — This is one face of Auburn football, sitting behind an office desk piled high with newspapers and other assorted clutter. You could say it's the red face. It belongs to 63-year-old James Gundlach, the sociology professor who this summer blew the whistle on some questionable academic practices in his department benefiting athletes.

About 10 miles away, on a 700-acre farm of Southern pine and cypress and man-made ponds, is another face. This one is that of Pat Dye, 66, maybe the greatest living icon of Auburn football, man enough to stand up to the largest legend of this state, Bear Bryant.

"It is some serious stuff down here," says Dye, talking about the place of football in the state's culture.

Washington State brings its banged-up football team to sample this milieu tonight against Auburn, a chic choice to win the national title this year.

There are some parallels in the football history of the two Land Grant universities. In 1982, each broke its longest losing streak in the series against its rival (WSU had lost eight in a row to Washington, Auburn nine straight to Alabama).

One of the signal moments in each program's history was the date it managed to bring its rivalry game back to its campus — for WSU, 1982, and thanks to Dye, Auburn in 1989.

"I guess you're gonna try to take the game to Auburn," Dye remembers Bryant telling him when he got the Tigers job in 1981.

"I'm going to," Dye said resolutely.

"We got a contract through '88," Bryant retorted.

"We're gonna play it at Auburn in '89," Dye shot back.

But where WSU and Auburn diverge can be found on page 200 of the Auburn media guide, where it posts photographs of the four Alabama state troopers who provide security at Tigers games. Nothing reflects the place of Southern football like troopers escorting head coaches off the field, protecting them from — from what, assassinations? Nuclear warheads?

Up in his office, Gundlach thinks he knows the intersection where WSU and Auburn began to differ, the place where football got big here.

"One of the problems in Alabama is, we're at the bottom of so many things," says the bespectacled Gundlach, wearing jeans and a ponytail. "Football is one thing where Alabama competes on a national level."

And so it got big, way big, here. It produced Heisman Trophy winners Pat Sullivan and Bo Jackson. Sixteen months ago, it had four players taken in the first round of the NFL draft.

Big means passion often overwhelms restraint. Gundlach thinks fellow professor Thomas Petee was motivated partly by a simple jock-sniffing urge when Petee offered an inordinate number of directed-reading — independent-study — courses.

Gundlach didn't just throw rocks willy-nilly. He meticulously researched Petee's students, one of whom he describes:

"I'm not going to name the sport, or even the sex of the athlete," Gundlach says. "They were going along, kind of a low C, kind of hanging on, and all of a sudden, one semester, they flunked every course. The next two semesters, they take five classes in directed-readings format from Petee, and get four A's and one B. During those same two semesters, they take three other classes and make F's in them."

Auburn's interim president, Ed Richardson, acknowledged the irregularities but said it was an academic problem, not an athletic one.

"The administration's afraid to touch football," Gundlach said.

The NCAA hasn't been. In 1993, you could almost hear the NCAA committee on infractions sighing as it whacked Auburn again, writing it was "indicative of what can occur when, in the minds of a university's athletics department staff and [boosters], the program becomes more important than the university of which it is a part.

"As a result of this case, Auburn University has become one of only three universities that have been placed on probation six or more times by the NCAA."

Dye lost the athletic-director segment of his duties over that one — to ex-Washington AD Mike Lude — and retired a year later.

"He may think he had something to do with me retiring," Dye said defiantly of Lude, "but he didn't."

It's better here, anyway, on his farm, where Dye delights in landscaping projects, building rustic dwellings and being the gentleman farmer. Oh, and giving the waitresses a hard time at a nondescript roadside eatery, with pictures of the Earnhardts on the walls and a copy of the Ten Commandments in the window.

"Catfish, hush puppies, slaw and fried okra," Dye orders, and two reporters follow suit.

"Melanie!" he barks, feigning impatience. "Where's the fried okra?"

He is back on the big spread now, playing tour guide, obviously proud of what he has wrought here. It is suggested that he seems a man who likes having a project waiting.

"I do," he said. "But I like it without the pressure. Doing it when I want to do it, not when somebody else wants me to."

His words seem to convey a message, felt both in the sociology office and here in the woods on a sultry afternoon: The big ticket here is Auburn football, and don't you forget it.

Bud Withers: 206-464-8281 or bwithers@seattletimes.com