Bryan Harsin
Now
Career arc
Bowls and playoffs: 3-3
2014Fiesta BowlW 38-30
2015Poinsettia BowlW 55-7
2016Cactus BowlL 12-31
2017Las Vegas BowlW 38-28
2019Las Vegas BowlL 7-38
Auburn
2021Birmingham BowlL 13-17
Fans
No fan talk about him on our list yet. His record is on Career.
Stats
Big games
Pick a job to see its years on their own.
The big-game ledger
How he does in the games that matter most — rivalry record, performance broken out by real opponent tier, one-score games, and his toughest historical matchup.
1-0 against his rivals at Arkansas State.
The big-game ledger
How he does in the games that matter most — rivalry record, performance broken out by real opponent tier, one-score games, and his toughest historical matchup.
4-2 against his rivals at Boise State. Just 1-2 against Bronco Mendenhall.
Signature games
Tags describe each game; they aren’t scores. The weighting that picks these games is still being tested.
The big-game ledger
How he does in the games that matter most — rivalry record, performance broken out by real opponent tier, one-score games, and his toughest historical matchup.
0-3 against his rivals at Auburn.
Signature games
Tags describe each game; they aren’t scores. The weighting that picks these games is still being tested.
The big-game ledger
How he does in the games that matter most — rivalry record, performance broken out by real opponent tier, one-score games, and his toughest historical matchup.
5-5 against his rivals. Just 1-2 against Bronco Mendenhall.
Signature games
Tags describe each game; they aren’t scores. The weighting that picks these games is still being tested.
ATS is his record against the spread: did his team beat the closing betting line, winning by more than it or losing by less? Lines start in 2013; a dash means fewer than 6 of those games had one. One-score games carry no spread record: a big favorite that wins a close game has almost always failed to cover, so that number would say nothing about the coach.
How he plays
Run/pass mix, by field position
Passed more than the situation called for under Bobo.
1,410 run and pass snaps at Auburn, 2021–2022, his own games, one row per offensive coordinator. Each cell is how much more often he passed than the rest of FBS did in the same situation (field zone, down, distance, score, quarter, same season), in percentage points.
Pass rate, stint by stint
Where each stint’s offense sat between run-first and pass-first, and how far it moved from one season to the next, against the FBS-wide average of 41% pass. The band is that stint’s real season-to-season range, not a fixed-width box.
Season-to-season pass-rate range for all 449 FBS coaching stints with at least three covered seasons, 2004–2025.
Building the roster
Six numbers on how he actually stocks a roster, from signing day to draft day.
His recruiting, really
His one ranked Auburn class of his own finished #21 nationally.
Boise State
AuburnAcross every program: 4 ranked classes of his own, averaging #48 nationally.
His class — he had the full signing cycleTransition — he was hired mid-cycle
Rank is each signing class’s national recruiting rank (#1 is best). Only a class he had a full signing cycle to build counts as his; inherited and mid-transition classes still show here, faded, but stay out of the average.
Followed him here
Arkansas State→Boise State2014Boise State→Auburn2021Players who transferred from his old program to his new one through the portal in the same year he made the move. Name-matching across data sources misses some, so every count is a floor, not an exact number.
Roster ownership
Roster ownership
of his 2022 roster arrived on his watch — 66 of 115 players. The other 49 are holdovers from before he was hired.
Of his own players on this roster, 17% came through the transfer portal; the rest are non-portal arrivals (high-school signees, JUCO transfers, walk-ons).
Everyone he has brought in, 2021–2022Counting players who have since left: 19% of the 73 arrivals we can classify came through the portal.
“His own” means the player arrived while he was head coach; “inherited” means a predecessor brought him in.
Size up front
Size up front
Offensive linemen on his Boise State rosters have averaged within a few pounds of the FBS average (2014–2020). In the three seasons before he arrived, Boise State’s line averaged within a few pounds of the FBS average.
Average listed weight of every offensive lineman on each season’s roster, holdovers included, against every FBS roster that season (2010 on; a program needs 3+ seasons under him to appear). Weights are the ones programs publish, and programs list differently. This describes size only — not scheme, and not quality.
Where he recruits
is his biggest recruiting state: 11 of 37 signees (30%) across his 2021–2022 tenure, drawn from 11 states in all. Next: FL (7).
70% of his signees come from AL and its 4 border states (FL 7, GA 6, MS 2).
Off this map: 2 signees to the north (MI, NE) and 1 to the west (CA).
- median hometown distance
- 128 mi
- within 100 mi
- 38%
- within 500 mi
- 87%
- beyond 1,000 mi
- 3%
The map counts signed recruits across his tenure; the distance figures cover his current roster, transfers and walk-ons included. Two different groups, kept separate on purpose.
