Stacy Danley has worked in college athletics for nearly 30 years, but not a day goes by that he doesn’t lean on something he learned while an All-SEC running back at Auburn from 1986-90.
Danley’s head coach during those years was Pat Dye, who died Monday at age 80 after a long illness. Now athletics director at South Carolina State, Danley fondly recalled some of the lessons instilled in him by his old coach.
“He taught us what it meant to be an Auburn man,” Danley said in a phone interview with AL.com. “He talked about that a lot. He had us on top of the world, believing that we were special because we were Auburn men. He’s our Bear Bryant, no question about it.”
Dye won 99 games and four outright or shared SEC championships during his 12 years at Auburn, restoring glory to a program that had lost eight consecutive times to Bryant and arch-rival Alabama when he took over as head coach in 1981. After losing to the Crimson Tide in his inaugural season, he won the Iron Bowl five times in the next seven years — including the watershed 1989 game that was the first played at Auburn’s Jordan-Hare Stadium.
Dye’s locker-room speech after that 30-20 victory is the stuff of Auburn legend. But just as impactful, Danley said, were Dye’s day-to-day expressions during team meetings, one-on-one meetings and in practices.
Among Danley’s personal favorites:
“We’ve got to get up early and stay late. We’ve got to outwork that bunch across the state.”
“The mark of a true champion is how you handle adversity — you’re either going to handle it like a champ or a chump. What are you, a champ or a chump?”
“You’re out there playing for your mamas and your daddies. … You’re representing more than just yourself out there — you’re representing Auburn.”
Quentin Riggins was also a member of those late 1980s SEC championship and Iron Bowl-winning teams at Auburn, and has devoted his post-playing life to the school as well. After many years as part of the Tigers’ radio broadcast team, he’s now a member of the school’s Board of Trustees.
As a white man raised in rural Georgia in the 1950s, Dye’s background could not have been more different than Riggins, an African-American man raised in Montgomery in the 1980s. But on a deeper level, the coach knew how to connect with his players.
“He was a guy who really loved hard,” said Riggins, an All-SEC linebacker in 1988 and 1989. “He was an old-school, throwback guy that, when he shook your hand or gave you his word, that was it. You never have to go back and worry that things had changed. What you saw was what you got. Anybody who sat down with Coach and talked to him can never say they never knew his position. He was a straight-through-the-front-door kind of person.
“I think Coach had a way of relating to our parents like no other. He’d see my mom and go hug her — he knew her first name and last name — but he’d go ‘hey Sugar.’ It was that Southern gentleman hospitality that he extended to our moms. He told them he was going to raise their boys. And he did so. That was those old-school values. If you got in trouble, you were going to run stadiums. If that didn’t get to you, you were going to run stadiums again. If you were a player and you made a mistake, he gave you a way back.”
Larry Blakeney is quite blunt about it: he owes everything he has as a football coach to Dye.
Blakeney coached for the Tigers from 1977-90, four years under Doug Barfield and then 10 under Dye before becoming head coach himself at Troy. When the NCAA began investigating Auburn for violations in the early 1990s, Blakeney was famously caught in the middle of it.
But Dye went to bat for his former assistant with Troy officials, and Blakeney kept his job. He retired in 2014 with eight conference championships and a school-record 178 victories.
“He saved my career twice,” Blakeney said. “No. 1, he hired me from (Doug) Barfield’s staff. And No. 2, he stood up for me when I needed him after I got to Troy. He really meant a lot to me and my family.
“I think (his legacy) is much the same as when Coach Bryant brought the same thing back to Alabama. Same kind of guys, small-town guys, farm guys, guys who understood hard work. But Coach Dye built this thing from the ground up. It was struggling when he got here. There had been a lot of good people who had tried to keep it where it needed to be, but he was able to take it and move it to the heights that Auburn people wanted and deserved. I’m thankful I was able to be a part of it.”
Just as impressed were those who competed against Dye at the school’s biggest rivals, Alabama and Georgia. Ray Perkins went 2-2 against Dye from 1983-86 and also served as a fellow SEC athletics director during that time.
