Just How Good Can The Auburn Tigers Be In Harsin’s First Season?

It is one of the more interesting stories of the 2021 college football season: Where will Auburn go after eight years with one of the more puzzling, enigmatic, talented, and ultimately inconsistent head coaches in college football? It is always a wild ride at Auburn, where good seasons and bad ones both seem to cut against the grain. Auburn thrives when not everyone expects the Tigers to do so, and Auburn often struggles in years when the Tigers gain a lot of offseason hype into the summer months. Now, the program embarks on a new era, and it seems everything is possible for better or worse. The Tigers hope to go in the right direction.

Taking a look at things from a betting perspective, most oddsmakers don’t expect much from Auburn this year. BetOnline lists them with a regular season win total of 6.5, so most experts aren’t even sure if they’ll go bowling. Can they surprise and exceed expectations? Let’s take a closer look.

What Happened In 2020

The Tigers finished 6-5, sputtering on offense for much of the season. Auburn had a strong midseason sequence in which it scored 30 or more points in three straight games. Other than those three games, however, Auburn scored 30 or more only one other time. Auburn averaged 25.1 points per game, 90th out of 128 teams in the Football Bowl Subdivision for 2020. Quarterback Bo Nix remained wildly inconsistent, much as he was in 2019. The Tigers were 5-2 after their midseason three-game winning streak but then lost three of their last four games, including a Citrus Bowl loss to Northwestern. Auburn has been through a lot of ups and downs over the years. The Tigers played for the BCS national championship in the 2013 season, then hugely underachieved in 2014 and 2015. They won the SEC West and earned a New Year’s Six bowl bid in 2017, but then crashed in 2018. Consistency is elusive for this program, which is why the team’s main offseason change was a huge one:

Offseason Changes

The Tigers could not put up with head coach Gus Malzahn any longer. Yes, he did coach in the national championship game with Auburn. He did win the 2013 SEC championship. He did beat Nick Saban and Alabama three times at Auburn – 2013, 2017, and 2019 – which is a lot more than his peers. However, Auburn was way too volatile. A program such as Auburn shouldn’t have a six-win season. It should be able to win nine or 10 games every year. The failure to do so led to Malzahn’s firing after eight seasons as the school’s head coach. Malzahn was the offensive coordinator for Auburn when it won the 2010 season’s BCS championship. Malzahn was the coordinator for quarterback Cam Newton, who took college football by storm that year and won the Heisman Trophy. Malzahn meant a lot to Auburn, and he forged some significant successes at the school, which made the down times and the bad years that much more puzzling. Auburn hired former Boise State head coach Bryan Harsin after a prolonged and messy head coaching search. Malzahn took the open head coaching job with the Central Florida Knights after UCF head coach Josh Heupel was hired as the head coach of the Tennessee Volunteers. The Tigers hope Harsin will be able to create the long-term consistency and stability Malzahn was unable to bring to the program.  

Schedule

The Tigers’ 2021 schedule, being in the SEC West Division, is naturally tough, but it contains some win opportunities as well. It’s going to be very tough for Auburn to beat big, bad Alabama, but Auburn will be favored to beat Mississippi State and Arkansas. The key games – the swing games which will determine how successful Auburn is this year – are the contests against LSU, Texas A&M, and Ole Miss. If Auburn goes 2-1 in those three, it will be a good result for the Tigers, given that they are going through a coaching transition.

The Tigers’ SEC games outside the West Division are against South Carolina and Georgia. Auburn should split those two games. The nonconference schedule has three easy wins, but a road game at Penn State will be tough.

Outlook

The Tigers had a lot of problems which will require more than one year for Bryan Harsin to fix as the new head coach. Auburn’s biggest problem during the Malzahn era was that quarterbacks who were home-grown inside the program did not develop very well. The two quarterbacks who thrived for Auburn while Malzahn was the head coach were Nick Marshall, who led the 2013 team to an SEC title and the BCS National Championship Game, and Jarrett Stidham, who won the 2017 SEC West championship and is now in the NFL with the New England Patriots. Marshall was a transfer from Georgia, while Stidham was a transfer from Baylor. Malzahn was able to do really well with those two guys, but players he directly recruited to Auburn and brought up within the AU program never tasted success on the field with the Tigers. This is a central reason why Auburn’s offenses were so erratic and ultimately reliable

Under Malzahn, which led to the head coach’s departure.

Bryan Harsin did a very good job at Boise State of maintaining what former coach Chris Petersen built. Yet, the SEC is a very different universe compared to Boise, Idaho, and the Mountain West Conference. Harsin is not inheriting a program which is fully loaded. He is stepping into a transition year. That alone should recommend a cautious and conservative view of what Auburn can realistically achieve this year.

What also has to be noted is that Auburn has a below-average offensive line. Harsin needs to recruit quarterback and offensive line at a high level if he is going to thrive as the Tigers’ head coach. Auburn does not have the caliber of offensive line which makes a strong 2021 season a likely proposition. There is too much uncertainty on this front.

The final point to make is that LSU slipped badly last season while Arkansas improved and Ole Miss was inconsistent. Did the pandemic create those results, or is LSU in real trouble? If LSU is in real trouble, Auburn can beat LSU this season. If LSU’s woes were pandemic-based, Auburn is likely to be worse off this year.

Final verdict: 7-5 would not be a bad season under all the circumstances. This is a year to make a bowl game, learn, grow, and develop so that 2022 can restore Auburn to the standards it expects for itself.