Now it’s Bryan Harsin who’s caught up in the never-ending saga that is Auburn football

The wind in Auburn blew out of the west at 8 mph Wednesday, so Bryan Harsin didn’t twist nearly as much as expected ….

I’ll be honest with you: I’ve watched Auburn football all my life and I don’t understand why this kind of thing keeps happening, this kind of thing being the job of Auburn football coach turning into a Netflix miniseries.

Harsin was supposed to return home from vacation Wednesday while the university continued to investigate complaints made about Harsin’s treatment of players and others in the athletic building. In this new era of modified free agency, players no longer have to figure out how to get along with the coach. At least 18 Tigers have bolted for the transfer portal. While Auburn tries to establish the facts, the university can’t dispute the math.

Since the end of the season, eight of Auburn’s top 12 defensive linemen have left the program or entered the transfer portal. Three of the top five wide receivers have done the same. After last week’s National Signing Day, Auburn has 73 scholarship players. That’s a hole too big for the transfer portal to fill, at least with the quality of player that Auburn will need to compete with Alabama and Georgia.

That is, in part, what this is about. Locate the University of Alabama and the University of Georgia on a map, look south, and you’ll find Auburn. Locate Alabama and Georgia in the polls and the recruiting rankings, look south again, and you’ll find Auburn. The Tigers have fallen far below their two biggest rivals.

Harsin is a smart coach. He can make his Xs tap dance through your Os. But based on his 14 months at Auburn, Harsin couldn’t sell red meat to a hangry Doberman. You can be that coach if your team plays on Sunday. Coaching in the NFL is all ball, all the time. You don’t have to recruit; you coach and you go home, rinse and repeat.

You can be that coach in certain zip codes in college football, say, programs that are in Boise and Jonesboro. In eight seasons at Boise State and Arkansas State, Harsin went 76-24. But you can’t be that coach if you want your program at the top of the game. That kind of coaching combines football knowledge with salesmanship. You sell yourself and your program to recruits, to the players in the locker room, to the boosters who write the checks, and you do it every day.

When you recruit at Auburn, and you’re 100 miles from Atlanta, the mother lode of college football gold mines, you have to pan every day. You accommodate the unofficial visit from a top recruit, no matter how many times he shows up. You want that. You carve out time in your schedule that is already 18 hours start-to-finish because if you’re going to beat Alabama and Georgia, not to mention LSU and Texas A&M and the Mississippi schools, that kid needs to feel like you care. You better be able to recruit Atlanta. And everywhere else.

You sell yourself to your players, especially if you didn’t recruit most of them. You bond with them, you try to understand them. Defensive lineman Lee Hunter, who went through the portal to join former Auburn coach Gus Malzahn at UCF, asserted that Harsin treated players like dogs and has “a terrible mindset as a person.” Some players disputed Hunter. Others backed him up.

You sell yourself to the assistants that you hired at exorbitant salaries because they will help you bridge the gap between where you came from and where you are. Harsin isn’t the first coach to have half of his first-year staff leave. Dave Aranda cleaned house at Baylor after his first season, then won the Big 12 in his second. Aranda bases his coaching philosophy on “servant leadership.” And, to my knowledge, no one on the 2020 Baylor coaching staff left voluntarily and took a $400,000 pay cut as did Derek Mason, formerly of Auburn and now of Oklahoma State.

You sell yourself to your boosters because if you haven’t recruited them, if you haven’t made them feel invested in what you’re doing, they won’t give you the benefit of the doubt when you struggle. Don’t believe me? Ask Tom Herman, who thought he could win his way to success at Texas without cultivating the Orangebloods. When he didn’t win a Big 12 title in four seasons (32-18), no one stood up for him. He’s now an assistant for the Chicago Bears.

When Auburn went 6-7 in 2021, when it lost its last five games, when it lost an Iron Bowl that it dominated, when it lost in the Birmingham Bowl, no ground swelled with support for Harsin.

Auburn has a lot of issues these days. The board of trustees is split into factions, and Harsin’s hiring reflected how everyone is not pulling in the same direction. Every single one of those people love Auburn and want the university to succeed in the worst way. Right now, that’s what it’s doing.

A long time ago in the Cotton Bowl, an Alabama player named Tommy Lewis came off the bench in the middle of a kickoff return to tackle the Rice return man. After the game, Lewis said he was “just too full of Bama.” Auburn people will tell you their passion for Auburn airs the football program’s dirty laundry in a way that doesn’t happen at other schools. Maybe so. But all the buyout money that Auburn has raised to contribute to buying out Malzahn ($21.7 million) and all the money that Auburn will raise if it buys out Harsin ($23 million) is money that isn’t benefiting the players, either through NIL, new facilities or anything else that doesn’t involve going straight into a fired coach’s pocket.

You couldn’t make it up. But that’s where Auburn football is these days.