A lifetime in drag-racing prepared Bryan Harsin for his biggest build yet

[aubiefifty 16,695]

al.com

A lifetime in drag-racing prepared Bryan Harsin for his biggest build yet

By Tom Green | tgreen@al.com

13-17 minutes

There’s an unfinished 1969 Mustang sitting in Dale Harsin’s garage in Boise, Idaho. The classic coupe has been a work in progress for the last year — a pet project that Dale and his son, new Auburn coach Bryan Harsin, have built and customized together in their spare time.

It’s not their first build together; working on cars has been a passion for the older Harsin — a drag-racing pioneer who is now semi-retired — and his son, who grew up idolizing the family business in Boise. The two have customized their share of racecars over the years, mostly street rods and the funny car vehicles that the older Harsin helped pioneer in the late-1960s and early-1970s, but this particular project is one that father and son are particularly proud of.

The custom ’69 Mustang is still a few months from being finished, but when it’s done, Dale Harsin said, it will be something to behold — an 800-horsepower Roush Coyote motor with a six-speed transmission, custom suspension, custom wheels and tires, gauges, modern wiring and a sleek paint job.

“It’s going to be fun when it’s all done,” Dale Harsin said. “It’s just that it takes time.”

That’s a lesson that Bryan Harsin learned early on in his life, and his drag-racing background helps provide a window into how the 44-year-old head coach operates. He’s a meticulous, process-oriented coach with a keen attention to detail, according to those who know him best. It’s something that his father ingrained in him at a young age, and that trait has shaped Bryan Harsin’s career, which took him from an NAIA assistant to a longtime assistant and eventual head coach at his alma mater and, now, to being the first-year head coach at an SEC program more than 2,100 miles from the place he spent most of his life.

“When you’re gonna go over 200 miles an hour in a car in six seconds, that thing better work right, or you’re not going to do so well at the end of it,” Bryan Harsin said. “And, you know, (my dad) taught me about process. He’s taught me about details. He’s taught me about how to do things the right way.”

***

Drag-racing is in Bryan Harsin’s blood.

From the time he was 3 years old, he would tag along with his dad to the racetrack in the summers. That’s where Dale Harsin made his name behind the wheel of a 1957 Chevrolet known as “The Outlaw” — a black two-door coupe with green flames stenciled across the front and embellished tailfins.

The younger Harsin played with other kids at the track, but his eyes always wandered toward his father and what he was doing. He was enamored with the car, and by the time he was in elementary school, he dreamed of one day sitting behind the wheel.

At age 9, his father started to get him involved with the racing team. He was too young to drive, of course, but he was given tasks in the garage to help get the car ready between races. He cleaned the garage and organized tools, and he added more responsibilities with each passing summer. He changed the car’s oil and topped off the fuel tank, and he was often tasked with straightening the parachute and making sure it was in place for deployment.

There was always a checklist for him to complete, and his father made sure of it, recalling a sign he once saw in a friend’s body shop years ago that said “half right, all wrong.”

“When you’re going as fast as we are, you have to have the details down to where you don’t want to just go at it halfway and find something goes wrong,” Dale Harsin said. “That’s just kind of what we always did. We didn’t always have the best parts to do it with, but we always made sure what we had was ready to go and didn’t have to do something, so we were prepared when we got there. That’s what I tried to teach in him.”

By the time Bryan Harsin first got behind the wheel, it wasn’t the ’57 Chevy his dad made famous on the drag strip; it was a Toyota pickup he drove to Capital High, where he played quarterback in the early 1990s and twice earned All-State honors. It wasn’t until he graduated high school that he was permitted to drive a dragster, earning his Funny Car License at 18.

The test requires the driver to successfully complete six passes — the burn and launch, half- and three-quarter track runs, and two full-track runs — under the watchful eyes of a panel of driving experts and track owners. Dale Harsin and Greg Borgens, his father’s crew chief at the time, made him complete 12 passes “to make sure he knew exactly what was happening and what each detail was.”

“He always wanted to know what made stuff work; his thing was he’d always ask questions,” Dale Harsin said. “Why do you do this because of this? Different tracks that you’re racing, you find that they have different characteristics, so when he started racing, he’d ask me, ‘What do you have to do here to make this work right?’ That’s kind of where he was at. He’d always ask questions and wanted to know.”

