Before the Internet became the omnipresent element we savor and chastise and bemoan and champion daily, newspapers were the primary conduit through which we learned about the machinations of college football.

These days, the news is the story. We see almost everything happen live, or at least have the option of watching it live, streamed on your device of choice.

Years ago, though, the story could be the news.

This is about one of those stories. It was published Nov. 11, 1998, by an Orlando Sentinel columnist named Larry Guest. The piece, "Sources Say Oliver Was In On Ouster," was a true bombshell. It was one of those stories that drew some kind of reaction from every person who read it -- from the Auburn insiders who chafed at the melodramatic narrative to people a thousand miles away who believed, and still believe, that Auburn is in Georgia. Or maybe Florida. Somewhere down there.

Conspiracy theories were rife at Auburn during the late fall of 1998. Terry Bowden, less than a year after guiding the Tigers to the SEC Championship game, found himself unemployed. To this day, there is no unified story about the true reasons behind Bowden's resignation on Oct. 23, 1998. Some people maintain that he was fired, or was on the cusp of being fired. His team was 1-5 after a decisive loss at Florida on Oct. 17 and pressure was mounting. Everyone can agree on that.

Still, is pressure alone enough to warrant a break-all-ties resignation the day before a football game?

Bill "Brother" Oliver, the team's tenured and headstrong defensive coordinator, was named the Tigers' interim head coach for Auburn's Oct. 24 game against Louisiana Tech and beyond.

That's where Larry Guest's column began.

The Big Salvo

The column's thesis was housed in this remarkable sentence: "(Oliver) worked in lockstep with former Auburn coach Pat Dye to undermine Bowden for weeks prior to his resignation, and Oliver lobbied omni-powerful Auburn booster and trustee Robert Lowder to push Bowden overboard at season's end."

Guest went on to postulate that Dye furiously lobbied athletic director David Housel, now celebrated author of The Back Booth at Chappy's, to remove the "interim" tag ahead of Oliver's new job title and mitigate, at least in the short term, what had become a terminal administrative mess.

The column continued to sling an array of outlandish, pro-Bowden claims, most notably that Lowder was setting up Bowden to forfeit a $600,000 buyout. And that Oliver bullied Bowden by talking down to him and denigrating the head coach when talking with players.

Sordid accusations, to be sure.

These accusations, this alleged conspiracy, weren't well known until Guest's column hit the newspaper wires. Message boards still were in their infancy. Chatter like this was restricted to word-of-mouth with newspapers unwilling to delve into what widely was perceived as gossip.

Except this was true. Well, some of it was true.

Oliver didn't like Bowden. Dye had grown weary of Bowden, later telling anyone who asked that Bowden was a bad fit.

That was considered a damning statement at the time. Only the most ardent Bowden supporters would consider that sentiment even slightly off base these days, though it's worth noting that Bowden's 20-1-1 start as the Tigers' head coach really was something to see. Bowden looked like a great fit initially, but first impressions can be wrong.

And this one was.

The truth is that Bowden's staff, and therefore the program as a whole, had a major design flaw. Oliver was an old-school coach with close ties to Dye and many other, less-influential members of the Auburn elite. Bowden was the epitome of new school. He once cut out of practice early during the 1997 season to catch a James Taylor concert at Oak Mountain Ampitheater. You can imagine Oliver's reaction.

Some coaches were loyal to Oliver. Some were loyal to Bowden. It was a powder keg waiting to blow and a miserable start to the 1998 season provided a most combustable spark. To be sure, similar flavors of treachery aren't exactly uncommon out there in the real world.

It's just that Auburn's travails have a habit of hitting the open air with remarkable frequency. This has been proven time and again.

The Fallout

Auburn knew controversy long before Guest's column hit America Online -- Eric Ramsey was plastered across the front page of the Montgomery Advertiser for the wrong reasons in 1991 -- but this Oliver/Bowden hubbub soon became a regional spectacle. It hurt Auburn. It damaged the brand.

Though Tommy Tuberville restored Auburn's competitive edge within two years, accusations of meddling never dissipated. The university was investigated by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools and placed on probation in 2003 for what the organization felt was undue influence wielded by some Board of Trustees members.

Then Jetgate happened in late 2003. A handful of Auburn officials, headlined by Housel and university president William Walker, flew to suburban Louisville, Ky., to meet with U of L coach Bobby Petrino while Tuberville still was employed by Auburn. It was an ill-advised move that backfired spectacularly when the clandestine trip was brought to light jointly by the Montgomery Advertiser and Louisville Courier-Journal.

Those three events -- Bowden's messy departure, the SACS snafu and Jetgate -- gave Auburn a black eye that remained a stumbling block for several years. Some might argue that Auburn hasn't fully recovered even today. Many corners of the college athletics universe still see the program as a place where closed-door politics trump job performance, where administrators still take care of their friends and plot the downfall of their political rivals.

Yet Auburn is much healthier than it was 18 years ago. It's becoming a financial success, like every other member of the Southeastern Conference, and the sprawling athletic department has become all but impossible to re-direct nefariously. The department no longer is a one-man show; a cadre of assistant and associate ADs collaborate to shape decisions and policies.

The Auburn that Guest painted with prose in 1998, clearly accentuated by pro-Bowden sources, now is nothing more than a relic of a bygone era that may or may not have actually existed. It's a newspaper clipping stashed away in your grandmother's attic, a fleeting memory of life before social media and the SEC Network and million-dollar assistant coaches.

Still, it was one heck of a story.