Bryan Harsin is back in Idaho and ‘thriving’ in his post-Auburn life
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Chris Low, ESPN Senior Writer
IT’S BEEN NEARLY seven months since Bryan Harsin walked out of his football office at Auburn for the last time.
He did so with a $15.3 million parting gift — the kind of pricey buyout Auburn has become known for when it comes to fired football coaches — and a promise to himself and his family that his sights would remain straight ahead and not in the rearview mirror.
“I wasn’t going to let it eat at me, no matter how s—ty some of the things were that my family had to endure,” Harsin told ESPN recently in his first extended interview since being fired Oct. 31, 2022.
“There were things we didn’t like. There were things that were disappointing, on and off the field. There were things that I wish I would have done better, and there were things where we got a chance to see some of the worst in people.
“At the same time, here we are. We’re thriving.”
Harsin is back home in Boise, Idaho, with his family and a group of close friends, some of whom he went to college with at Boise State. He never sold his house when he made the move to Auburn on Dec. 22, 2020, and when he was fired 22 months later, it was an easy decision to head back. The return to Idaho has been therapeutic for Harsin and his family, really from the time he and wife Kes loaded their two dogs and embarked on the 33-hour cross-country drive back to Boise, where they first met as teenagers in junior high school.
“The person who bought our home in Auburn bought it as is, furniture and everything,” Harsin said. “We flew the kids back, and Kes and I jumped in the car. We drove through Mississippi and Louisiana, through rainstorms, through Colorado in the snow with a truck driver in front of us. We had a hell of a time.”
It was the start of Harsin seeing a life beyond coaching, which has made it easier to forget everything that went wrong at Auburn.
And a lot did go wrong.
THINGS started going wrong even before he had the Auburn job. His interview with the school, which was conducted over Zoom, had some glitches. “The screen went blank during the interview. I couldn’t see them, but they told me to keep on, so I kept rocking along,” Harsin said. “I walked out of my office, and my wife asked me how it went. I said, ‘I don’t know. The screen went blank, and I couldn’t even see them.'”
But that wasn’t the end of the technical difficulties. Harsin finished 9-12 in less than two seasons, losing 10 of his final 13 games, and never gained any real traction on the recruiting trail. He was viewed as an outsider by influential boosters from the time he stepped foot on campus and experienced a mass exodus of players and coaches following his first season.
Following the departures, a university-directed investigation into Harsin and his relationships with players and staff members left him in limbo for eight days. He was retained, but during that time, social media message boards were filled with ugly rumors about Harsin and his family and their personal lives. “Everything we were going through — these players, this program, the attacks on my character and my family — was bulls—,” Harsin told ESPN in the wake of the investigation.
Then, just before the start of Harsin’s second season in 2022, Allen Greene, the athletic director who hired him, stepped down as it was clear new university president Chris Roberts had no intention of renewing Greene’s contract.
Once again, Harsin was left in a difficult spot, or as one rival SEC coach told ESPN prior to last season, “cut off at the knees” in a league that chews up and spits out even the most established coaches. Harsin was fired after a home loss to Arkansas left Auburn with a 3-5 record. A statement from the school said Roberts “made the decision after a thorough review and evaluation of all aspects of the football program.”
“We dealt with it as a family, and it made us even closer, because that was the first real failure in a lot of ways because we were winning and had a lot of success everywhere else we’d been,” said Harsin, who won 10 or more games in five of his six full seasons as head coach at Boise State. He also was part of two undefeated seasons as the Broncos’ offensive coordinator under Chris Petersen.
Successful coaches don’t typically forget how to coach overnight. But for myriad reasons, the Harsin/Auburn marriage just never was a fit.
“You learn in every situation, the good and the bad,” Harsin said. “But when you really get tested as we were at Auburn, and it’s the same challenge for your players, your true colors are going to show in how you handle it. Certainly, there are things we could have done better and things we would have done differently if you could go back.
“But as a family, we stood on the things we believed in and held firm on those things. That was our foundation, and that’s the way we’re moving forward.”
HARSIN CAN’T SAY whether he will be ready to be back on the sideline for the 2024 season. The 46-year-old said he received some interest from schools after being fired, but nothing he felt was right.
Plus, he’s getting to do things that would have never been possible in the past. He’s enjoyed three-hour lunches with former teammates and old friends and spends mornings with his wife drinking coffee, working out and helping clean the house.
“Kes is probably enjoying it as much as I am, watching me go through all the things she has all these years,” Harsin said with a laugh. “The most important thing, though, is that we’re doing things. We’re not sitting around and moping and watching Netflix. We are active and out, and we are trying to better ourselves and take advantage of the time we have together.”
They went to see a Kane Brown concert, and Harsin is building a 1969 Mustang Mach 1, “a bad machine,” as he calls it. It takes him back to his days of racing drag cars at speeds of 200 mph when he finished high school. His father, Dale Harsin, was one of the pioneers of Funny Car racing in the early 1970s, and at one point, Harsin thought his future would be in racing cars and not coaching football.
