Each and every week after the slate of college football games on Saturday, national columnist Dan Wolken puts together his “misery index”. A collection of teams that are having a miserable time on game days. This week the list is headlined by Bryan Harsin and the Auburn Tigers football team.
Wolken writes that it isn’t just losing by 29+ points at home for the first time since Georgia skunked them in 2012 (38-0). It’s more that they don’t have the talent on this team currently and it doesn’t appear to be coming next year either.
Auburn’s biggest problem is not necessarily losing 41-12 to Penn State.
Make no mistake, it’s not good. The worst Auburn team you’ve ever seen should not lose by 29 points at home to the best Penn State team James Franklin could possibly put together. But it’s not the first or last time Auburn will have a bad day on the football field.
He isn’t wrong. Looking at this team right now, Auburn doesn’t look like a team that can come back from big deficits. They forgot about [autotag]Tank Bigsby[/autotag] during the game, he averaged 7 yards per touch but only heard his number called 11 times. Backup quarterback [autotag]Robby Ashford[/autotag] had more carries than the Tigers leading rusher.
Speaking of the quarterbacks, [autotag]T.J. Finley[/autotag] and Ashford just don’t seem to have enough juice to overcome what we are seeing on the field. You could argue that it was just one game, being 2-1 isn’t a bad thing right now. But it is how they look on the field, the win over San Jose State didn’t do much in terms of confidence in this team.
But as Wolken continues, the losses aren’t even the worst thing happening on the Plains for Harsin and the Tigers.
The more pressing issue for Auburn right now is in the recruiting rankings, where 247 Sports ranks the Tigers’ 2023 class No. 62 in the country, just behind Washington State, Oklahoma State and Missouri.
Auburn’s current coach is Bryan Harsin. After going 6-7 in his first season, it seemed that a salacious whisper campaign about his alleged off-field behavior was aimed at getting him fired. After the school found there was nothing to those rumors, Harsin kept his job. But the reality for Harsin was that only two things were going to calm the waters long-term: A lot of wins or a lot of blue-chip recruits.
The first one isn’t going to happen. This might be the least talented Auburn team since the late 1970s, and it would be semi-miraculous for Harsin to win eight games this year. If Auburn had a bunch of studs waiting in the wings, this might be survivable for another year. But at 62nd in recruiting? This seems like a dead end for Harsin, who won a lot of games at Boise State but has not shown an aptitude or an appetite for the cutthroat world of SEC football.
Through 16 games with Auburn, Harsin is 8-8. When you are playing .500 football and not getting top-tier recruits, there is only so much that the administration will put up. Given the attempted coup this past February, I would guess they won’t put up with much more.
At this point, it is beginning to feel like a matter of when, not if, Harsin is relieved of his duties. This would put Auburn on the coaching market and join the Nebraska Cornhuskers, who already parted ways with their head coach this season.
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