It has been a difficult last several weeks for the Auburn football team, with the program looking in complete shambles after countless players and coaches opted to depart from The Plains following Bryan Harsin's first season as head coach.

One of the coaches who opted to leave was defensive coordinator and former Vanderbilt head coach Derek Mason, who opted to leave Auburn for greener pastures in Stillwater and join Mike Gundy's staff under the same position at Oklahoma State.

Mason, who was one of the higher paid coordinators in the country at $1.5 million per year under Harsin, will reportedly be taking a massive pay cut of $400,000 at his new post at OSU, for a total of $1.1 million per year.

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Now, Mason's new salary is certainly nothing to turn a nose up at.

His reported two year contract will make him the highest paid assistant coach in the history of the Oklahoma State football program, but still, to walk away from $400,000 a year to simply not coach under Bryan Harsin any longer or at Auburn seems extremely telling.

Is it possible that Mason thought he could get what he was making at Auburn from another big named program and ended up falling short of that number? Perhaps. But more likely than not, he wanted out of Auburn and didn't really care what the financial cost would be.

It seems like the negative headlines are just continuing to stack up here for the Tigers. With the administration releasing a statement Monday morning on the status of Bryan Harsin, the number of questions simply continue to grow, with very little answers to go with them. No matter what happens here, there is one undeniable fact. Trouble is brewing on The Plains.

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