BIRMINGHAM | A 6-7 first season that ended with a five-game losing streak.

It’s certainly not the easiest way for Bryan Harsin and his Auburn football program to go into the offseason. But here they are and there’ll be no backing down in year two.

“I mean, there is no Plan B. There’s Plan A,” said Harsin after Tuesday’s loss to Houston in the Birmingham Bowl. “And we’re here to make this work. And we’ve got a staff and a group of players that are all willing to do whatever it takes to make it work. At the end of the day, that’s it. We’ll be driven. We’ll be motivated.

"Whatever extra pressure, that’s not really going to be needed to be applied, because we already feel that. We want to win. And we want to be successful. And Auburn football should, in my opinion.”

Harsin embraces the high expectations that come with an Auburn program that expects to compete with the top teams in the SEC. It’s one of the main reasons he accepted the position a little more than a year ago after the firing of Gus Malzahn.

Harsin inherited a team with talent and depth on defense, but one lacking in both areas on offense. It showed down the stretch as the Tigers were out-scored 51-6 in the fourth quarter over the final five games combined.

“The fourth quarter happens to be the one that gets magnified because it’s the last quarter of the game, but it’s a continuation of the execution that you should have throughout the entire four quarters,” said Harsin. “In my opinion we’re not as consistent as we need to be and those are fixable things. We’ll fix them. We’ll address them, and we have. We’ll address them and those will be things we improve on as we move on to this next year. Hopefully not have those same issues moving forward.”

Harsin insists the players and everybody involved with Auburn’s program are determined to compete for and win championships. For the coaches, that’s happening right now as they seek to improve AU’s talent level through recruiting and the transfer portal.

The players will return Jan. 11 for a full team meeting, which will include new offensive coordinator Austin Davis. Spring semester begins the next day.

"As far as our football program goes, I think there's a lot of things that we learned this year that we know we have to be better at in order to be the type of caliber of program that I think we can be,” Harsin said. “We need to have a mentality that every single day, what we do matters. And it really does. At the end of the day, that's what it comes down to. I think teams that have success and organizations that have success, everything you do matters.”