Delta Force: Auburn coach Gus Malzahn's Meteoric Rise Began in the Arkansas Delta

BY Brandon Marcello
9 July 2013

HUGHES, Arkansas -- Jutting out of a wide-open space along Arkansas Highway 79 is an old football stadium, lost among the miles and miles of bean fields in the Arkansas Delta.

The only mark you can associate with the year 2013 is the short grass, where someone decided to provide a quick, fresh cut where the field once hosted games. There are no hashmarks, no yard lines, and the locker rooms, ticket booth, concession stand and wooden grandstands have been taken over by long weeds and vines.

The story of Gus Malzahn’s meteoric rise from the Arkansas high school ranks to the head coaching job at Auburn began here in 1991. It's a farming town of 1,441 people planted 15 miles from Interstate 40, which cuts the state in half and serves as its main traffic artery. Hughes hasn’t had much to cheer about of late, but they look back, fondly, to Malzahn and the magical run he made in '94.

"Someone needs to write a book about it some day or make a movie," said Rob Coleman, a former assistant for Malzahn at Hughes High. "You're talking about somebody who came from the -- hate to say it -- the bottom of the totem pole in coaching, and now he's coaching at Auburn University. That doesn't happen every day."

Hughes, a predominantly black community, is still somewhat cut off from the outside world because of its location. Even the Encyclopedia of Arkansas holds nothing back, calling the scene at Hughes "typical of the towns in this part of the state, although it is not known for any major historical events or as the home of any significantly famous people."

Malzahn may just be the biggest name to emerge from Hughes. It was his home for five years -- and his canvas as he made mistakes, tried new things, drew up a few funky offensive plays and led the Blue Devils to the Class AAA state championship game in '94.

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Malzahn did a little bit of everything at Hughes. He taught a history class, and coached the junior high basketball team leading them to a couple of conference titles. He kept an eye on his players inside and outside the classroom. He even learned how to drive a tractor to cut the grass and keep the field pristine.

"He wasn't a very good teacher in the classroom, because he was always drawing up plays," said Charlie Patrick, Hughes' former athletics director.

A fresh-faced graduate of Henderson State, Malzahn tried to land a big job immediately out of college as an assistant coach at Arkansas powerhouse West Memphis in 1991. The job instead went to Bobby Crockett, an assistant at Hughes. Malzahn simply shifted his attention to Hughes and jumped at the opportunity to start his coaching career -- but not as an offensive coordinator.

Patrick hired Malzahn to serve as the Blue Devils' defensive coordinator on Dale Coomer's football staff. He was still a long way from earning the label of a mad scientist in Arkansas, where he developed the hurry-up, no-huddle philosophy in the mid-1990s before skyrocketing through the high school ranks. When he started, Malzahn was leading cornerbacks and defensive linemen through drills.

"I tell you what," Malzahn said. "First of all, I didn't have a clue what I was doing and I learned a whole lot by making mistakes."

He leaned on Patrick, a former football coach, for advice. He also called on Frank McClellan, a rival coach at nearby Barton, for advice. McClellan is a legend in this state, where he won eight state titles at the small school and is widely known for his hard-hitting defenses.

"But, really, to be honest with you, I learned by making mistakes," Malzahn said, with a grin cracking his stern face. "I'm glad I moved to the offensive side after that."

Coomer left for a coaching job at Van Buren the next year. He wanted to be closer to home. Patrick says it was an easy decision to promote Malzahn to the head coach after only one year as an assistant.

"People aren't beating down the door to come here," Malzahn joked with Patrick.

"He was the obvious choice," Patrick said. "I didn't have to consider anyone else."

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Malzahn seemed content with living in the small town, fishing Lake Horseshoe with friends and playing basketball on the weekends with his coaching buddies in the area.

At first, the Malzahns lived next door to the Patricks in a rental house across the street from the school, but had to move to a small trailer along Highway 38 -- the main road through town -- during their final two years as residents because the rental home’s owners decided to make the property their own.

The pay wasn't incredibly high, though anyone will tell you Malzahn leaves most of his financial decisions -- and balancing the checkbook -- to his wife, Kristi. Malzahn's first job at Hughes paid in the area of $24,000 a year. Kristi's parents, says Melinda Patrick, stocked the young couple's fridge with food whenever they traveled across the state to visit.

Malzahn’s mind was always on football.
Former quarterback Michael Troup remembers Malzahn asking him one December day if he wanted to jump in his small red car and travel down Interstate 40 to watch Barton play in a state championship game at War Memorial Stadium in Little Rock.

"He took us to that game to show us how teams have to perform in order to get there," Troup said. "See how they continue to block? They don't quit. They don't stop at the whistle, is what he told us.