The NFL pipeline
The NFL pipeline
players drafted into the NFL off his teams here. None were his own recruits yet: all 6 roster-verified picks arrived under Gus Malzahn.
| Year | Pick | Player | Pos | NFL team | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | R2.06 | Derick Hall | Outside Linebacker |  Seattle Seahawks | recruited under Gus Malzahn |
| 2023 | R3.25 | Tank Bigsby | Running Back |  Jacksonville Jaguars | recruited under Gus Malzahn |
| 2023 | R4.14 | Colby Wooden | Defensive Tackle |  Green Bay Packers | recruited under Gus Malzahn |
| 2023 | R5.34 | Owen Pappoe | Inside Linebacker |  Arizona Cardinals | recruited under Gus Malzahn |
| 2023 | R6.30 | Anders Carlson | Place Kicker | Green Bay Packers | recruited under Gus Malzahn |
| 2022 | R2.03 | Roger McCreary | Cornerback |  Tennessee Titans | recruited under Gus Malzahn |
A pick counts toward his tenure when the player’s final college season was one he coached, a checkable rule rather than a claim about who developed the player. A blank note means the player is on a verified roster and arrived on his watch. “Estimated” means no roster record, so the final season is assumed to be the year before the draft.
News
No outlet on our list has written about him by name yet. His record is on Career.
Career
Coaching career
The arc of his career is on Now.
Inheritor inherited a power and neither built it higher nor let it collapse · Steady no large move in either direction on our stature ladder
Followed Gus Malzahn (2013–2020) · succeeded by Cadillac Williams (2022).
| Season | 2021 | 2022 | Trend |
|---|---|---|---|
| Record & result | |||
| Record | 6-7 | 3-5 | |
| Postseason | L bowl | — | |
| Coordinators | |||
| OC | Mike Bobo | Eric Kiesau | |
| DC | Derek Mason | Jeff Schmedding | |
| Outcome — opponent-adjusted efficiency percentile | |||
| Offense | 40 | 55 | |
| Defense | 87 | 56 | |
| Tendencies — play-by-play, neutral script | |||
| 1st-down pass% | 44.8 | 28.9 | |
| Red-zone pass% | 40.8 | 30.1 | |
| 4th-down go%opp. territory | 28.3 | 31.0 | |
Underperforms his recruiting talent on offense and performs about as expected for his recruiting talent on defense.
Brings in bigger-than-position-typical players than most.
Recruits older, more experienced transfers than most.
1 player-season honored (All-America / national award): Roger McCreary (2021)
2nd-best Boise State tenure of 9 by the numbers.
Followed Chris Petersen (2006–2013) · succeeded by Andy Avalos (2021–2023).
| Season | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | Trend |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Record & result | ||||||||
| Record | 12-2 | 9-4 | 10-3 | 11-3 | 10-3 | 12-2 | 5-2 | |
| Postseason | W bowl | W bowl | L bowl | W bowl | — | L bowl | — | |
| Coordinators | ||||||||
| OC | Mike Sanford | Eliah Drinkwitz | Zak Hill / Scott Huff | Zak Hill | Zak Hill | Eric Kiesau / Zak Hill | Eric Kiesau | |
| DC | Marcel Yates | Marcel Yates | Andy Avalos | Andy Avalos | Andy Avalos | Spencer Danielson / Jeff Schmedding | Spencer Danielson / Jeff Schmedding | |
| Outcome — opponent-adjusted efficiency percentile | ||||||||
| Offense | 93 | 71 | 83 | 65 | 87 | 77 | 49 | |
| Defense | 85 | 92 | 58 | 64 | 59 | 58 | 59 | |
| Tendencies — play-by-play, neutral script | ||||||||
| 1st-down pass% | 37.2 | 45.5 | 38.9 | 41.6 | 45.1 | 40.3 | 43.2 | |
| Red-zone pass% | 25.8 | 33.1 | 34.2 | 33.3 | 36.8 | 35.9 | 29.1 | |
| 4th-down go%opp. territory | 30.0 | 32.0 | 45.5 | 24.4 | 34.0 | 30.6 | 29.4 | |
Outperforms his recruiting talent, on both sides of the ball.
14 NFL Draft picks: Jay Ajayi (2015), Kamalei Correa (2016), Darian Thompson (2016), Rees Odhiambo (2016), Jeremy McNichols (2017), Tanner Vallejo (2017), Leighton Vander Esch (2018), Cedrick Wilson (2018) + 6 more
1 player-season honored (All-America / national award): Demarcus Williams (2020)
Followed Gus Malzahn (2012) · succeeded by Blake Anderson (2014–2020).
1 NFL Draft pick: Ryan Carrethers (2014)
All-time wins
Wins at programs this site tracks, 1936–present — one consistent count for every coach, not each program’s own historically reported total.
2nd all-time at Boise State
Was he good?
Every angle here comes back inconclusive — not enough separation from zero to call it either way.
-3.2 pts at Boise State · #901 of 1290 · middle halfModel fit as of 2026-09-04.