They were the original snakes on a plane. A quartet of Auburn University officials who secretly flew out of town in search of a new head football coach only days before the Tigers’ annual showdown with rival Alabama.

The year was 2003, and Auburn was sliding toward another mediocre campaign under coach Tommy Tuberville. The Tigers began the season ranked No. 6 in the country, and several preseason publications predicted that Auburn would contend for the national championship.

But the Tigers opened that season with losses to eventual co-national champion USC and Georgia Tech, then later dropped consecutive Southeastern Conference games to LSU, Ole Miss and Georgia to fall to 6-5. That left Tuberville, after nearly five full seasons at Auburn, with a pedestrian 36-24 overall record and a 22-17 mark in SEC play.

Some Auburn boosters had seen enough and were clamoring for a change. So two days before the Tigers’ regular-season finale against Alabama, university president William Walker, athletic director David Housel and two members of the school’s board of trustees flew on a private jet owned by another Auburn trustee to a small airport in rural Indiana, where they interviewed University of Louisville head coach Bobby Petrino — a former Tuberville assistant — for Tuberville’s job.

There was one major problem with the entire episode — neither Tuberville nor Louisville officials were notified in advance about the meeting. Within days, however, the media began spreading word of the clandestine gathering, and many Auburn supporters were upset at the underhanded way Tuberville had been treated, regardless of his record. It certainly didn’t hurt Tuberville’s cause that the Tigers had defeated Alabama in the interim, giving Tuberville three victories in a four-year span against Auburn’s most-hated rival.

Suddenly, it no longer mattered whether there was any validity to the argument that Auburn needed to change coaches. The attempted search had been bungled so badly that embarrassed university officials quickly retreated and actually gave Tuberville a one-year contract extension and a $1.5 million raise.

A few months later, Walker resigned under pressure after less than two years on the job and Housel — a longtime Auburn official who by all accounts simply had been following the orders of his superiors — announced he was retiring.

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Not since Leslie Nielsen has a person looked so foolish taking an airplane ride. But despite all the justified ridicule directed toward Auburn officials following the incident, that flight of fancy might have been the best thing to happen to the Tigers. Because for whatever reason, Tuberville’s record has been drastically different ever since that plane left the Plains.

The victory over the Crimson Tide two days later was the beginning of a 15-game winning streak for Auburn, a span that included the entire 2004 season. And though the Tigers were denied a shot at the national championship game that year, they finished No. 2 in the polls and went into the record books as the best team in program history.

The Tigers followed that up with a solid 9-3 record last year (7-1 in the SEC), and they are off to a 5-0 start this season and are ranked second or third nationally in the major polls. All told, Tuberville has gone 29-3 since nearly losing his job, and is an astounding 20-1 against SEC teams.