This past Saturday, the Auburn Tigers played probably the best half of football they’ve played all season and likely will play for the remainder of the year. The issue you ask? Football is a game of adjustments, and Bryan Harsin has proven now time and again to be completely inept in this department.
After dominating the Missouri Tigers for the first two drives in the previous week, Harsin’s simple offense was figured out and they completely stalled out from there, scraping by Missouri in a game they really should have lost. Had it not been for the dropped ball in overtime on the goal line, Harsin may have been gone right then and there.
But Auburn was not going to fire their coach after a September win in the SEC, even as bottom tier as Missouri is. Then this past weekend, Robby Ashford plays by far the best game of his career thus far, Auburn has a 17-0 lead, and once again the wheels come off. The offense died, and the Tigers from Baton Rouge came back to win as Bryan Harsin looked on helplessly.
This all makes me ponder the question: if he hasn’t been fired already, what is it going to take for Harsin to lose his job during the season? Nobody expects Auburn to remotely compete against Georgia in Athens this week, so I don’t think it would be very fair to can him after Saturday afternoon’s inevitable beatdown. After this, the Tigers hit the road again to take on, ironically, Lane Kiffin and Ole Miss, and then have a bye week.
Could they simply be waiting for the bye week to get rid of him and allow a new interim coach some time to get ready for Arkansas after the off week? I suppose that makes sense, but I am of the opinion that the decision has already been made and Auburn would simply be best off just ripping the band-aid off now. The Bryan Harsin experiment has been an unequivocal failure, and the school is not doing him or themselves any favors by allowing him to continue to coach.
