It’s over for Bryan Harsin at Auburn.
Auburn made it clear this week that Harsin can no longer effectively coach football at the university, and that’s for the best since Harsin has made it clear over the last couple months that he doesn’t know how to coach in this new version of the SEC.
Harsin returns from vacation today, and while he was away the university, working outside of the athletics department, launched an investigation of the football team to figure out how Harsin could lose so much support from within. It was a stunning rebuke of a second-year football coach like the SEC has rarely seen. Harsin was hired little more than a year ago to replace fired coach Gus Malzahn, but now the university has turned on him.
Malzahn had a pretty good run at Auburn. Harsin never put on his shoes, and then someone took his fresh kicks out of the locker room and threw them up on a power line for all to see.
Alabama infamously had a coach named “Ears” Whitworth, and now Auburn has their modern version of that old coaching relic. Harsin’s unmasked, abject failures as head coach of Auburn football scream of someone unwilling to listen to people smarter than him about how to win in the SEC.
Whatever it takes.
Maybe Harsin just needed more time, but Auburn, though its actions this week, clearly decided any more time spent helping Harsin figure things out was a waste.
At one point, maybe for a few months, Harsin could have succeeded at Auburn if things had been different. I’m being kind here because, to be fair, Auburn athletics director Allen Greene and his hiring committee wanted a tough coach who could mold a team the old way and that’s exactly who they thought they hired.
Then, suddenly, everything changed about college football in the SEC.
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The rules allowing players to be paid for their name, image and likeness went into effect in June of 2021, Texas and Oklahoma announced it was joining the SEC a couple months later and now Texas A&M is out-recruiting everyone thanks to a bottomless war chest of cash.
In the old SEC, where toughness was currency and grit was like football gold, Harsin might have made a really good coach. Now coaches need to keep players happy, and maybe well compensated, too, for a team to even have a chance. There are ways to rebuild quickly in this new world, and all it takes is more money.
Auburn appears ready to fork it over.
On Monday, the university released an ominous statement announcing for all to hear that it was “judiciously collecting information” on Harsin’s program.
On Tuesday, Auburn screamed to everyone that — hooray — it suddenly received the single largest donation in Auburn athletics history.
On Wednesday, Harsin was set to return from vacation. Don’t unpack, coach, because we all know what happens next. Harsin’s buyout is $18 million if Auburn fires him without cause. Maybe something will come up, though. The investigation of Auburn football is ongoing.
At the beginning of this week, I was convinced that firing Harsin after just one season would set Auburn football back years. That was just me thinking like a college football dinosaur circa January 2021. If and when Auburn officially breaks with Harsin, and it’s surely coming soon, maybe the university doesn’t need the best available coach in the country to compete with Alabama and Georgia.
Find someone people respect, and instead of paying him $5 million a year figure out creative ways to funnel half of that money to players through NIL deals.
Oh, did I say the silent part out loud? Well, you don’t have to like it, but this is the future of the SEC.
Nick Saban says paying players NIL money to pick a school is wrong, but I can’t see the reason why. Everyone else is making money, so what’s wrong with the players getting paid their fair shares? If that’s cheating then something’s wrong with the rules. In reality, paying players through NIL deals is about to be a normalized way of doing business.
Why keep blowing out the budget on these wasteful and disgusting coaching buyouts when investing capital in players is the intelligent and morally correct thing to do? The buyouts for Gus Malzahn and Bryan Harsin combined are $40 million. That kind of money would change the lives of a lot of people.
The game changed on Harsin before the ink even dried on his contract, and then he refused to adapt in a league he never understood from the beginning. His starting quarterback left for Oregon, his defensive coordinator took a pay cut to coach at Oklahoma State and Harsin’s young, 32-year-old offensive coordinator, who was on the job less than two months, suddenly quit two days before National Signing Day.
It can’t get any worse than that, right? I don’t want to find out.
At best, Harsin is a pettish version of Michael Scott at Dunder Mifflin, a poor manager of people selling reams of paper out of an office building at the dawn of our digital age. To be sure, this past week has felt like an episode of some ridiculous sit-com because only some fictitious television character like Scott could get fired from his job while on vacation.
We all know it’s so much worse than that, though. Harsin isn’t Scott. He’s what happens when Dwight Schrute finally gets his chance to run the office.
Joseph Goodman is a columnist for the Alabama Media Group, and author of “We Want Bama: A season of hope and the making of Nick Saban’s ‘ultimate team’”. You can find him on Twitter @JoeGoodmanJr.
