Auburn assistant Zac Etheridge opens up about tumultuous offseason, Bryan Harsin

At SEC Media Days, Auburn head coach Bryan Harsin made one thing clear. He’s putting the tumultuous offseason behind him after a university inquiry into the program and, ultimately, keeping his job.

But it’s still the subject of many a question in college football, and Tigers assistant Zac Etheridge discussed the situation on The Paul Finebaum Show on Thursday.

Etheridge, Auburn’s secondary coach who played for the Tigers from 2007-10, said the biggest thing for the staff was to keep the players dialed in as everything unfolded. He added his belief in Harsin and said the program had his back the whole way.

“Coach Harsin always had conviction in what he’s believed in,” Etheridge said. “Anytime you go through adversity is always tough, and here at Auburn, we preach family. The one thing about it — I know from inside this building and this team and this staff — we rallied behind Coach Harsin and we were 100% behind him and what he wanted to do for this program.

“We knew the things [that] were coming out wasn’t always the case, it was outside noise. But inside this team and in this facility, 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. That’s about going to winning … every single day.”

Zac Etheridge: ‘It was really important for us to … make sure that coach Harsin knew that we had his back’

Etheridge further addressed what it was like to see the head of the program go through what happened to Harsin. Rumors swirled and reports circulated, but he said Harsin remained true to what he’s doing on The Plains.

“You don’t wish that type of noise on anyone,” Etheridge said. “It was wrong, it wasn’t right. At the same time, you’re going through adversity, it’s sink or [swim]. Get yourself to the top. I think Coach Harsin, like I said, his conviction and the things that he has been able to do to be able to have us behind him and knowing he had people behind him to focus on what the ultimate goal was, and that was to get this program to where he wanted it to be.

“We were all there for him and we prayed for him. That was what it was all about. Knowing that you had a leader that believed in this staff and believed in this team and he wanted to be here. Myself, being at Auburn for a long time, it was really important for us to rally around those guys and make sure that Coach Harsin knew that we had his back.”