it's always a good sign when you hire a position coach and someone from the other fan base says yeah yeah we're going to miss him

you are locked on Auburn your daily podcast on the Auburn Tigers part of the locked on

podcast network your team every day. Yes, welcome on into Locked-on Auburn, your daily Auburn Tigers podcast. I'm your host, Zach Blackerbie. Thank you so much for making Locked on Auburn, your first listen every single day. Special guest today, Mountaineer Paul, host of Locked-on, West Virginia, hanging out.

We've been talking a lot over the last day or so, Paul, with the news of Larry Porter

leaving West Virginia to return to Auburn to be Alex Golish's running backs coach. And your

initial reaction, it seemed like, yeah, Larry Porter

has done an incredible job at pretty much every spot that he's been at that when dealing with

running backs. Absolutely. If you look at just the, the players he's coached over his career,

it's a long distinguished list on Marian Hampton, 1500 yards, 15 touchdowns with him. I mean, just an incredible year. Elijah Hood was at UNC with him. T.J. Logan was a UNC with him. I mean, he was one of the first guys, Mac Brown hired whenever he came to UNC. That's a legendary coach, right? Jacob Hester, that's a legendary LSU name, a national champion. Charles Scott, a legendary LSU name, right? Joseph Adai. We all know who that is, one of the greatest cults. That's a throwback. That's crazy. That's a throwback, yeah. And you can go on and on. There's a huge list of players. He's also been named the national recruiter the year twice in his career.

He's just a guy that, you know, from my vantage point is a guy who didn't know who he was

really before he came to West Virginia. Yeah. And a guy that we really needed everybody to buy

into the hard edge philosophy, Rich Rodriguez has. I mean, he really grinded it out, bought into it, showed us a lot in the year he was here, was here. It was a one year contract, so we knew he was only going to be a bridge guy. He's just one of those guys. You're not going to keep him at a place like West Virginia very long. He's more of a guy. He's always coached at upper tier places. That's just the truth, right?

So he's a guy that's highly sought after. You can keep him for a year. You can have him pretend. He's going to do a great job. Yeah, this is now his third stint in the SEC. Like you mentioned with LSU, he coached under Gus Malzon, and now he will be at Auburn again under Golesh. I mean, how much of it do you think, okay, we've listed all these guys who have had a ton of success at the college level and at the pro level with some of these guys.

How much of it do you think is, okay, he's getting these guys on the roster and how much of it is, okay, I'm molding this clay.

It might be really good, high quality clay, but I'm still molding it into this productive running back.

What do you think that balances?

Well, the ultimate decider is NFL draft picks, and he's had 12.

You know, the best, the best players in the country can come to your roster.

And if you're not developing them, they're not going to be NFL picks.

They may be good players in college, but to develop people in the NFL players,

there has to be an extra layer of development there.

And he's done that top down, right?

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