New Auburn coach Bryan Harsin on UCF’s Gus Malzahn: ‘We have a weird web of connection’ | Commentary

Once again, Bryan Harsin is following in Gus Malzahn’s footsteps.

Except this time, instead of bringing a playbook, headsets and a coaching whistle, he better bring a prayer book, a shield and a suit of armor.

It’s one thing to follow Malzahn at Arkansas State as Harsin did back in 2013, but following Malzahn at Auburn is like following an antelope into a tiger cage.

When Malzahn left Arkansas State to take the head-coaching job at Auburn, Harsin was hired by former Arkie State and current UCF athletic director Terry Mohajir. And now, after Malzahn was shockingly fired by Auburn and given a $21 million buyout after last season, Harsin left his dream job at Boise State to succeed Malzahn in the meat-grinding, coach-killing SEC West.

“Coach Malzahn and I have this weird web of connection,” Harsin said when I asked him about his relationship with Malzahn Thursday at his inaugural SEC Media Days.

It’s so true.

Harsin not only has replaced Malzahn twice as a head coach, but when he took over at Arkansas State, his first big game of the season came against the Malzahn-coached Auburn Tigers. And oh, by the way, Harsin’s former team Boise State opens the season against Malzahn and UCF on Sept. 2.

Even further back than that, in 2007 when Harsin was the offensive coordinator at Boise State, he read Malzahn’s trailblazing book, “The Hurry-Up, No-Huddle: An Offensive Philosophy.” He was so intrigued, he and Boise State head coach Chris Petersen made the pilgrimage to Tulsa, where Malzahn was the offensive coordinator, to tap Malzahn’s brain on the hurry-up.

“I read his book that he wrote about tempo,” Harsin recalls. “There was a lot of great things in there so I wanted to go see him. We went to Tulsa, and we got a chance to sit down for a couple days and talk football, talk about tempo, talk about how he does things. So we took a lot away from that, and that spring we installed some of that no-huddle and some of those ideas. I’ve always admired Gus. I’ve always thought he was a great offensive mind.”

I’m guessing Harsin didn’t consult with Malzahn before taking the job at Auburn — a place affectionately known as “The Loveliest Village On The Plains.” If he had, Malzahn would have likely told him that “The Loveliest Village on the Plains” too often turns into “The Loneliest Village on the Plains” for Auburn head coaches.

On the day, Malzahn was hired as the new head coach at UCF, Daren Stoltzfus from WESH 2 asked him a question that caught everybody off guard.

“Do you have a good grasp at the pressure cooker you’re walking into at UCF?”

Malzahn did a double take and sort of chuckled as if to say, “I just walked out of the biggest pressure cooker in all of college football.”

And, so, when Harsin made his debut at SEC Media Days, I thought I would tear a page out of Stoltzfus’ playbook and ask him, “Do you have a good grasp of the pressure cooker you’re walking into at Auburn?”

“I know that the microscope is a lot different at Auburn, but that was part of it (his decision to leave his alma mater at Boise State),” Harsin replied. “As a competitor, this is why you come to Auburn. This is why you want to be in the SEC. You want to play against the best. … The best athletes in the world; the best coaches. If you want to be a part of that, understand what you’re getting into.”

Here’s hoping Harsin truly understands what he’s getting into. He had it made at Boise State, where he had five 10-win campaigns in six full seasons as a head coach. Harsin is sharp, he’s charismatic and he sorta looks and talks like a young Jon Gruden. He has all the makings of being a really good head coach at Auburn.

The problem is that Auburn chews up and spits out really good head coaches. Malzahn led the Tigers to the 2013 SEC championship, a berth in the 2014 BCS championship game and a 2017 SEC West division title. He went 68-35 overall, 39-27 in the SEC and never had a losing season.. Even more impressively, he was 3-5 against the king of college football — Alabama’s Nick Saban. His three victories is three times as many victories against the Sabanator as the other 13 coaches in the SEC combined. Besides LSU coach Ed Orgeron’s one victory over Saban, the other 12 sitting coaches in the league have zero wins against King Nicholas I.

Before Malzahn, Gene Chizik won a national title in his second season as head coach at Auburn and was fired two years later. Granted, Chizik was fired after going a dismal 3-9, but, still, he won Auburn’s first national championship in 53 seasons only TWO years earlier.

Before Chizik, Tommy Tuberville was fired by Auburn after going 85–40 overall, 52–30 in the SEC. And before Tuberville, Terry Bowden took the job at Auburn as the youngest coach in major college football and promptly led the Tigers to 20 straight victories. He became the first Auburn coach in history to have a winning record against Alabama and had a 47-17-1 overall record — still the highest winning percentage in Tigers’ history . However, he, too, was run out by Auburn’s band of bozo boosters.

“I was disillusioned about coaching after that experience,” Bowden once told me.

Welcome, Coach Harsin, to Auburn …

The Looniest Village on the Plains.

Email me at mbianchi@orlandosentinel.com. Hit me up on Twitter @BianchiWrites and listen to my Open Mike radio show every weekday from 6 to 9:30 a.m. on FM 96.9, AM 740 and HD 101.1-2