Harsin’s father was a huge part of his childhood, and he’s used the past few months to strengthen the connection with his son. He recently went on a whirlwind football tour to several colleges with his son, Davis, a rising senior at Eagle High in the Boise suburbs and quarterback prospect at the college level.
Some of Davis’ teammates and their fathers were also part of the tour, and as much as anything, Harsin soaked up the chance to be a dad, listen to his son ask questions to coaches and see the recruiting process from a whole different perspective.
They visited Pac-12 schools and smaller schools, too, from Oregon and Cal to UC Davis and Idaho State. Idaho State coach Cody Hawkins is the son of Dan Hawkins, who hired Harsin at Boise State in 2001 as a graduate assistant.
“It was really cool hearing Davis’ thoughts and what he got out of sitting in some of the meetings and watching the practices,” Harsin said. “It’s an experience I’ll always remember, being able to go to all these places with my son, tap into some of our connections with past coaching colleagues … and do it as a dad and not so much as a coach.”
During their travels, Harsin couldn’t help but think back to a conversation he used to have with Petersen at Boise State.
“I used to tell Pete, ‘Wouldn’t it be awesome if coaches could take a year, like a sabbatical, and go out there and see other things and get a different perspective on stuff?'” Harsin recalled.
Petersen’s response was always the same: “Yeah, that’s called getting fired.”
Harsin has heard from numerous coaches since his firing, including Mack Brown, for whom he was offensive coordinator at Texas. Harsin said former Duke and Ole Miss coach David Cutcliffe, now working for the SEC, gave him some of the best advice.
“He said that when he got fired [at Ole Miss] that he jumped right back in and it wasn’t the right thing to do,” Harsin said. “I have tremendous respect for David Cutcliffe and just his wisdom on things. He told me to take some time, and I had that in my mind already, and that conversation with him only helped.”
Former Washington coach Jimmy Lake sent Harsin a so-called game plan for how to cope with losing a job. There were about 15 things on the list. Among them: Don’t panic. Be yourself. Have no regrets. Get out of the house.
Another one was to do something you’ve always wanted to do.
For Harsin, that was spending more quality time with his entire family. Both of his daughters, Devyn and Dayn, are also in the Boise area. Devyn is an esthetician, and Dayn (named after former Wisconsin Heisman Trophy winner Ron Dayne) is a junior at Boise State.
“I feel as good as I’ve ever felt, refreshed,” Harsin said. “My body feels good. My mind feels good. I feel younger and have a lot in my tank to go do whatever I choose to do.
“Right now, that’s enjoying my family.”
HARSIN IS NOT interested in looking back, even though he says his short time at Auburn would help him be more discerning, more selective and more inquisitive when and if he decides to go back down the coaching road.
“The first thing I would say is that I would ask different questions,” Harsin said. “The football piece is just one piece. It’s everything else around the program that really matters. You can solve a lot of problems by asking the right questions, not the football part so much, but everything else.”
One of the most challenging things for Harsin when he took the job was that he arrived with COVID-19 restrictions still in place. A frequent criticism of Harsin was that he didn’t make enough of an effort to get to know key power brokers and establish himself in the Auburn community, an approach his critics say also spilled over into recruiting.
“It was difficult to get out and see anybody, to meet people,” he said. “And from that point, in some ways, it felt like you were playing from behind.”
New Auburn coach Hugh Freeze is the school’s third head coach in four seasons. Auburn has fired its past five coaches and paid a total of $44.2 million in buyout money to the past three.
Harsin isn’t in the business of giving advice, but he’s more convinced than ever that complete alignment from the president to the board of trustees to the athletic director is critical to win consistently in the SEC, especially when you’re playing Alabama and Georgia every year.
“But we don’t want to make that our problem any longer,” Harsin said. “That’s Auburn’s problem. We’ve moved on and being home has never felt better.”
LOS ANGELES — It’s easy to take Shohei Ohtani for granted. By now, we’ve settled into the rote comfort: He is the best player on the planet, and that’s that. Ohtani’s baseline is everyone else’s peak. He is judged against himself and himself only.
And it’s human nature that when we watch something often enough — even something as mind-bending as a player who’s a full-time starting pitcher and full-time hitter and among the very best at both — it starts to register as normal.
Which is why his performances on Friday — the unleashing of the full extent of Ohtani’s magic — was the sort of necessary reminder that one of the greatest athletes in the world, and the most talented baseball player ever, is playing right now, doing unfathomable things, redefining the game in real time. And that even when he starts the day mired in an uncharacteristic slump, Ohtani needs only a single game to launch himself into the annals of history.
Where Ohtani’s performance in Game 4 of the National League Championship Series ranks on the all-time list of games will be debated for years. In the celebration following Los Angeles‘ 5-1 victory over the Milwaukee Brewers, though, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts stood on the field and said, “That’s the greatest night in baseball history,” and no one cared to argue.
