Bruce Pearl offers up insight on Bryan Harsin saga at Auburn

Bruce Pearl has Auburn basketball on a polar opposite trajectory than Bryan Harsin and the Auburn football team, but Pearl still sympathizes for Harsin – or any coach facing uncertainty.

Pearl, now in his eighth season at the helm of the Auburn Tigers, has led the basketball program to a 22-1 overall record, including a 10-0 conference record, and brought Auburn its first-ever No. 1 basketball ranking. Now, just three seasons after Pearl led Auburn to the Final Four, the Tigers are poised for another deep postseason run in the near future. Harsin, on the other hand, has only been at Auburn for one season, and yet he is left to wonder if he’ll have a future at Auburn at all.

Reports first surfaced on Thursday that “people in positions of power” were making their cases to Auburn officials to relieve Harsin on Thursday. And as of Monday, Auburn still didn’t think it had sufficient information to make a decision on Harsin’s future. The school plans to continue gathering information in order to make an informed decision on Harsin’s future.

“Oh gosh, when you’re in coaching, it’s kind of like The Godfather, when Hyman Roth said, ‘This is the profession we’ve chosen.’ We chose the profession because we wanted to teach and we wanted to be around young people and make a difference in their lives,” Pearl said Monday, when asked if he’s ever faced similar speculation about his future. “People don’t actually choose coaching or teaching for many other reasons. And then if you wind up getting good at it, maybe there’s an opportunity to coach at the higher levels and all of a sudden it becomes a financially successful, great profession.”

As Pearl continued to note, his coaching future did not always look on pace to turn into a high-major coach, one of just a few in the country that make a higher annual salary than the school’s football coach. Pearl, 61, coached at Southern Indiana, Milwaukee and several other stops before getting his big in 2005 break at Tennessee.

“I chose to coach and for 45 years we didn’t live in a big house and we lived paycheck-to-paycheck because I was an assistant coach, I was a Division II coach, I was a mid-major coach. And all my college friends and all my peers, they were all able to take care of their families way better than I was financially,” Pearl said. “So we do this because we want to make a difference in young people’s lives, we want to give back, we love our campuses, and our universities and our communities, but we also understand the pressures that go with the position.”

Harsin certainly understands the pressures that go along with being Auburn’s head football coach. But after losing several assistant coaches, roughly 20 players to the NCAA Transfer Portal and finishing with a mediocre 6-7 record in the 2021 season, the pressure has only mounted, and his future is in further doubt.

Auburn releases statement, outlines next step in Bryan Harsin assessment

Auburn head coach Bryan Harsin continues to maintain his position that he is the man to lead the Tigers back to college football prominence.

As for the Auburn brass — they still don’t believe they have the adequate information to make such a claim. In the meantime, the university will seek out that critical information, according to a statement released Monday morning.

“The Auburn administration is judiciously collecting information from a variety of perspectives, including our student-athletes, and moving swiftly to understand any issues in accordance with university policies and procedures,” Auburn said in a release. “Decisions regarding the future of Auburn and its athletics programs, as always, are made in the interests of our great university and in fairness to all concerned. We do not make institutional decisions based on social media posts or media headlines.

The aforementioned media headlines in the past week have chalked up a second year for Harsin as an unlikely scenario. Reports surfaced that Auburn was looking to move on from Harsin after just one year at the helm, but the university could be looking for information to justify letting him go for-cause, which would relieve Auburn from having to honor a substantial buyout clause. Justin Hokanson of Auburn Live first broke the story on Thursday, Jan. 4, when he reported that “people in positions of power” were making their cases to Auburn officials to relieve Harsin on Thursday.

Harsin, who was hired on Dec. 22, 2020, had the Tigers ranked as high as No. 12 in the AP Top 25 poll this year, but Auburn limped to the finish line, losing all four of its final regular-season games to Texas A&M, Mississippi State, South Carolina and Alabama. In total, Harsin amassed a 6-7 season in 2021 before his abrupt firing. Auburn finished the season bowl-eligible, but it lost to Houston, 17-13, in the Birmingham Bowl.

Harsin’s initial staff consisted of Mike Bobo at offensive coordinator and Derek Mason at defensive coordinator, neither of whom Auburn kept heading into Harsin’s second year with the program. A couple of Harsin’s assistant coaches left the program, too.

Bobo was fired after a disappointing offensive campaign, and he was replaced by Seattle Seahawks quarterbacks coach Austin Davis, who had never before served as an offensive coordinator in his career. One month after his hiring, Davis stepped down, a decision he said was “100 percent based on personal reasons” in a statement.

Mason, on the other hand, left Auburn, citing similar personal reasons. He then accepted the same role as defensive coordinator at Oklahoma State less than a week after stepping down.

By season’s end, roughly 20 Auburn players had entered the NCAA Transfer Portal after one season with Harsin, potentially adding to the narrative.

Auburn president Jay Gogue addressed the rumors of Harsin’s future on Friday, stating that the Tigers are still working through the validity of various claims.

“There have been a lot of rumors and speculation about our football program. I just want you to know we’re involved in trying to separate fact from fiction,” Gogue said of Harsin’s future, via ESPN’s Chris Low. “We’ll keep you posted and make the appropriate decision at the right time.”

If Auburn decides to move on from Harsin after one season at the helm, the university will owe Harsin $18.3 million of his remaining salary. Of that money, half of it ($9.15 million) would be due in 30 days, while the other half would be paid out in quarterly payments over the next year. Should the university fire him for-cause, it would be void of having to pay; however, Harsin would likely fight for that negated salary in a lawsuit.