OldBaldFrog

Well in that case it will be up to Harsin to mold them into football players to fit his system and hopefully into fine young men like Coach Jordan, Coach Dye and Coach Tuberville did. I'm reminded of a few years ago when Iowa St beat Texas in Austin and folks from Iowa St. said....5 Star Culture beat 5 Star Recruiting.

He's a hack who slandered Harsin and should be sued for libel and defamation of character along with his employer and forced to pay out and publicly apologize face to face to Bryan Harsin and Auburn University. The thing is that Harsin is a class guy and a gentleman who'd use the moment to teach his players about how to act with grace and class. Bryan reminds me of Coach Dye and Coach Tuberville in a lot of ways. I can see why Alan hired him and fought for him.

We all are in agreement about Joseph Goodman. I hope you're right and think you're right about Auburn this year. The way he works those kids and the toughness he instills in them and the program are very reminiscent of Coach Dye and Coach Tuberville. I hope the results are the same.

I don't think so. I think a winning record this regular season and a bowl victory and he'll be fine. Folks at Auburn know what happened and that it will take time to recover from what happened. The concern I have is that some other school out west will look at Harsin and say.......how about coming back west and getting out of that soap opera and he leaves. Then.....AU literally starts all over.

That's putting it mildly. He and that rag he wrote for should be sued for libel and defamation of character.

As a fellow alum I totally agree. These guys want to "play football coach" when none of them played a down. They just need to write the checks, love the school, and keep their mouths shut. Harsin could've sued them for defamation of character.

Easily. However, the grit Harsin showed and the backing he got from his players will in the long run stand him in good stead. Auburn's boosters have been doing this kind of stupid stuff for decades. They tried it with Coach Dye in 1986, after they were "disappointed" after the 1985 season and falsely accused him of abusing his wife Sue, but Coach Dye was beloved and folks were outraged so the "snakes" slithered back into their holes. They got Bowden who didn't help himself with some of "personal conduct", but had an overall winning record. They went after Tuberville in 2003, with jet-gate and again after a down year in 2008. They got Chizik in 2012, after a down season and they got Malzahn in 2020, after Kevin the weasel Steele went behind Malzahn's back and tried to stage a coup to get his job. If these guys really cared so much about the school and its football program they'd just shut up and write the checks since not one of them ever played a down of football and know nothing about the game.

Yes...but hopefully not with a lit match.

Are you talking about the same Evan Neal who routinely does the 48 inch split box jump? While an ACL injury is more serious an un-repaired pectoral injury can really hamper a LB's ability to cover, rush the passer and specifically tackle.

Seven players in the first three rounds......gotta hand it to Kirby for recruiting and coaching some serious talent at UGA.

No doubt certain boosters at Auburn will be hoping he does hit the wall, but I think it's a sign that he's being accepted in Alabama, which will bode well for his future as a recruiter and ultimately as a coach.

....and Nick Saban is what.....the smiling coach? Harsin is a tough coach and a stern disciplinarian...plain and simple. That's what he was hired to be at Auburn. Gus Malzahn is a fine man and really nice guy....but he wasn't a tough disciplinarian and that lack of toughness and discipline hurt his teams on the field and cost him his job. I understand at UCF he's gotten a lot tougher on the kids.

Auburn's NROTC program is the largest in the country and one of the very oldest. Auburn has a strong tradition of providing officers to the Navy and Marine Corps going.

Right now Bo Nix isn't even #1 on the depth chart as QB at Oregon so I've got to wonder where the author is coming from.

I think the kids who are at Auburn have bought into Bryan Harsin's toughness and discipline.

There've been years where Auburn didn't have the "talent" other rosters had and yet there were really good seasons. Folks need to remember that Coach Dye's first year at Auburn in 1981 was 5-6, as was Tommy Tuberville's first year at Auburn and yet both coaches who were renowned for toughness, hard work, discipline and brutal physical conditioning had very successful runs.

Well it should be remembered that against South Carolina, Alabama and Houston Finley played with a severe ankle injury that ended up needing surgery. So let's see what happens when he's fully healthy and mobile again.

Agreed. Bryan Harsin is an excellent QB coach who had Nix on the right path. Nix just didn't want to hear that he had to compete for the starting QB job at Auburn and decided to jump ship for what he thought were the greener pastures of Oregon and the PAC 12. Unfortunately it seems that the young man has found that he's the #2 QB at Oregon, when had he come back to Auburn and heeded what Harsin was telling him he'd be the starter at Auburn in 2022.

Bo Nix transferred because Harsin told him he'd have to compete for the QB job in the spring after his rehab. He goes to Oregon expecting to be named the starter and guess what......the coach there tells him....."you'll have to compete" and now he finds himself a solid 2nd on the depth chart. The very things Bryan Harsin harped on Bo about.....decision making and fundamentals are the very things that have surfaced at Oregon.

