Charles Barkley Shares His Thoughts On Auburn’s New Coach

Auburn football moved on from Gus Malzahn after the 2020 season, one of the more high profile moves in a surprisingly active coaching carousel. The Tigers settled on Boise State head coach Bryan Harsin, who takes a big leap up to one of the SEC’s biggest jobs.

Harsin has been pretty successful at his alma mater Boise State, taking over the Broncos in 2014. He has a 76-24 career record as a head coach, which began closer to SEC country. In 2013, he spent one year as head coach of Arkansas State, taking over for—coincidentally—Malzahn, who left for Auburn.

Of course, there’s a huge difference between leading Arkansas State or even Boise State, and a job like Auburn. He’s tasked with facing the likes of Alabama, Georgia, and LSU every single year, and as we know from Gene Chizik and Malzahn’s tenures, expectations are supremely high.

He has the support of one of the more prominent Auburn alumni in sports: TNT’s Charles Barkley. The NBA great says that it took “guts” for Harsin to leave his alma mater, and a pretty safe situation at Boise State, for the Auburn job.

“I’m a big Coach Harsin fan. I think what he did takes tremendous courage, and I’m very very excited,” Barkley said of the new Auburn head coach, ahead of a golf event.

“To leave the confines of Boise, where you could probably win 7-8 games a year and live happily ever after, to come on down to Alabama and take on King Kong, that takes tremendous courage and belief in yourself. So, I’m really excited about Coach Harsin.”

That’s a fair point and a strong endorsement of someone who is very much an outsider to Auburn. If he elevates the program from the see-sawing that we saw in the late Malzahn years, and snags a win over Nick Saban and Alabama early, he’ll have most others on his side as well.

[Drew Carter]

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