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Former Auburn Baseball Coach Sunny Golloway Files Suit Against Auburn Trustees, Athletic Director Jay Jacobs, And Others

The Tigers' former coach broke a long silence filing a lawsuit against Auburn, yesterday.

By Walt Austin
Wade Rackley / Auburn Athletics

Since a rather strange and rambling press conference* in early November following his firing as head baseball coach at Auburn University and a tweet of "Amen" after the Iron Bowl that was quickly deleted, not much has been heard from Sunny Golloway.

That changed this afternoon when Rick Karle tweeted that he was told by Golloway's lawyer that he was, indeed, filing suit against Auburn.

The attorney, John Saxon, is definitely implying a conspiracy of some sorts to create a situation that lead to Golloway's firing. He also hasn't given up on that whole "lifetime contract" thing that was discussed in his lawyer's first statement following his firing, apparently. Why does he think that's even a somewhat viable statement to make? Well, because there was a clause that gave him extensions for reaching certain milestones. Of course, if he didn't meet those milestones, he doesn't get the extensions and can be fired, so that's a ridiculous thing to assert.

The official lawsuit is, as Kevin Ives noted, just the November press conference in written form.** Matthew Stevens of the Montgomery Advertiser summed it all up fairly succinctly in a series of Tweets:

Count 2) Golloway is claiming Jacobs made him a "permanent employee" & therefore he couldn’t be fired with or without cause. #MGMAuburn

I'm curious about why it's taken this long for the filing to be made. I'd like to believe it's because Golloway had the decency to not want it as a sideshow throughout the 2016 Auburn Baseball season that would distract his former players. With the Tigers' season over, there's a long offseason where this can all play out and hopefully be wrapped up before current Auburn coach Butch Thompson and his 2017 squad hit the diamond next February.

I'm not giving him the benefit of the doubt on anything "decent," though. His complaint also contains this little bit:

I don't know one way or the other on the validity of this, but why bring it up? My guess is he'll say one of his former players still on the team told him, but that player isn't likely to want to be identified, so there won't be any corroboration.

Everything about Golloway's and his attorney's treatment of this situation has been strange. It's similar to his calling Bruce Pearl "disgraced" in the initial statement when he was fired. His outlandish statements and claims throughout the process don't really paint him in the best light. They've been prone to grandiose statements such as this one:

Matthew Stevens also brought up another good point with these tweets:

That is hardly the sort of thing you would expect from one who still wants to coach again. He's going complete scorched earth on the Athletic Department and everyone in it. Who is ever going to consider hiring him after that? It really seems like he knows he's not going to get another major job and he's just trying to parlay this whole thing into a big payoff.

What does Auburn have to say about all of this?

It's going to be interesting - and not at all fun - to see how this ends up playing out either in court or in a settlement.

*If you've forgotten just how crazy that press conference was, then definitely go back and read that link. It was weird. Very weird.

**No, really, go read it again. It was strange.

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