There was smoke, but there was no fire, to the rumors that Smoke Monday and Bryan Harsin had issues during their lone season together on the Plains in 2021.
Monday was recruited by Gus Malzahn and was a star safety heading into the 2021 season, but he was often uncharacteristically beaten in coverage during year one of the Bryan Harsin era in Auburn.
Many figured there were issues in the wake of comments (“He probably doesn’t know their names. As a coach, how can you explain that?”) made about Harsin in February as talks of the Auburn BoT booting the Boise native from the HC role heated up.
But Smoke is here to pour water on that fire at the NFL Combine:
"“I never really had any problems with him, for real,” former safety Smoke Monday said Saturday. “There was a lot of different guys that might’ve had their problems, but I was not one of those guys. I feel like, like I said, he does everything in his power to get his players in the best position to perform well. I feel like he’s a coach that wants to win. He’s got a winning mindset, and if you got a winning mindset, things work out for you.”“I played with the guy and I feel like he’s a pretty good coach,” he said Saturday. “He does everything in his power to bring the team closer. He tries his best to get us to the point where we expect each other to be more than other teams. When I was there, he was doing a great job of trying to keep the team together. There was a lot of people trying to break us apart, so I feel like he is doing a good job.”"
This is a sharp change in tone since just a month ago:
"“I was at Auburn for four years and it never felt like how it felt this past season. Auburn will forever be my second home, but in order for guys to succeed, this has to change. Harsin is hell of a coach that wants to win but as a person he truly don’t understand kids that come from nothing, kids that come from the hood, like he truly don’t understand that, but as kids we try our best to outgrow where we came from, but we need people that didn’t grow up the way we grew up to help us along the way, and that was something Harsin didn’t do.”"
The skeptic in me thinks this could be a face-saving measure to better appeal to NFL front offices that are probably not too high on the idea of a player talking ill of his collegiate coach.
That said, Monday saying there were people ‘trying to break us apart’ speaks volumes to the chatter that the AU BoT was heavily involved in the slanderous Bryan Harsin rumors that almost sunk his Auburn aspirations.