From the very beginning, there were red flags about hiring Bryan Harsin to be the head coach of the Auburn football program. Though he saw success at Boise State, he arrived on the Plains without any experience in the cutthroat world of the SEC and had no idea what he was about to get himself into.
The issues began early on, with boosters that viewed Harsin as an outsider and someone they needed to get rid of alongside high school coaches that wondered about the culture fit. It didn’t help that Harsin struggled to open up to the public as the face of the Auburn football program and work on fitting in with the Auburn family.
Then the recruiting problems began, with the Tigers failing to ever get hot on the recruiting trail and articles being published left and right about how the former Auburn coach never even met many of the high school coaches across the state and how displeased the coaches were with Harsin.
But according to a recent interview with ESPN, Harsin explained that things began going wrong before he even got the job:
"His interview with the school, which was conducted over Zoom, had some glitches. “The screen went blank during the interview. I couldn’t see them, but they told me to keep on, so I kept rocking along,” Harsin said. “I walked out of my office, and my wife asked me how it went. I said, ‘I don’t know. The screen went blank, and I couldn’t even see them.'”"
After leading Auburn football to its first losing season since 2012 and losing 10 of the last 13 games he coached on the Plains, Harsin walked away from the position with $15.3 million, moved back into his Idaho home with his family, and reported that he is “thriving.”
If only our football program could say the same thing.