Sources: Auburn, AD Greene finalizing split

Auburn and athletic director Allen Greene are finalizing negotiations to end his tenure as athletic director, sources told ESPN on Friday.

The school is expected to make an announcement about Greene’s departure later Friday.

Greene was entering the final five months of his contract, which is a rarity among athletic directors at major conference schools. Greene had asked Auburn for clarity about his future with his deal expiring in January, sources told ESPN, and he was told that Auburn was likely to wait until the end of football season to make a decision.

That led to Greene finding an exit strategy, sources told ESPN.

Greene was hired from Buffalo in January of 2018 by Auburn, becoming the school’s first Black athletic director. During Greene’s tenure, Auburn reached two College World Series in baseball, a Final Four in men’s basketball and had significant growth in both capital projects and facilities. Auburn is in the midst of building a $92 million football facility, which is slated to open later this year.

Issues in the football program have lingered, however. The school decided to part ways with coach Gus Malzahn in December of 2020 and struggled to find a replacement, in part because of Auburn’s reputation for administrative dysfunction.

Greene led the search that yielded coach Bryan Harsin, whose tenure has been shrouded by an “inquiry” by the university. That inquiry has since become viewed as the school fishing for a reason to fire Harsin for cause. Nothing was found, but Harsin has spent months fighting Auburn’s self-inflicted damage from the inquiry.

Harsin is widely viewed as coaching for his job this season, and it was widely viewed as unlikely that Greene would be unlikely to be the athletic director to determine his fate.

Greene is a former Notre Dame baseball player who developed a strong reputation in the athletics industry as he worked his way up the college athletics ladder as an assistant AD at Ole Miss to Buffalo, where he was a deputy and then the athletic director, before arriving at Auburn in 2018.