Print edition: 
Austen Arnaud remembers a few Iowa State players walking out on Gene Chizik's exit speech to the team after Chizik took the Auburn job — and that pretty much summed up the mood in Ames.
It wasn't much better at Auburn. A day or so earlier, a handful of fans had heckled the school's president and athletic director at the airport upon their return from a meeting with Chizik's agent, when it appeared that the Tigers had their man. Famed alum Charles Barkley cried racism when the school didn't hire Buffalo's Turner Gill.
Chizik caught it coming and going.
But all is forgiven at Auburn. In his second year, Chizik's program is undefeated, ranked first nationally and meeting Oregon in the BCS championship game on Monday in Glendale, Ariz.
At Iowa State, the Cyclones say they benefited from the move as well.
"It worked out fine for everybody," said Arnaud, whose three-year run as the team's starting quarterback began with Chizik's second season. "We've done some good things in the last two years, and obviously Auburn's in a good position."
From universally despised to the best thing that's happened — at two programs. Quite a trip for Chizik.
"There's always going to be a few people that disagree with anybody's hire in college or the NFL," Chizik said.
And in Chizik's case, the departure, which must rank among college football's oddest in recent years.
Typically, a poor performance gets a coach fired and a stellar one gets him a better job. Chizik delivered the first — a 5-19 record over two years — and somehow landed the second.
"It was weird," said Bobby LaGesse, sports editor of the Ames Tribune, who was the newspaper's football beat writer at the time. "He hadn't delivered yet, but there was still a jilted-lover feeling about it."
Iowa State athletic director Jamie Pollard had to feel betrayed. After the 2006 season, he had fired one of the most popular coaches in school history, Dan McCarney, because the program could no longer sell hope. The Cyclones had just come off a 4-8 season after appearing in bowl games five of the preceding six years.
Pollard moved quietly behind the scenes. Reports had him interviewing San Diego's Jim Harbaugh and Nebraska offensive coordinator Jay Norvell, and some media outlets called for Central Michigan's Brian Kelly.
But Chizik was the hottest property after his defenses had helped Auburn to an undefeated season in 2004 and Texas to a national championship the following year. His teams had won 29 straight games. When Chizik agreed to begin his head coaching career in Ames, Pollard joked before the news conference, "I hope he doesn't change his mind."
"They way he carried himself, I remember being impressed by that," Arnaud said. "He had all that success on defense at two different programs, that was going to be a big boost."
The immediate payoff came at the bank. The reach-for-the-stars hire had the desired impact with brisk suite and season-ticket sales. And any skepticism that had emerged after an 0-2 start was washed away in Chizik's third game when the Cyclones defeated Iowa.
That triumph, plus two victories late in the season, reinforced the idea that the Cyclones were turning the corner and that Pollard's ambitious hire would soon bear fruit.
Instead, the 2008 season spiraled into a disaster. A Big 12 season-opening loss to Kansas, a game in which the Cyclones blew a 20-0 halftime lead, began a winless conference season.
"It was a rebuilding situation," Chizik said. "We put down an idea of where we wanted to go and how we wanted to get there. Obviously along the way we would have liked to have had more wins."
Two weeks before he was hired as the head man at Auburn, Chizik demoted both coordinators and fired two other coaches, bold moves for a coach who looked dedicated to fixing Iowa State's problems.
But soon, the Cyclones started getting text messages and seeing their coach's name on TV crawls. Auburn was seeking a replacement for the coach it had just fired, Tommy Tuberville.
"It started circulating before we knew what was going on," Arnaud said. "Our coaches knew something was up, but they couldn't control it. Some of our guys, especially the young guys he recruited, were getting pretty upset."
So was Pollard, who declined to be interviewed for this story but said at the time that Iowa State deserved better.
At Auburn, a mere 15.1 percent in an unscientific poll conducted by the Alabama-based website al.com said they liked the choice.
It was classic lose-lose.
But not for long, and Iowa State was the first to feel better about itself. The hiring of Paul Rhoads, a former Cyclones assistant who had grown up 10 minutes from Jack Trice Stadium, had a one-of-us sensibility about it.
Even better, it came with victories and YouTube moments. The first-year triumph at Nebraska and locker-room celebration, a bowl victory over Minnesota and this season's triumph at Texas — and the fact that Rhoads had come from the Auburn staff — might have given Iowa State the last laugh.
Except the Tigers hit the jackpot by hiring a coach who won the Outback Bowl in his first season, persuaded Blinn Junior College quarterback Cam Newton to wear an Auburn jersey — and not one from Mississippi State — and guided a remarkable comeback victory at Alabama in what might be the greatest triumph in program history.
That is, unless Chizik holds the crystal football aloft Monday night.
"Maybe a lot of people didn't think so when it happened, but you have to say he made the right move," Arnaud said. "I'll be pulling for him."