Dye was an Alabama assistant under Bryant from 1965-73, while Perkins was playing in the NFL. The two became fast friends when Perkins — who like Dye was a country boy, albeit from Mississippi rather than Georgia — sold Dye an old pick-up truck shortly after his pro career ended.
“They just don’t come any better,” Perkins said. “I know a lot of people say that about a lot of other people, but Pat Dye was as at the top my list. I just loved the guy. You ask him to do something for you, he’s got it done before you even get it out of your mouth. He’s that kind of guy. … His players, he wanted to see them do good. He was in the helping mood for any of them — coaches and players. The No. 1 thing I can say about him, he was just a top-quality person.
“It was great to compete against him. We had fun with it. It really kept you on your toes trying to figure out a way to beat him.”
Dye’s first SEC championship came in 1983, when Auburn snapped Georgia’s three-year stranglehold on the league title. The Bulldogs’ coach at the time was Vince Dooley, an Auburn graduate.
Dooley famously turned down the Auburn job before Dye was hired after six years at East Carolina and one at Wyoming. But Dye proved he might have been the right choice all along by going 5-3 against Georgia prior to Dooley’s retirement in 1988.
“I’d like to forget the ones we lost, and we certainly lost our share of them,” Dooley said. “He was a very sound football coach and had a good relationship with his players. They played hard for him. We had some great games competing. At the same time, we maintained a good friendship and relationship, which grew even more so after coaching because we both had an interest in gardening and, particularly, a love for Japanese maples.”
Bill Curry succeeded Perkins at Alabama, but was unable to beat Dye on the field. He’d also faced him several times as head coach at Georgia Tech, Curry’s alma mater.
It was during his playing days that Curry first encountered Dye, an All-America lineman at Georgia when Curry was a freshman. Dye had a major hand in the Bulldogs’ one-point win over the Yellow Jackets in 1960.
“He was an incredible competitor,” Curry said. “… My first memory of him on a football field was the Tech-Georgia game that year. It was a 7-6 win for Georgia because Pat blocked the extra point. He just came off the edge and I remember thinking ‘my gosh, I thought the guy was a guard.’ He was like lightning. He was a really good player and really fast and quick.”
Gene Stallings left Bryant’s Alabama staff to become head coach Texas A&M just as Dye was arriving in 1965. The two were both mentored by Bryant, but never faced off as head coaches in a game until Stallings returned to Tuscaloosa in 1990.
Stallings won all three meetings with Dye before the latter stepped down following the 1992 season. But the two remained great friends over the years, serving together on the board for the Great Southern Wood company and participating together in several charitable endeavors.
“We were competitors and never had a cross word the whole time I coached against him, whether it was recruiting or a game,” Stallings said. “… When I say I lost a friend, I lost a friend. He was a great coach. He was a better individual. I thoroughly enjoyed my relationship with Pat. We’ve been on several trips together and I enjoyed every one. His coaching record speaks for itself. I thoroughly enjoyed coaching against him. His teams were always extremely well-prepared and it was a pleasure to compete against him.”
Other reactions regarding Dye’s death from around the football world:
Bill Oliver, who coached with Dye on Bryant’s Alabama staff “When we started at Alabama, we were two country boys. I had places to hunt. He was from Blythe, Georgia, across the state line. He didn’t know that many people. My daddy had land, my kin people had land, had friends that had land. There was plenty of hunting and fishing, and we got to be very close doing those things.”
South Alabama coach Steve Campbell, a graduate assistant under Dye in 1988-89
“He had a tremendous influence. I’ll always been appreciative of him for giving me a start in coaching. That was my first coaching job and I had the opportunity to start my career under a legend. They were in the midst of a historic run, where we were winning SEC championships and had great players. The thing I’ll always remember about him is his toughness. He preached ‘one heartbeat.’ Those were the things he preached and what helped those Auburn teams be successful. He surrounded himself with good people, players and coaches.”
Alabama football coach Nick Saban
Former Auburn coach Tommy Tuberville
Former Auburn baseball star Frank Thomas, who also played football for the Tigers
North Carolina football coach Mack Brown
East Carolina, where Dye got his head-coaching start
Morgan Jackson, daughter of former Auburn star Bo Jackson
Former Alabama All-American Cornelius Bennett