Tommy Tuberville: Auburn should claim vacated 2004 BCS title

The 2004 BCS title is vacated and up for grabs, and former Auburn head coach Tommy Tuberville thinks his 2004 Tigers team should speak up and claim it.

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Auburn completed an undefeated season that year, but was locked out of the BCS Championship game (mostly due to a very low early season ranking and tough climb up the polls), which featured the USC Trojans badly beating the overmatched Oklahoma Sooners.

After the NCAA stripped USC of that title due to numerous violations, it officially now sits unclaimed and asterisked.

Auburn is recognized as national champions in 1957 and 2010, and Tuberville thinks the school should stake their claim to the 2004 title, among others. But apparently he’s not getting much cooperation from his former employer.

In an interview with USA Today Sports, Tuberville had this to say:

"“They didn’t step up and say anything. That I was disappointed with is we didn’t have the media step up and say, ‘OK, there’s got to be a champion so who is it? It obviously should have been us. Oklahoma lost. Maybe they could say it should be split because they played in the game. But Auburn went undefeated.“If it’d been Michigan, if it had been Alabama, there would have been more of a push toward saying, hey they should be named No. 1. But Auburn, for some reason, we never got to first base on it. There was no support out of the administration.”"

This whole idea of “claiming” titles as if you were calling shotgun on a beer run seems a bit ludicrous. If a title is truly vacant, then it should be up to the NCAA to make a decision and award the title to the team that deserves it.

In this case, Oklahoma lost, and lost badly. Auburn would seem to be the most logical choice.

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