The latest Senate campaign spots by former Auburn University head football coach Tommy Tuberville sound nothing like the coach that radio show host Paul Finebaum remembers from more than a decade ago.

Tuberville’s ad simply states that if God isn’t put back into schools, “this country has no chance of survival.” He adds that “with all of my heart, ‘God sent us Donald Trump’ because God knew we were in trouble.”

“It clearly sounds like a new Tommy Tuberville,” said Finebaum, the iconic longtime radio personality whose show has long focused on the Southeast and SEC football. “I have no recollection of him ever bringing faith into a conversation.”

Finebaum, who worked as a longtime reporter and columnist at Alabama newspapers before rising to prominence in talk radio with ESPN, said he had developed a close working relationship with Tuberville from the mid-1990s to 2008, the year when Tuberville was fired from Auburn.

Finebaum admitted that since 2008, the two have interacted but “not to the degree” when Tuberville was a head football coach at both Auburn and the University of Mississippi. Tuberville coached at Mississippi from 1995-1998, before coming to Auburn for 10-year run.

“From a coverage standpoint, and I don’t have close friends as coaches, but among those in the state, I was as close to him as any I covered,” Finebaum said. “We were friends and played golf together and went on vacation (together) once. You can digest that in anyway … but I saw that (campaign) statement, and I just shook my head and said, ‘Wow, I am a journalist and a talk show host and (not) an active candidate in 2020, so I don’t know how to answer that question other than it clearly sounds like a new Tommy Tuberville.”

Finebaum continued, “Everyone has conversions. Everyone is different than maybe they used to be. But I think Tommy Tuberville, the guy I spent a lot of time covering, did not correlate with the guy in that statement.”

Tuberville and his wife, Suzanne, are members of the Church of Christ. He has identified himself during the campaign as a “Christian conservative,” and an ardent backer of Trump.

Tuberville, in a statement to AL.com, didn’t mention Finebaum by name. He said that his “Christian faith guides everything I do.”

Said Tuberville, “It’s why I had team chaplains at every college I coached. It’s why my players began each game with a locker room prayer. It’s why we provided faith-based counseling to the players who wanted to utilize it.”

Finebaum admits that he wasn’t present inside the Auburn locker room before football games to grasp the “tone and tenor” of pre-game religious activity.

Finebaum said that the team’s longtime chaplain, Chet Williams, was close to Tuberville. Williams could not be reached for comment.

Tuberville is one of seven Republicans running for the Senate seat currently occupied by Democrat Doug Jones and is viewed as one of the frontrunners. The primary is scheduled for March 3, with a runoff on March 31, if none of the Republican hopefuls receive more than 50% of the vote.

Finebaum, though not involved in Jones’ political campaigns, has had him on his radio show as a legal analyst. In 2013, for instance, Jones provided his viewpoints into a sexual assault investigation that was going on at the time involving then-Florida State quarterback Jameis Winston.

Jones has raised the most of any of the Senate candidates, according to the latest federal disclosures. Tuberville, though, is proving to be a strong fundraiser after leading the rest of the Republican field with a 4th quarter tally of more than $530,000.

Finebaum said he’s not surprised to see Tuberville running for high office. He said that in recent years, whenever he interviewed Tuberville during broadcasts from Birmingham, the conversation often “veered to politics.”

“We were taping interviews and he veered so much into politics it was hard to use,” said Finebaum, a political science major in college who says he’s a close follower of Alabama politics. “Everything he said was political. We want to talk about things that would be interesting to a mass audience. My philosophy on the show is that you can go up and down the dial on television and subscribe to as much political idealism as possible. We keep it neutral.”