Well.....hopefully the play calling (or lack thereof) has been straightened out with the departures of Mason and Bobo. Hopefully Auburn will start to recruit or at least develop quality, tough and nasty O-Lineman similar to what AU has known under Dye, Tuberville and even Chizik so they can run the ball when they want to. Defensively there are holes to be plugged, but there are some promising kids who will step up and in. I'm of the opinion that the thing Auburn needed to and still needs to work on more than anything else was rebuilding toughness, discipline, and character which is what Harsin is doing.

Everyone's entitled to an opinion. While the second half of the season was disappointing, I do think that Harsin is on the right track in terms of rebuilding the character and toughness within the Auburn program which Auburn was IMHO sorely lacking under Gus Malzahn. I'm an old guy and I was at Auburn when Coach Dye was first at Auburn and remember how many folks left the program because they couldn't handle how tough Dye was on everyone. In Coach Dye's first two seasons at Auburn a couple dozen players left. What was the result? Auburn was no doubt the team of the decade in the 1980's in the SEC and a national power. As for wins and losses this year I do see Auburn all four non-conference games and winning up to 5 SEC games this year.

Meddling Boosters has been an unfortunate "fact of life" at Auburn for nearly thirty years now. They've never liked Greene as AD and their dislike turned to outright loathing when Greene refused to let their little coup against Malzahn result in hiring their butt boy Kevin Steele. They had it in for Harsin since they day he was hired. That whole "investigation" thing was b.s. that was based on the slanderous stories that came from a couple of those boosters.

Ah......the Harsin hater has made an appearance.

Gus was a good recruiter, and yet at the same time allowed the O-Line to lapse into mediocrity. Last time AU had a really good line was 2017.....IMHO. While we're at it I still think that the root cause of what did Gus in was the fact that he wasn't true to his own system. He kept trying to turn a team built around being able to run the hell out of the football with a spread offense into a wide open passing team which in the end was disastrous.

Got the feeling that in the end the QB job at AU comes down to Finley or Ashford. Either way AU will hang its hat on running the ball.

My bet would be that in the end.....Robby Ashford is the guy unless as you've said T.J. Finley takes a really big step forward this summer. In Finley's defense that ankle injury ended up needing surgery and at one point the coaches at Auburn were going to hold him out of a lot of scrimmage type work, but the young man...ever the competitor insisted he could go.

You do realize that LSU desperately tried to keep one of those "mediocre" QB's from transferring from LSU to Auburn right? Does the name T.J. Finley ring a bell?

Texas and Texas A&M have a huge advantage in this area. If NIL is the "way of the future" then both schools will take advantage of their enormous financial and boosters' financial resources to "sign" (i.e. rent) the most coveted players.

Weren't they already being "paid" by being given scholarships (or grants in aid) as colleges call them that include tuition, board, books, fees, tutoring, and a whole lot of incidental benefits that 95% of college students would love to have? If they want to let these kids get paid then put it on the NFL to institute a "D league" like the NBA does or a "minor league" system like Baseball does and let them go from high school to the "pro's" like a lot a baseball, hockey, soccer, and basketball players already do.

That sounds so wonderful on the surface. However, when you take a look at the details (where the devil is found) you find that NIL isn't the panacea folks make it out to be. What happens when a kid gets injured, gets tossed off the team, or simply gets beat out by someone more talented? There are no guaranteed deals and when the "star" goes down with an injury, gets tossed out of school, a better player shows up and the "star" (now former star) decides it's time to transfer.....the NIL deal is over and done. What happens when colleges decide to treat these kids like employees who do get paid? At a university they're not tenured nor are they vested so they are "at will" employees so they can be "fired" at anytime. If college athletes are now paid employees then they'll have to pay.......wait for it.....TAXES. How many of these "sudden millionaires" are prepared to deal with filing what will no doubt be a complete 1040 for the IRS and a similar document(s) for most states and (in a few cases) municipalities? People keep forgetting (as Gene Chizik so aptly said) that these kids are already being compensated with free educations that are costing their non-scholarship peers between $100,000 and $200,000 on average. In the end I fear that Saban is dead right about the current "model" and that if something isn't done we will see the end of college football as we've come to know and love it. By the same token I also think if we don't get coaches salaries under control the same thing will ultimately happen. IMHO I think that what got all this stuff started was when colleges started paying coaches millions per year to coach. Once that happened (as Coach Dye warned 30 years ago) college sports were no longer even remotely about developing the moral and physical character of the young men women who participated but rather about one thing and one thing only.....winning at ANY costs which is where we are today.