THE CHEAP SEATS with STEVE CAMERON: Boise boy got a sour taste of the SEC

With apologies to Dorothy and Toto …

You’re not in Boise anymore, Bryan.

If we ever needed a refresher course in the difference between normal, university life college football — fun on a Saturday afternoon — and the big-bucks, win-now, cutthroat Southeastern Conference, it arrived this week when Auburn fired Bryan Harsin to the surprise of absolutely no one.

You probably know that Harsin was major success at Boise State, where he’d played quarterback.

Harsin coached one year at Arkansas State, then came home to take on the Broncos job (for which he’d apprenticed under Chris Petersen).

Harsin’s stint as boss in Boise produced a 69-19 record, three Mountain West championships, and an offer from Auburn — where any sane person can see that things will be wild and uncontrollable, but where you’ll walk away with a significantly large pile of money.

Even by the nutty standards of Auburn, though, Harsin was doomed from the beginning.

He inherited a sagging program from Gus Malzahn, went 6-7 a year ago — and the Auburn boosters (who run the place but also fight amongst themselves like cats, dogs and War Eagles) decided that Harsin had been a mistake.

NOW, THIS was after a single season, with no opportunity for Harsin to put his own stamp on the program.

The money people at Auburn, who also have major input in hiring the athletic director and probably the school president, tried to have Harsin fired “for cause” during this past offseason — even though there was no cause beyond his record.

The point of that unseemly exercise was to avoid paying off the remainder of Harsin’s six-year contract, or roughly $15 million — but really, it was meant to damn well sink Harsin.

That entire episode made the Auburn program toxic, and gave Harsin (and his staff) absolutely no chance to save it.

More than two dozen players hit the transfer portal, and this past February, Auburn landed ZERO players on national signing day.

In other words, if the boosters couldn’t get rid of Harsin after that first season, they could doggone sure sabotage the program to the point where he HAD to be sacked sometime this year.

Sure enough, after a loss last weekend to Arkansas (dropping the War Eagles to 3-5), Auburn pulled the trigger.

The university president’s office issued the necessary statement, mentioning a new direction, yada, yada, but …

The statement never even mentioned Harsin’s name.

He is now a non-person on the Plains.

THIS TALE is so SEC, yet even excessive by standards of the football-mad South, that I need help telling it.

Here is a summary of Auburn’s financial goofiness, courtesy of Yahoo’s Dan Wetzel …

“On Dec. 13, 2020, Auburn fired its head football coach, Gus Malzahn.

“Per terms of the contract, Malzahn was owed $21.45 million. Half of that — or $10.275 million — was paid within 30 days of termination.

“The rest is being paid annually in $2.68 million installments, even though Malzahn quickly accepted a new head coaching job at Central Florida, which will pay him $11.5 million over five years.

“Auburn also had to pay Malzahn's assistant coaches and staffers who were not retained. That bill was approximately $7.15 million, per the Opelika-Auburn News.

“So that’s $28.6 million to get rid of Malzahn and company.

“Less than two weeks after firing Malzahn, Auburn hired Bryan Harsin as its new top man. It gave him a six-year contract.

“After just one season, however, a group of boosters got tired of Harsin, and tried to undermine him. An investigation was launched, but it found nothing untoward.

“He got to coach a second season, but momentum within the program and on the recruiting trail was crushed.

“As such, Monday’s announcement that Auburn had fired Harsin a season and a half into his tenure was expected.

“He went just 9-12. Per terms of that original contract, the school owes him 70 percent of his remaining money, or $15.575 million.

“He’ll get half, or $7.78 million, within 30 days and then four annual payments of $1.94 million.

“That means Auburn is in the midst of paying $44.175 million for two head coaches and one staff of assistants to NOT coach Auburn football right now.

“And when you add the buyout cost of ousted Harsin assistants, that tag will go up by millions more.

“Fifty million is not out of the question.”

BACK IN the days when I lived and worked in Europe, dozens and dozens of people seemingly always wanted to quiz me about life in America.

One obvious question that would spring up involved our elections.

After the Bush-Gore ruckus, a Scot on the golf course asked: “How can one bloke get more votes in the whole country, but the other bloke becomes president?”

Answering that one requires an explanation of the Electoral College, and NOBODY would grasp that.

The next obvious question that kept coming around, though, had to do with sports.

At conferences and meetings, invariably someone would say: “Why do these giant universities in the States all have professional sports teams attached to them?”

(That was before name, image and likeness, too. Inquiries are even stranger now.)

Somewhere in the conversation, it would come up that the United States is the only country in the world with a massive, routinely functioning system of subsidized intercollegiate athletics.

You know, it’s a good question.

Why DON’T we let universities teach English and chemistry, and keep our sports fully professional?

Well, at least under our system, you can become wildly rich while being considered a total failure.

Ask Bryan Harsin.

Email: [email protected]

Steve Cameron’s “Cheap Seats” columns appear in The Press each week from Tuesday through Friday.

Steve suggests you take his opinions in the spirit of a Jimmy Buffett song: “Breathe In, Breathe Out, Move On.”