Over the course of 2 hours, 41 minutes, in front of 52,883 fans, with millions watching domestically and tens of millions more in Japan, Ohtani threw six shutout innings and struck out 10 in between hitting three home runs that traveled a combined 1,342 feet, including one that left Dodger Stadium entirely. It was the sort of game that happens in comic books, not real life — and it was a game that completed a championship series sweep and sent Los Angeles to its second consecutive World Series. It was the kind of night that leaves patrons elated they saw it and also just a little ruined because they know they’ll never see anything like it again. Everyone was a prisoner, captive to perhaps the greatest individual game in the quarter-million or so played over the last century and a half.
It was, at very least, one of the finest displays of baseball since the game’s inception, up there with Tony Cloninger hitting two grand slams and throwing a complete game in 1966 or Rick Wise socking two home runs amid his no-hitter on the mound in 1971. And unlike those, this came in the postseason, and in a game to clinch Los Angeles the opportunity to become the first team in a quarter-century to win back-to-back championships.
It wasn’t quite Don Larsen throwing a perfect game — but Larsen went 0-for-2 in that game and needed a Mickey Mantle home run to account for his scoring. It wasn’t Reggie Jackson hammering three home runs, either — because Reggie needed Mike Torrez to throw a complete game that night to make his blasts stand up.
Ohtani is the only player who can do this, the offense and the defense — the mastery of baseball, the distillation of talent into something pure and perfect.
Hours earlier, his day had started by navigating the tricky balance of starting and hitting on the same day. His metronomic routine, such a vital piece of his three MVP seasons (the fourth will be made official in mid-November), is upended completely when he pitches. He budgets for the extra time he needs to spend caring for his arm by sacrificing his attendance at the hitters’ meeting, instead getting the intel he needs from coaches in the batting cage about an hour before the game.
Nobody could tell, when Ohtani arrived in the underground cage Friday, that he was mired in a nasty slump that had stretched from the division series through the third game of the NLCS, a jag of strikeouts and soft contact and poor swing decisions and utter frustration that got so bad earlier in the week he had taken batting practice outside at Dodger Stadium, something he never — like, really, never — does. He had decided to do so on the plane ride back from Milwaukee, where the Dodgers had humbled the Brewers with the sort of starting pitching never seen in a league championship series.
Game 4, his teammates were convinced, was going to be a culmination of that extra cage work and the matching of his pitching peers’ dominance.
“You guys asked me yesterday, and I said I was expecting nothing short of incredible today,” Dodgers third baseman Max Muncy said. “And he proved me wrong. He went beyond incredible.”
After walking the leadoff hitter, Brice Turang, Ohtani struck out the next three hitters, popping a pair of 100 mph-plus fastballs and unleashing the most confounding version of his splitter seen all year. He followed by obliterating a slurve from Jose Quintana in the bottom of the inning for a home run, the first time a pitcher ever hit a leadoff homer in the game’s history, regular season or playoffs.
The strikeouts continued — one in the third inning, two more in the fourth, preceding Ohtani’s second home run, which left 50,000 mouths agape. In the stands, they cheered, and in the dugout, they whooped, and in the bullpen, they screamed: “The ball went out of the stadium!” Alex Vesia, the reliever who would come in after Ohtani struck out two more in the fifth and sixth innings, could not conceive that a person could hit a baseball in a game that far. Officially, it went 469 feet. It felt like 1,000.
“At that point, it’s got to be the greatest game ever, right?” said Vesia, who did his part to help keep it so. Ohtani allowed a walk and a hit in the seventh inning, and had Vesia allowed either run to score, the sparkling zero in his pitching line could’ve been an unsightly one or crooked two. When he induced a ground ball up the middle that nutmegged his legs, Mookie Betts was in perfect position to hoover it, step on second and fire to first for a double play that preserved Ohtani’s goose egg.
In the next inning, Ohtani’s third home run of the night, and this one was just showing off: a shot to dead center off a 99 mph Trevor Megill fastball, a proper complement to the second off an 89 mph Chad Patrick cutter and the first off a 79 mph Quintana slurve). If it sounds impressive to hit three different pitches off three different pitchers for home runs in one night, it is. To do so throwing six innings, allowing two hits, walking three and striking out 10 is otherworldly.
“We were so focused on just winning the game, doing what needed to be done, I’m not sure we realized how good it really was,” Dodgers catcher Will Smith said. “I didn’t really appreciate it until after. Like, he actually did that?”
Yes. Yes he did. In baseball history, 503 players have hit three home runs in a game, and 1,550 have struck out 10 or more in a game. None, until Friday, had done both. And that’s what Shohei Ohtani does, who he is. For eight years, he has transformed what is possible in baseball, set a truly impossible standard to match, and now, finally, having signed with a franchise capable of giving his talents the largest stage, Ohtani gets to perform when it matters most.
Milwaukee won more games during the regular season than anyone. Regardless of how impotent the Brewers’ offense was this series, they were a very good team, and the Dodgers flayed them. The final game was an exclamation point — and a warning for the Seattle Mariners or Toronto Blue Jays, whichever survives the back-and-forth American League Championship Series.
Shohei Ohtani awaits. Good luck.
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