By Ted Miller
ESPN.com
Archive

Auburn went 3-9 this season and fired coach Gene Chizik. Having covered Auburn in 1998 -- when Terry Bowden was forced out -- I know how miserable things can be on The Plains when football fortunes are flagging.

Folks at Auburn so very much want their football program to be a national power on an annual basis that even food tastes bad when the Tigers are losing. That includes barbecue and sausage gravy.

Of course, back in the late 1990s, Alabama wasn't rolling along atop college football with a glowering Nick Saban making like Bear Bryant II, so maybe I don't know the true depths of the present misery.

Yet here's what I would tell Auburn fans to do before you hire a new coach and inject some renewed hope and optimism into your lives that likely will again melt and resolve itself into a dew: Dust off the copy of your 2010 national championship video and watch it again. And again. And again.

You'll always have Glendale. Here's looking at you, Cam Newton and Nick Fairley.

They say it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. That sounds like the sort of poetry talk that could get a fella slugged at a sports bar, but I do know it is better to have won a national championship than to have not, even if what follows thereafter is an unexpected and extended slog through mediocrity.

College football has a lot of one-hit wonders -- Maryland in 1953! -- and teams whose best days came before face masks -- let me tell you about the great football tradition at … Minnesota!

But recent decades, at least before the SEC took over college football, feature a number of programs that tasted the sweet championship fruit but once, such as Clemson (1981), BYU (1984), Colorado (1990) and Washington (1991).

(I know, Huskies fans, you claim four national titles; I am too busy typing to argue.)

Those aforementioned programs have known plenty of rough times since their moment on top. Colorado just had its worst season in program history. Washington didn't post a winning season from 2003 to 2009. Clemson has been up-and-down since the Danny Ford era. It averaged five losses per season from 2000 to 2010. BYU, other than a losing lull from 2002 to 2005, has posted several nice seasons since its title, but it has not been a serious national title contender since 1984.

The question for those teams -- and for Auburn -- is, would you trade that national title to escape all downturns? Would you trade experiencing a fleeting moment of No. 1 for winning eight to 10 games a year, guaranteed, but with no hope for a title? You might want to check in with Buffalo Bills fans about the 1990s.

We play sports for many reasons, and there is plenty of cuddly talk about the real meaning being "how you play the game." All that "doing your best" stuff.

Nonsense!

It's about winning. It's about standing atop the mountain and looking down at everyone else.

So know that it is far better to suffer the slings and arrows of sporting misfortune and live through that sublime experience of championship glory than it is to wallow in a gentle hum of consistent, moderate success.