Bruce Pearl bulldozed his way to the top

His career was like his teams: relentless

Photo credit: Auburn athletics

Imagine a medieval city. Wheat fields and windmills. Stone walls. Shacks and townhouses and manors, blacksmiths and miners and artisans, all packed in circles around the looming castle at the town’s center. Maintaining this delicate, internal ecosystem, in a world of external threats, was not a simple matter of rule by violent force, though having a bunch of soldiers with swords didn’t hurt. But no: For a city to thrive, it needed collective buy in, social understanding. Norms had to be preserved.

One common punishment for norm-breakers — people who didn’t deserve to be hanged, say, and didn’t warrant holding in the town gaol for the rest of their lives, but who aggrieved enough of their neighbors that something needed to be done — was banishment. Offenders were told to leave and never return. It was better than dying, but not much better: Exiles would wander the spaces between villages, expose themselves to the elements and the ungoverned wild, with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Whatever they did, whether they carved out a quiet life or died in the snow, they would never again experience the security or prosperity of a life inside the walls.

This is, more or less, what happened to Bruce Pearl. But Pearl didn’t stay exiled. Again and again, emphatically, for better and worse, through sheer relentless will, he bulldozed the walls and walked himself right back into town.