Bryan Harsin is giving Auburn a new appreciation for Doug Barfield.

Can’t really frame what’s happening this season any better than that.

At least Barfield could recruit. At least Barfield lasted five seasons. At least Barfield had a winning record in the SEC.

And so maybe it’s time to view Barfield’s run from 1976 to 1980 from a new perspective. He was the worst, but not anymore.

At best, Harsin is Barfield on a bad day in his final season. And then there’s this. Who had Barfield’s reputation aging better than that of former Auburn coach Tommy Tuberville?

These are tough hours for Auburn, and it’s all hard to watch. Senator Tuberville is dead wrong for his racist rhetoric on the campaign trail, and Harsin is a dead man walking when it comes to coaching football on The Plains. Sad times. Long days.

Auburn (3-3, 1-2 in the SEC) is a bad Mountain West football team as it enters the seventh weekend of the 2022 season. It’s No.9 Ole Miss on Saturday in Oxford, Mississippi, and then the Tigers enter a bye week. That would be a good time to promote associate head coach Zac Etheridge to interim head coach, and officially be done with one of the worst hires in the history of SEC football.

Please, just let us all move on from this heartache.

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Here’s what people are worried about with Harsin. It’s that his desolation of Auburn football is the beginning of some dark age for the Tigers. Is there a path back into the light after this season? These are valid fears, but history points to hope.

History points to Barfield, who was Shug Jordan’s offensive coordinator before being promoted to head coach in 1976. Barfield might not have been the best hire, but at least he kept Auburn’s recruiting pipelines open. Those pipelines run deep even if they’ve been redirected elsewhere for a time.

It’s not just Alabama and Georgia that have taken advantage of Auburn’s troubles over the last few years. Clemson coach Dabo Swinney, who has strong ties in Alabama, has pulled elite recruits away from Auburn as well. Barfield faced similar challenges during his tenure.

In 1976, Barfield’s first season, Georgia won the SEC championship. Alabama won the next three and also claimed national championships in 1978 and 1979. Georgia of course won it all in 1980 (Barfield’s last season at Auburn), and then Clemson, with Alabama native Danny Ford as the coach, went 12-0 in 1981 and was awarded the national championship for that season.

Despite all that, Auburn hired the man who would become arguably the best coach in program history, Pat Dye. Dye was at Wyoming before Auburn, but was a two-time All-American at Georgia during his playing days and coached under Paul Bryant at Alabama.

Dye knew what he was doing the day he was hired, in other words. Harsin was expected to learn as he went, but it was obvious early on he didn’t have the talent for such things. The pandemic didn’t help his cause, and while Harsin’s lack of leadership destroyed Auburn from within, Alabama’s Nick Saban landed the top-rated signing class of the recruiting-service era. The year before, in 2020, Georgia, Alabama and Clemson finished the recruiting cycle one, two and three.

Harsin was hired in December of 2020 and Alabama won a national championship a few weeks later. Georgia won it all in 2021, and last week smoked Auburn 42-10. It was bad. Harsin attempted a fake punt in the first quarter with the game tied. Auburn was at its own 34-yard line. There’s no telling what he’ll try against Lane Kiffin’s Ole Miss, but Harsin’s coaching decisions are like watching a 12-year-old kid on a sugar binge play Madden NFL at 3:30 in the morning.

Entering Week 7 of the 2022 season, Georgia is ranked No.1 in the country and Alabama is ranked No.3. The next coach at Auburn is going to have to go head-to-head with Alabama’s Saban and Georgia’s Smart on the recruiting trail, and come away with some wins. That’s where the rebuilding begins.

With Dye, Auburn lost to No.1 Georgia 19-14 in 1982, but then upset Alabama 23-22 the next week at Legion Field. Since that victory, Auburn is 20-20 against Alabama in the Iron Bowl.

As I wrote a couple weeks back, Auburn is still an elite football school despite the up and down years of Malzahn and now the tragedy of Harsin. Auburn isn’t Nebraska. Is the culture at Auburn too toxic to hire a good coach? That’s the biggest question facing Auburn football this season.

Behind the scenes, Auburn can no longer waste time with its political in-fighting. It needs to impress a good coach with a strong plan for success … that maybe also includes an NIL war chest a la Texas A&M.

Considering the prestige of Auburn football in relation to the guy former athletics director Allen Greene hired to replace Gus Malzahn, Harsin very well could represent the worst hire in SEC football history. Is that Auburn’s fault? Is that Greene’s fault? It’s more like a combination of factors, and they include the fact that Alabama and Georgia are currently among the best-run programs in the country.

Don’t compare Harsin to Barfield, though. Harsin is worse. Harsin is more like JB “Ears” Whitworth, who is considered one of the worst coaches in Alabama football history. Whitworth kept Bart Starr on the bench his senior season. Harsin ran off Bo Nix.

It’s never as bad as it seems, though. After Barfield came Dye. After Whitworth, Alabama brought home Bryant.

Joseph Goodman is a columnist for the Alabama Media Group, and author of “We Want Bama: A season of hope and the making of Nick Saban’s ‘ultimate team’”. You can find him on Twitter @JoeGoodmanJr.