"To take out the time to take us to those places to see where we can go, was a reason why we made it to the championship in '94."

The 20-something coach did dream big, sure, but he said the usual things a young man in a small town utters during quiet moments away from the field.

"He said he was going to revolutionize high school football in Arkansas," Coleman said. "You know how young, stupid people get together and say things. He said that. I still tease him about that. I don't know if he revolutionized football in this state, but it's a lot different than it was back in the 1990s."

Malzahn might not admit it, but high school football in Arkansas did change because of him. He started revolutionizing the game at Hughes -- well before he developed the hurry-up, no-huddle offense.

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Malzahn wanted to make football fun for his 20-plus players, so he'd develop trick plays to run at various times in games. Most of his inspiration came from two teams: Steve Spurrier’s Florida Gators and the Dallas Cowboys.
Even Spurrier’s style caught his eye.

"He was wearing a visor way back before anybody else was and I was coaching high school," Malzahn said. "I thought that was pretty cool, so I started wearing a visor."

What really mattered were the plays.

The players' favorite was the "Starburst" on kickoff returns, which started with five players huddled in a circle with the football before one emerged with the ball. They even ran the fumblerooski.

"He was an architect even back then, too," Troup said.

Troup was named the starting quarterback as a sophomore in '94. Malzahn handed the reins to the youngster, providing him the freedom to audible into different plays and lead the team.

The formations were not all that out of the ordinary -- I-formation, shotgun and some Wing T. Malzahn's offense was multiple, yes, but he spiced it up with motion and misdirection, an innovation in an era of Wing-T’s, counters and dives into the line.

"We definitely changed things up to where you would have a lot of formations to deal with," Troup said. "If they weren't ready, they would definitely not be ready when we ran motion."

Malzahn's core staff was comprised of coaches with connections all across the state. Coleman knew the northwest corner, Patrick knew central Arkansas and Mark Eubanks had a few more connections in the east.

Hughes, on the other hand, was isolated. Coaches drove 30 minutes every Saturday morning to pick up a newspaper to check on Friday night's football scores. Teams were lucky to pull one game film from a rival each week, but Malzahn would drive long hours to pick up game film -- sometimes two tapes -- from common opponents. His staff, with connections all across the state, called coaching friends to get insight on an upcoming opponent. Malzahn was in the office early and late, jotting down notes in small handwriting on notecards.

"His notes looked like it was typed on a typewriter. He's that neat with it," Patrick said.

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Malzahn was working long hours, acting as if he was leading a big-time program in the Southeastern Conference rather than a small-town team with less than 30 players on the sidelines.

"He was really good at scheming defenses," Coleman said. "His biggest strength through his whole career, no matter where he was at or who he was coaching, was putting the right people in the right place to make plays. He had good kids, game planned it out and knew how it was going to work out. It was something to see."

The Blue Devils were a long way from the playoffs in the last half of the '94 season. Only two teams from the conference could advance to the postseason, and Malzahn's team was in third place with two games remaining.

Those two opponents? The two teams above the Blue Devils in the conference standings. History was not on Hughes' side – the program rarely made the playoffs -- and they needed to beat Brinkley by 14 points and Rivercrest by seven.

They blew out Brinkley and beat Rivercrest by seven on a goal-line stand, then ran through the playoffs with a win over state powerhouse Pine Bluff Dollarway to set up a meeting with Lonoke for the Class AAA state championship.

The Blue Devils made plenty of mistakes. Troup remembers his receiver ran a hot route, a play they had run hundreds of times that year in practice. The ball was placed perfectly, but it went through the receiver's hands.

"Maybe it was being on the big stage," Troup said. "He dropped it for some reason. If he had caught it, he'd have turned it up field and maybe would have scored. If we played them again, we would have won by 40."

Hughes fell 11 yards short of the win in the final seconds, losing 16-13.

Malzahn wasn't sure he would ever return to War Memorial Stadium as a coach. He would, of course, but not with Hughes. He left Hughes one year later to accept the coaching job at Shiloh Christian, a private school in Springdale on the opposite side of the state. He later led Shiloh Christian and Springdale High to state titles before coaching the University of Arkansas' offense in a pair of games in Little Rock.

"I felt like I lost my best friend the day he left," Patrick said.

The Blue Devils never went that far again. Seventeen years later, Hughes High disbanded the football program following the 2011 season because of a lack of participation.

But they still talk about Malzahn here, where both of his first two homes still stand, a reminder of where Auburn’s new coach got his start.

"I'm proud of everything he's done," Troup said. "Everything he has accomplished, I feel like I've accomplished it, too."