AUBURN | Let’s mark this past weekend’s NFL Draft as the end of Bryan Harsin’s reign of destruction at Auburn.
Yes, his tenure officially ended 30 months ago, fittingly on Halloween of 2022. But the stench of his ineptitude has left a cloud over the program long after he took that big check back to Boise.
Harsin’s complete abdication of his recruiting duties over his 22 months in charge set the Tigers’ program back years.
It’s no exaggeration to say Hugh Freeze inherited one of the worst rosters in the SEC when he took over 29 months ago. And it has been an uphill battle to build it back into one that can compete in the top half of the SEC.
Four consecutive losing seasons can attest to that along with the 2025 NFL Draft, which saw just three former Auburn players selected — one in each of the fourth, fifth and sixth rounds.
The Tigers join Vanderbilt as the only SEC schools without a first-round pick in the last five years. That’s not the company you want to keep.
The last five years have seen Alabama with 16 first rounders, Georgia with 14 and Ohio State with 11. That’s the kind of company you need to keep if you want to consistently compete for championships.
Of course, Harsin did have one first rounder. Except quarterback Bo Nix left after a year under Harsin, had two great seasons at Oregon and then became a standout rookie starter for the Denver Broncos.
Auburn’s streak without a first rounder should come to an end soon. Junior defensive end Keldric Faulk is projected by USA Today, CBS Sports and The Draft Network as a top 10 overall pick in the 2026 draft.
PFF has both Faulk and wide receiver Eric Singleton Jr. projected as first-round picks. AU’s group of sophomores, which came from Freeze’s first full class, looks to have even more first or second-day selections.
While I don’t think this roster is talented or experienced enough to compete for a championship this fall, it’s certainly made a lot of progress since the dark days of Harsin.
That it’s taken this long during the transfer portal era says a lot about how far Auburn had slipped under Harsin. It’s also an indication that Freeze didn’t fare so well in the portal his first couple of seasons.
Most of that is Freeze’s belief that the best way to build a roster is by signing top high school players and developing them over three, four and five years.
I certainly agree with that approach. But in today’s college football world, it needs to be supplemented with the portal. When you stack three or four top high school classes on top of each other, that produces a lot of highly-recruited kids that are backups and have to bide their time to play or start.
Those kids are less likely to stick around in the portal era when a starting job and a fat check are just around the corner at another school.
Freeze addressed this deficiency with the hire of Will Redmond as GM of Player Personnel. Redmond’s first group of transfers, that included 15 in December/January, and four more this month, appears on paper and through spring practice to be a big upgrade on the last two.
Now, it’s time for Freeze and what I consider to be a very talented staff, to mold their players into a winning team.
It’s not an excuse or an exaggeration to say Harsin’s two years had a negative impact on Freeze’s first two years.
But year three? There needs to be progress. It doesn’t have to be perfect and it doesn’t have to end with a trophy being hoisted in the air.
But it needs to be undeniable, verifiable progress. Perhaps good enough to create some unrealistic expectations for 2026.
You still remember what it’s like to have those, right?
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In today’s musical journey we go back 47 years to the release of a movie about a radio station that included several musical artists that contributed to a soundtrack that out-performed the film. On April 28, 1978, the movie FM debuted in theaters. Linda Ronstadt, Tom Petty, Jimmy Buffett and REO Speedwagon appear in the film with Steely Dan providing the theme song. FM’s cast included Michael Brandon as a program director and DJ, and Eileen Brennan, Alex Karras and Martin Mull as DJ’s. The film had a box office of $32.6 million, which ranked 75th for movies released in 1978. The top-grossing movie of that year was Grease with $903.2 million. It was rumored that the movie led to the development of the T.V. show WKRP in Cincinnati. But WKRP series creator Hugh Wilson had already begun development of the show before the movie came out. WKRP ran for four seasons on CBS from 1978-82.
FM: The Original Movie Soundtrack was a hit, peaking at No. 5 on the Billboard 200 album chart and winning recording engineer Roger Nichols a Grammy Award for Best Engineered Album. The theme song, Steely Dan’s “FM (No Static at All),” was written by the band's lead guitarist, Walter Becker, and lead vocalist, Donald Fegan, with the only requirement being it needed to be about FM radio. It peaked at No. 22 on the Billboard 100. The soundtrack had a number of other previously released hit songs including Steely Dan’s “Do It Again,” Ronstadt’s “Poor, Poor Pitiful Me” and “Tumbling Dice,” Petty’s “Breakdown,” the Eagles’ “Life in the Fast Lane,” Joe Walsh’s “Life’s Been Good,” Queen’s “We Will Rock You,” Bob Seger’s “Night Moves,” Steve Miller’s “Fly Like an Eagle,” Foreigner’s “Cold as Ice,” Boston’s “More Than a Feeling,” Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are,” Boz Scaggs’ “Lido Shuffle,” the Doobie Brothers’ “It Keeps You Runnin’” and James Taylor’s “Your Smiling Face.” FM: The Original Movie Soundtrack is considered one of the best soundtracks of all time, selling 1.2 million copies and earning Platinum certification.
