Ole Miss reminds Tommy Tuberville about his ‘pine box’ comments before his ESPN2 trip to Oxford

On Saturday, the Ole Miss Rebels will play the Texas A&M Aggies in Oxford, and the game will be televised on ESPN2 at 7 p.m. ET. One of the announcers for the broadcast will, naturally, be former Rebels head coach Tommy Tuberville, who has been working with ESPN all season, his first non-coaching gig since he stepped down as Cincinnati’s head coach last December.

Tuberville’s departure from Ole Miss didn’t exactly go over too well for Rebel fans. During his final season in 1998, he was asked about the rumors of him heading to Auburn.

“They’ll have to carry me out of here in a pine box,” he said when asked leaving Oxford to take the Auburn job. Ole Miss hasn’t forgotten those words:

After the Egg Bowl that season, Tuberville made his way to Auburn to accept the Tigers’ head coaching job. It’s been nearly 20 years since his pine box comments, but it’s safe to say Ole Miss hasn’t exactly forgotten.

The shade goes both ways, though. When Tuberville was considering running for governor of Alabama last spring, he had this to say:

“Thank goodness Ole Miss can’t vote,” he said via the Oxford Eagle.

Tuberville has called games of former teams he used to coach. In September, he called a Texas Tech contest. Tuberville, who coached in Lubbock from 2010-12, compared the city to Siberia and Irag over the summer:

“You run me off at Auburn and you ship me to Lubbock, Texas,” Tuberville told the Rick & Bubba radio show, via 247Sports. “I’m going to tell you what; that’s like going to Siberia. Somebody asked me, ‘What’s Lubbock look like?’ It looked like Iraq.”

He reportedly added: “Well, I love those people out there.”

He later apologized on a Lubbock radio show:

The former Texas Tech football coach said on Double T 97.3 FM that he was prompted by comedians on a Birmingham, Alabama, radio show to be funny, but said he “stuck my foot in my mouth.”

“I’m here to apologize,” Tuberville said on the Thetford & Asbhy Show. “I shouldn’t ever said that. My mom said there’s an idiot born every day. That day, I was an idiot.”

Tuberville made headlines May 17 for disparaging Lubbock on the Rick and Bubba Show.

On the Lubbock radio show Saturday, he told hosts David Thetford and Craig Wells that he was making no excuses and owning up to the comments.

“As you always teach your kids and players and even people around you, don’t downgrade anybody,” Tuberville said. “If you downgrade somebody, you deserve to be ridiculed and I deserve it. I deserve it, shouldn’t have done it and I apologize. I still want to have goings-on there in Lubbock and still be a part of the history, because it is great history.”

On a note unrelated to Ole Miss or Texas Tech, Tuberville’s hot mic featuring some NSFW language from Saturday was picked up on Twitter, and it was gold.

Brb, making Tuberville saying “Thank you, d*ckhead” as my ringtone. We’ll see if he has anything to say about Ole Miss’ tweet, or his former team in general during the broadcast!