AUBURN | That Colby Wooden, Derick Hall, Marquis Burks, Owen Pappoe and John Samuel Shenker have elected to return says something about Bryan Harsin and the program he’s building at Auburn.

The fact that Chandler Wooten returned after opting out in 2020 and became a permanent team captain and one of the strongest voices in support of Harsin says even more.

There is a definite buy-in among Auburn’s players with Harsin, his message and his way of doing things.

That’s big, and its importance shouldn’t be minimized.

When you have a big group of people all on the same page and working toward the same goal, you can achieve a lot.

But Auburn will need more than that to consistently win at a championship level as its two biggest rivals are doing right now. That takes a roster stacked with NFL-level talent.

That’s the next step Harsin and his staff must take. The way they added eight talented players to the roster the final days before and after the early signing period was a good start.

It’s gonna take more.

The Tigers need to upgrade their roster, particularly on offense, over the coming months via the late signing period and, most importantly, the transfer portal. They’ve got room to add more than a dozen players.

Auburn’s also got to consistently sign top 10 classes, and throw in some top five finishes, to have a program that can start competing with Alabama and Georgia on a yearly basis.

And if you think AU is close to that right now, let me remind you that its combined record against those two schools over the last 14 years is 7-22. Twelve of those losses have been by 20 or more points.

That should be completely unacceptable to anyone associated with Auburn.

But that record doesn’t belong to Harsin. He’s the one that was hired to change it and he deserves the time and resources to do accomplish his goals.

Auburn needs a fighter and Harsin strikes me as a self-motivated, competitive individual. A 6-7 record and five-game losing streak won’t sit well with him.

Can he do it?

He’s made huge strides in improving Auburn’s culture. That’s evident. He’s had a year to learn what it takes to coach at Auburn and in the SEC. A new Football Development Center is coming this fall.

It’s all about talent acquisition now.

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Speaking of bringing in that talent, Auburn landed its first 2023 commitment Saturday from the nation’s No. 1 center, Bradyn Joiner. That’s a big addition for several reasons.

First of all, Joiner is the type of talent the Tigers desperately need on their offensive line. He showed his quickness this season by playing mainly defensive line for Auburn High School.

Perhaps more importantly, Joiner has a lot of Damari Alston in him. The leader of the ‘22 signing class, Alston was very active on social media and behind the scenes helping recruit for Auburn.

Joiner has that same personality and already has relationships with recruits across the South. You’re going to see him at the forefront of a lot of recruitments between now and December.

His commitment actually moved Auburn to No. 27 in the very early 2023 team recruiting rankings. That doesn’t really mean anything at the moment, but if AU can continue to add players to its class in the coming months and not fall so far behind from a numbers perspective, it can avoid a low ranking and the false narrative that Auburn is having a poor recruiting class.

The Tigers are currently 13th in the 2022 team rankings, but were 71st just a few days before the early signing period, which prompted a lot of doom and gloom for much of the summer and fall.

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No. 11 Auburn made a statement last Wednesday with its 70-55 thrashing of LSU. It was an early showdown between two of the top teams in the SEC and ensures AU is the highest-ranked team in the conference and the team to beat going into January.

But it’s still early, way too early, to start celebrating anything other than that the Tigers having a talented and competitive squad.

Many big tests lie ahead including three of next four games on the road starting with Tuesday night’s trip to South Carolina. That’s followed by a home game against a talented Florida team, and road trips to No. 19 Alabama and Ole Miss.

We’ll know a lot more about this team over the next 12 days.

Don’t take this Gamecock team lightly. All three of their losses have been on the road and they’ve won their seven home games by an average of 20.3 points.

Anybody that’s watched SEC basketball over the past decade knows Frank Martin teams play tough, physical defense and are always a handful at home.

Florida has one of the nation’s top centers in Colin Castleton, who should be a great matchup for Walker Kessler, Alabama was the preseason pick to finish second in the conference behind Kentucky, and Ole Miss has won two of its last three home games against AU including an 82-67 beatdown of the 2019 Final Four team.

Auburn is off to a great start but there are plenty more SEC battles ahead.

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In today’s musical journey, we go back 52 years to the day a song about raindrops written for a movie scene without any rose to the top of the charts. On Jan. 3, 1970, B.J. Thomas’ Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head from the 1969 movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid hit No. 1 on the Billboard 100 for the first of four weeks. The song was written and composed by the legendary songwriting duo, Burt Bacharach and Hal David. The song was written with Bob Dylan in mind, but he wasn’t interested and Ray Stevens passed before Thomas agreed to record it even though he was battling laryngitis at the time. The song was written about the end of some tough times being just around the corner. It’s used in the movie during a scene with Paul Newman, who played Cassidy, going on a bicycle ride with Katharine Ross, who played Etta Place. The song won an Academy Award for Best Original Song and Bacharach won for Best Original Score. It was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2014.

Thomas was born in 1942 in Hugo, Okla. He began singing in his church choir and joined the band, The Triumphs, in the mid-1960’s. His first hit, 1966’s cover of I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry, came with the band while he had his first solo hit with Hooked on a Feeling in 1968. He had another No. 1 in 1975 with (Hey Won’t You Play) Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song. Thomas shifted to mostly contemporary Christian and country music in the late 1970’s and 80’s, but had another hit in 1985 with As Long as We’ve Got Each Other, the theme song to Growing Pains. He’s also published two books including an autobiography and voiced several commercial jingles including Coca-Cola and Pepsi. He passed away from lung cancer in May of 2021.