AUBURN | There were no winners Friday.
No matter how you feel about Bryan Harsin, Allen Greene, Ronald Burgess, Jay Gogue or Auburn’s Board of Trustees, they were all losers in the latest Just Auburn Being Auburn calamity.
Just the idea of allowing a full-scale, week-long investigation into your head coach to take place without having a very good idea how it would turn out, and acknowledging it publicly, is sheer lunacy.
Those proverbial powers that be at Auburn have completely undermined Harsin’s program, which was already on shaky ground to begin with.
Not to pile on, but recruiting for the 2023 class is off to an inauspicious start, 18 scholarship players have entered the transfer portal and Harsin has lost a total of seven assistants over 14 months with two current positions to fill.
Adding talented players via recruiting and/or the portal, something Auburn desperately needs, along with filling out the staff with competent coaches just became that much harder because of AU’s poor leadership.
The one saving grace of this entire debacle is the opportunity for AU to get its house in order before the same or similar issue rears its ugly head once again.
Dr. Chris Roberts will begin his tenure as Auburn’s 21st president on May 16. Whether it happens before or after his appointment, the two-headed experiment at athletic director must end. AU needs a skilled leader in charge of its athletic department.
What happens with Harsin?
Hopefully, that’s determined by the results on the field and not some other real or imagined scandal.
His job is already tough enough. It’s time for AU’s leadership to scurry out of Harsin's way and let him sink or swim on his own merit.
***
In today’s musical journey, we go back 50 years to the opening of an off-Broadway musical that led to the highest-grossing musical film of all time and one of the best-selling albums of all time. On Feb. 14, 1972, Grease opened at Eden Theatre in New York. The original cast included Barry Bostwick as Danny, Carole Demas as Sandy and Adrienne Barbeau as Rizzo. Later cast members included Richard Gere as Sonny, Marilu Henner as Marty, Patrick Swayze and Treat Williams as Danny, and John Travolta as Doody. Grease focuses on a school year in 1958-59 at Rydell High, which was named after rock singer Bobby Rydell, and the relationship between Australian transfer student Sandy Olsson and greaser Danny Zuko. The play originated in Chicago before moving to New York under a new production team and new choreographer, Patricia Birch. It moved to Broadway after four months and had a 3,388 performance run when it closed in 1980, which was the longest at the time and only surpassed by A Chorus Line.
The film was adapted in 1978 by Allan Carr and directed by Randal Kleiser with Travolta cast as Danny and Olivia Newton-John as Sandy. With a worldwide gross of over $341 million, Grease is the highest-grossing musical film of all time and surpassed Godfather as Paramount’s highest grossing film. It also beat out Animal House, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Jaws 2 as the highest-grossing film of 1978. The soundtrack has sold over 38 million copies, which ranks 11th all-time in music history and the third best-selling soundtrack behind The Bodyguard and Saturday Night Fever. Travolta and Newton-John’s You’re the One That I Want, and Grease, which was written by Barry Gibb and sung by Frankie Valli, both hit No. 1 in the U.S. Newton-John’s Hopelessly Devoted to You was nominated for an Academy Award while Summer Nights, Sandy and Greased Lightnin' were also hits. The album includes 24 song from a number of other artists including Sha-Na-Na, Frankie Avalon and Stockard Channing, who played Rizzo in the film. A less successful sequel, Grease 2, came out in 1982. The franchise could return soon with Paramout+ developing a series, Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies, and a prequel, Summer Lovin’.
