Analyst debunks myth that Auburn football head coach is a bad job due to job security

Auburn football has gotten a bad rap recently due to the national media’s insistence that the Plains is the only place where booster meddling and high expectations make a toxic cocktail at times.

Every marquee Power Five program without a Nick Saban-type head coach running things his way — Ie. just about any school generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for the city it resides in — suffers from the same issues.

HBO and ESPN host Bomani Jones called out the Auburn football program on October 10, parroting all the typical talking points about dysfunction, but he took it a bridge too far calling the Tigers head coaching job a bad one.

One of the many criticisms he leveled at AU was the lack of job security, but CBS Sports’ Barrett Sallee had the receipts in hand — and he is certainly no Auburn homer given his recent joke (half joke?) that Bryan Harsin is a double agent sent to destroy the program from within — to dispute Jones’ claims:

Auburn football has a bad reputation because of the Gus Malzahn firing and Bryan Harsin’s tenure

Auburn doesn’t give a damn about its bad reputation among the national pundits, especially when it doesn’t hold weight. LSU has the same number of firings, and they dismissed Ed Orgeron, Les Miles, and the Nick Saban after championship seasons. Tennessee was far more disappointing than Auburn was for far longer and had two more firings since the new millennium. Florida dismissed several coaches with New Year’s Six bowl victories, and sent away seven overall.

Rumors of Auburn football’s demise are greatly exaggerated, but not by the cold hard facts — which backs up the idea that while AU has its flaws, it also has a rougher reputation than it deserves.