Zac Etheridge has been around Auburn long enough to understand how the internal workings of the university and football program affect the team.

On Thursday, he was a guest on “The Paul Finebaum Show” and shared how the offseason turmoil around Bryan Harsin affected the team.

“Well, really Coach Harsin always had conviction of what he believed in, and any time you go through adversity is always tough and here at Auburn, we preach family, right,” said Etheridge, who is Auburn’s secondary coach and associate head coach. “The one thing about it from inside this building and this team and this staff, we’re behind Coach Harsin, and we’re 100 percent behind him. What he wants to do for this program, and we knew things that were coming out wasn’t always the case, it was outside noise. But inside this facility, inside this team, guys knew what type of man that was leading our program, and we all wanted to be behind him, and that’s what we’ve been showing every single day, just focus on what we can control and that’s about going 1-0 every single day.”

Once cooler heads prevailed, Etheridge spoke about how it could help make Auburn stronger.

“You don’t wish that type of noise on anyone, it was wrong, it wasn’t right, but at the same time, and you’re going through adversity you either going to sink or fail or get yourself to the top,” Etheridge said. “But I think Coach Harsin, his conviction and the things he’s been able to do to be able to have us behind him, and knowing he had people behind him and to focus on what the ultimate goal was and that was to get this program to where it wanted to be, and we was there for him, and we prayed for him. And that was what it was all about, that you had a leader that believed in his staff and believed in his team that he wanted to be here. Myself and being at Auburn for a long time, it was really important for us to just rally around those guys and make sure that Coach Harsin knew that we had his back.”