That was the beginning of more than a decade spent on the racing circuit for Bryan Harsin, who balanced his first passion with a playing career as a backup quarterback at Boise State and then a fledgling coaching career that started as Eastern Oregon’s wide receivers and running back coach in 2000.

Twenty-one years later, he is getting his first opportunity as a Power 5 head coach.

“You go, you jump to the big-time, and it’s the challenge — can you do this?” Dale Harsin said. “I think he can. We have faith in him that he’ll do just fine there, because his coaching style and what he does. It would be great to win at the top. I guess as a coach, that’s what you got your dreams set on — so go big; this is it.”

When his aspirations were still nestled in a life on the dragstip during that decade’s-long period, Bryan Harsin recorded his best quarter-mile time at 6.33 seconds — hitting a top speed of 233 mph — but also saw his coaching career begin to take root. He returned to his alma mater, first as a graduate assistant in 2001under then-Boise State coach Dan Hawkins before being promoted to tight ends coach the following year, holding that title for four seasons.

“He loved to race; it gets you,” Dale Harsin said. “He’d like to have done it, but he loved football, loved the challenges there in coaching. Maybe if he had got a big sponsor and went out on the circuit, he might have went with racing, but football and coaching was something he had really enjoyed doing. You know, for a while he could do both of them, but then coaching got so busy that he really couldn’t stay in there.”

***

Bryan Harsin’s heart was in racing, but there was something about the way he was wired that drew him to coaching.

As a backup quarterback at Boise State, he didn’t see the field often, attempting only 39 passes during his college career. But he was keenly aware of what was going on at all times, and Hawkins — then an assistant on Dirk Koetter’s staff at Boise State — described him as a “ball junkie.” When Hawkins took over as the Broncos’ head coach following the 2000 season, Bryan Harsin’s wife, Kes, encouraged him to pursue an opening on Boise State’s staff as tight ends coach.

Bryan Harsin didn’t get that job, and he wasn’t pleased about the decision, but he was offered a role as a graduate assistant on Hawkins’ inaugural staff. He accepted it, and he and his wife moved back to Boise, where they lived in her parents’ basement rent-free while trying to figure things out.

Bryan Harsin was eager to prove himself that season. He was a curious, hard-working hustler, according to Hawkins.

“He was always trying to expand his knowledge,” Hawkins told AL.com. “He just was very thorough, very detailed, very committed. He worked hard, was focused—yeah, he was on it.”

By the following season, Hawkins promoted him to an on-field role as Boise State’s tight ends coach — a move the longtime college coach admits he should have made from the onset..

“He just took off,” Hawkins said. “… He was young and fairly new, and you’re thinking maybe he should get a little more experience, but his enthusiasm and drive and intellectual curiosity made up for maybe missing a few years on the field.”

When Hawkins left Boise State after the 2005 season for Colorado, Bryan Harsin came to a crossroads. Chris Petersen, who spent the prior five seasons as the Broncos’ offensive coordinator, took over for Hawkins and hired Bryan Harsin as his offensive coordinator. Had he not gotten that position, Bryan Harsin said he would have fallen back into racing, telling ESPN in 2015 that his goal was to “get a sponsor, go be a driver on the NHRA circuit in the Top Fuel Funny Car division and try to live that lifestyle.”

That’s something he didn’t have to do — though his father said he still gets an itch to get behind the wheel whenever he attends races — and his ascension through the coaching ranks continued. He served as Boise State’s offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach for five seasons, the first of which saw the Broncos go 13-0. The 43-42 overtime win against No. 7 Oklahoma in that season’s Fiesta Bowl saw the first-year coordinator show off his creativity and play-calling acumen, as Boise State shocked the nation thanks to a string of late-game trick plays.

Boise State went 61-5 with Bryan Harsin as offensive coordinator, averaging 41.5 points per game and posting a top-five scoring offense in four of five seasons. Soon enough, bigger programs came calling. Mack Brown lured him to Texas as co-offensive coordinator and primary play-caller in 2011, sharing the title with Major Applewhite.

At Texas, he brought with him that same process-oriented meticulousness that was instilled in him growing up on the racetrack.

“If I heard it once, I heard it a million times,” Applewhite told AL.com. “Do you want it right now, or do you want it right? That was the mindset of our offensive staff room there — trying to get it right. It wasn’t just right now and the immediate; it was about making sure there’s a foundation.”

