It's fitting that spring football falls in the, ahem, the spring, the natural time of rebirth. The poet Alexander Pope coined the phrase "hope springs eternal" in 1734, and he was probably thinking about how his college football team would remain undefeated for at least the next six months when he wrote it.
That's definitely the case for Bryan Harsin at Auburn, who experienced an entire career's worth of drama in his first season on the Plains.
For those who need a refresher, influencers within the Auburn fan base took some very real gripes -- a 6-7 season, unhappiness with his management of the program (evidenced by defensive coordinator Derek Mason and a number of players leaving on their own volition), a substandard first recruiting class, the whiff of the Austin Davis hire as his second offensive coordinator -- and took them public. Worse, those gripes metastasized into a rumor that Harsin was cheating on his wife with a subordinate.
“I just want you to know we’re involved in trying to separate fact from fiction," AU president Jay Gogue said on Feb. 4. “We’ll keep you posted and make the appropriate decision at the right time.”
In addition to being sociopathic, sexist, gross and wrong, it was also a strategic misfire. The rumors were a naked attempt to get out from under Harsin's $18 million buyout for free, and instead turned the coach that they had some very real gripes with into a sympathetic figures.
"Personally, one of the most difficult times that my family and I have ever been through," Harsin said today. "Really. Just some of the things that have played out on social media, some of the attacks that were baseless, and dealing with that is something that my family and I have never been through.
As a coach, you understand this is part of the profession. You get scrutinized for the things you do on the field and recruiting and all the other stuff that comes with it. But just some of the things that my family and I went through, it just went too far at the end of the day. When it was all said and done and everybody moved on, it left some scars and some of the things we're still dealing with."
But what's past is past, and Auburn met the media Monday for the first time since Signing Day eager to focus on the present and the positive.
"We're moving forward and not looking back. Today is the first day of spring practice. It's our opportunity to step on the field and just play football but also know what we've been through as a football team and not forget that," Harsin told Next Round Live. "Learn from it, build from it, grow, take all of the things that we've been through into spring ball and come out of it better, and I really believe that we will."
While the February Episode itself was a black cloud over his program and his family, it was not without its own silver lining. In fact, one host of Next Round Live even drew the parallel to the drama of 2003 -- when Auburn nearly fired Tommy Tuberville for his former offensive coordinator Bobby Petrino, known as Jetgate -- to Auburn's undefeated 2004 season.
"When leadership is needed, someone has to provide it. I saw a lot of our players do that and I was very proud of those guys for doing that. Because guys acted, because they believe in what they were saying, I feel like our team is in a really good place, I feel like where we're going in this program is where we need to be going," Harsin said. "Guys that are here, they know that what we're building as a team is going to help us be successful."
Jetgate may or may not have spurred Auburn to an undefeated season in 2004, but it would take a miracle of all miracles for Auburn to go undefeated or anything close to it in 2022. The Tigers enter this spring with very real questions to answer, with a new quarterback (incumbent Bo Nix, an Auburn legacy, transferred to LSU) and new coordinators on both sides of the ball. Defensive coordinator Jeff Schmedding was Harsin's coordinator at Boise State, worked under Mason in 2021, and was then promoted to defensive coordinator again upon Mason's departure. Offensive coordinator Eric Kiseau worked under Harsin at Boise State as well, yet he's the third man to wear the OC title in Harsin's still-short tenure.
Point being: both Schmedding and Kiseau were present and available to coordinate their respective sides of the ball when the group left Boise for Auburn, yet they were Harsin Auburn's second (and even third) choices.
All the friction that bubbled over this winter? The fan base and the boosters had a point with a lot of it. Did Harsin take any of their, uh, constructive criticism to heart?
"This is about all of us aligning and pulling in the same direction so we can be as strong as possible, as a program, as anybody in the country," Harsin said. "To me, that's the king of success. I feel like we're doing that. We had a lot of productive conversations, we made a lot of strides in a really positive way."
Only those in the room can attest to the nature of those conversations, but we've got a pretty good definition of Harsin's definition of alignment. Here's what he told ESPN back when the first was at its hottest in February:
"Certainly, I'm the right man for the job. There's no doubt about it. No one is going to have a better plan than I do, but we've got to change some things. This place is not going to be a championship program until we change some things. You've got to let the head coach be the head coach and support him."