Auburn football: 4-star Birmingham area DT leaning towards Alabama

Auburn football head coach Bryan Harsin has taken his licks on the recruiting trail in his first year-plus on the Plains.

That’ll happen when you’re new to the SEC, but that will most certainly continue to happen when your own university Board of Trustees undermines you in an attempted coup…the second in as many offseasons by the way.

Harsin has talked about the disparity in negative recruiting from competing schools between what he was used to in Boise (aka not much) and what he is dealing with now (…) since the start of spring practice.

Perhaps that is why Hewitt-Trussville product Hunter Osbourne is leaning towards sticking close to home by committing to Alabama and Nick Saban and playing his collegiate home games in Tuscaloosa:

"Hunter Osborne had been waiting for an Alabama offer. The four-star Hewitt-Trussville defensive lineman’s winter featured interest from the top programs across the country but it was coach Nick Saban and lead recruiter Freddie Roach’s in-person offer in January that stood out.“‘Why not Bama?’,” Osborne told 247Sports, “Saban is the GOAT and how he operates the program really makes me have high interest in them.”"

It’ll certainly be a tough time convincing someone to commit to the primary rival of the GOAT, especially with the infamous inquiry that nearly submarined the entire Bryan Harsin era on the Plains.

But Harsin’s battle was always going to be uphill, particularly in the Birmingham area, where Saban has been digging his proverbial recruiting hooks into for more than a decade being just over an hour away in Tuscaloosa.

Osbourne would be joining the NFL factory up north and likely would be riding the pine for a season or two before being given a chance to shine.

Auburn football is among the eight other teams that have head coaches that Osbourne didn’t call the ‘GOAT’.