That carried over to Arkansas State in 2013, when he got his first head coaching opportunity, and then the last seven seasons back at Boise State, where he helped maintain a culture of excellence as the nation’s top Group of 5 program.

For Bryan Harsin, that process was about how he taught his offensive system. It was about how he wanted the offense to look on film, and the attention to detail that was identifiable on tape. He didn’t just want the players to learn the playbook; he wanted them to understand the concepts behind the plays, because that made it easier to change things up from week to week, giving defenses a variety of different looks with formations and personnel groupings.

“We were finding out what they don’t know,” said Applewhite, now the offensive coordinator at South Alabama. “Are they borrowing the information, are they learning the information, or do they own the information?... It’s not just does he run the right route at the right depth; it was the teaching process of how do we give this offense to these guys in bite-sized pieces where they understand the foundation of it, the rules of it, why they’re doing what they’re doing.”

It required patience and attention to detail, but his belief in that process was steadfast, as it had been since he first started working in the Team Harsin garage back in elementary school. Every box needed to be checked before the engine could begin roaring down that straightaway.

“There’s this very organized, very detailed, process-oriented guy,” Applewhite said, “but he also drives 100 million miles per hour.”

***

Dale Harsin is still waiting for his son to pick a color.

That ’69 Mustang recently returned from the body shop and is sitting in his garage in Boise. A family friend who does custom paint jobs is on standby to prepare some renderings just as soon as Bryan Harsin decides on a color scheme. It will be dark; Dale Harsin knows that much, but the rest is up to his son.

The progress on the car has been at a crawl over the last six months, but an end is in sight, hopefully sometime in the spring. While the father-son duo has worked in lockstep throughout the project, they haven’t seen each other much since the summer thanks to the pandemic. Safety protocols in place for the 2020 football season prevented Dale Harsin from his usual habit of taking in Boise State practices from the sideline.

Christmas was their first in-person interaction since the summer. They’ve otherwise gotten together only virtually to discuss details and make decisions on the Mustang and they won’t be working side by side in the garage any time soon, since Bryan Harsin last month was named the new coach at Auburn. The Mustang still needs its wiring configured before some test runs and the impending paint job, all of which Dale Harsin will take care of in Boise. His son has a bigger project on his hands now as he takes over at Auburn, where he plans to implement his scrupulous process to build the program back up to where it can regularly compete with college football’s upper echelon.

Eventually, after the car is finished this spring, Dale Harsin will make the trek to the Plains and hand over the keys to his son.

“It’s a process,” Dale Harsin said. “You put it together, take it apart, put it together, take it apart until you get it finally done.”

He was referring to the car, but there are parallels between that thorough process and the undertaking that awaits his son at Auburn. As Bryan Harsin always heard his father say: Do you want it done right, or do you want it done right now?

For Bryan Harsin, he only knows the former, but only time will tell if he can replicate his program-building success in the SEC.

“He’s kind of a guy that’s all systems going, giddy-up, but he’s going to make sure the car is right, everything’s checked, all the gauges are right,” Applewhite said. “... Then when it’s time for it to roll, you see all the time we put into it.”

Tom Green is an Auburn beat reporter for Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @Tomas_Verde.

[ChristoThor 70]

This is a good read. Thanks for posting it. It is hard to read this and not get really excited. That being said, I am tempering myself for a building year. I hope he can implement his process and get Auburn where we all want them to be. I hope he is ready to play in the toughest conference available.

[Sani-Freeze 552]

At first, I read this headline as "A lifetime in drag: Racing prepared Bryan Harsin for his biggest build"

He'll love Saturday nights at Irish Bred in Opelika...

[Old fan 47 765]

On 1/19/2021 at 3:16 PM, ChristoThor said:

This is a good read. Thanks for posting it. It is hard to read this and not get really excited. That being said, I am tempering myself for a building year. I hope he can implement his process and get Auburn where we all want them to be. I hope he is ready to play in the toughest conference available.

Me too. I think a coach deserves four years at the least. He has to change a whole slacker culture in my opinion and that generally doesn’t happen in 2 or 3 years. I expect us to be competitive, but this class will not define the future of AU football. Hell Gus was way behind in recruiting for 21. I’m not bashing him, but recruiting slipped year over year for the last three under him, because the writing was on the wall. No O players were next level ready.