The Day Before

We come to the day before the start of another Auburn football season.  I have truly followed Auburn football closely since 1967.  It's so different now than in the "old days" before almost every game was TV and we listed on the radio.  We can more now with our own eyes and draw our own conclusions.

There is no reason not to think that a lot of points will be scored tonight vs. a Mike Leach Washington State team.  Both teams are coming off 3 & 9 seasons.  I like to think that we can run the ball better than the Cougars and we are at Jordan-Hare but still if we win we will give up a lot of points.

As always we shall see.

A Week from Today

A week from today Auburn's 2013 football season will start with a night game at Jordan-Hare against Mike Leach's Washington State.  The Gus Malzahn era begins.

Excitement is high with a new coaching staff.  Expectations seem to be modest.  If only we can have a winning season---something like that.  That's okay since Auburn seems to do best when least expected.

JC transfer Nick Marshall wins the QB job.  We hear good things about the offensive line.  The receiving position is supposed to be thin, the running back position strong led by thousand yard rusher Tre Mason.  The defense is expected to give up points.  We get good vibes from defensive line coach Rodney Garner.  Dee Ford, our best DE, will miss at least the first game.  Demetruce McNeal, our best safety, was dismissed from the team, yet we get good vibes regarding the secondary. 

The line is something like 14.  I'll take a win any way we an get it.

Tales from SEC BeachFest: Coaches - Steve Spurrier's Worst Putdown

BY Mark Inabinett
20 August 2013

GULF SHORES, Alabama - During SEC BeachFest over the weekend, the 22 former coaches and players had a lot to say about their former coaches and their coaching rivals. Here are some excerpts:

CHRIS DOERING ON STEVE SPURRIER

Chris Doering set the SEC record for career touchdown receptions while playing for coach Steve Spurrier at Florida from 1992 through 1995. Now Spurrier is coaching South Carolina:

"Some people referred to him as the Evil Genius. He wanted us to refer to him as the Head Ball Coach. ... The biggest insult you could ever have when you came off the field after making a mistake: 'That's all right. Not your fault. My fault for putting you in there.' Not a more demeaning feeling than to have him tell you that. He didn't have to yell or throw the visor. ... The job he's done at South Carolina: They had no history of success there, with all due respect to George Rogers. They have no facilities. They haven't been able to recruit every well. Now all of a sudden, they've turned the tide. They've gotten every player they wanted out of the state of South Carolina now. And he's done it a little differently than he did it at Florida. He did it without the big passing game. He's done it by playing defense and running the football, which I know drives him crazy. But I think that shows the discipline that he has and his desire to win that he'd give up what he loves doing the most to get those W's on Saturday."

BEN LEARD ON TERRY BOWDEN

Ben Leard played for Auburn from 1997 through 2000. He started his career on the Plains under coach Terry Bowden:

"From Sunday to Friday, he was quite quirky. He just didn't connect with you. He kind of stayed off on the sidelines and monitored from a distance. But ... coach Bowden was an in-game genius. He could do things and make plays and draw question marks around certain defensive strategies and things that really made Dameyune (Craig), who I backed up for two years, understand what they were trying to accomplish. Now Dameyune was a tremendous athlete who could make plays on his own, but coach Bowden just had a knack. He had a knack to be able to do things on Saturdays that not many football coaches could do, and he had a way to deliver that to the football team so they could accomplish whatever goal it was he had in mind."

BEN LEARD ON TOMMY TUBERVILLE

Ben Leard was the starting quarterback on coach Tommy Tuberville's first two teams at Auburn:

"Coach Tubs was a blue-collar guy. Coach Tubs would basically tell us, 'Guys, if you score 17 points a game, I expect to win,' because he was so defensive-minded. ... He felt like his defensive football team should be able to hold an opposing offense to 16 or less. And that's the way we operated. I got threatened to be benched at least a dozen times a game because I'd check from a run to a pass. Third-and-long, first-and-10 or whatever, he wanted to run the clock down, play ball-control offense, and not to mention we had a guy behind me that could run the football pretty well, too. So he felt like he was hedging his bets giving the ball to Rudi (Johnson) more so than me putting the ball up in the air threatening an interception."

BEN LEARD ON GUS MALZAHN

The former Auburn quarterback is full of confidence about the job that former Tigers offensive coordinator Gus Malzahn will do now that he's the head coach on the Plains:

"He obviously had a tremendous amount of success in 2009 and 2010 and that was obviously expedited quite a bit by a kid who wore No. 2 in Cam Newton. But we'll take it any way we can get it. I am really, really excited not only about coach Malzahn coming back, but I'm excited about the staff he brought with him. ... They're tremendous recruiters, but the biggest thing is they're great football coaches. On top of that, they're going to coach those kids hard. Auburn will be a disciplined football team from the word 'go.' But the best thing about it is they'll coach them hard, but they'll love them, too. At the end of the day, these are kids that are 17, 18 years old that are away from their parents, away from their families, and as soon as they get on a college campus they don't know which end is up. They're going to treat them that way. I'm extremely, extremely excited and looking forward to this football season. I don't know if it's relative to the lack of success from 2012, but I'm really looking forward to what they have coming in the years to come in trying to compete with the other side of the state."

DAVID GREENE ON MARK RICHT

Quarterback David Greene became the SEC's career leader in passing yards while playing for coach Mark Richt's first four teams at Georgia:

"There's a misconception of coach Richt. Everybody just thinks he's just laid-back and never gets fired up. But it's really just the opposite, I'd say, during the week. Coach Richt has actually got plenty of fire in his belly, but he always made this comment that if he gets too worked up on game day, he doesn't think clearly. So he actually forces himself on game day to just stay calm no matter what's going on because he feels like, 'If I get too fired up, I'm not going to make clear decisions.'"

PHILLIP FULMER ON FRIENDLY RIVALS

Phillip Fulmer served as Tennessee's head coach for 16 seasons and is a member of the College Football Hall of Fame. He said any hatchets from his coaching days are long buried and he enjoys coming to events such as SEC BeachFest and visiting with his former rivals:

"We probably were fierce competitors, but we were also very respectful of each other in most cases. Everybody in the SEC, and to some degree even in coaching period, is intertwined. Coach (Pat) Dye had the great Auburn run, but before that he was at Alabama. He recruited me when he was (as assistant coach) at Alabama and I was a high school kid. We were laughing last night about all that. I have unbelievable great respect for coach (Gene) Stallings and all that he's accomplished. R.C. (Slocum) and I just went into the Hall of Fame together. We've been friends for 20 years. Coach (Jerry) Stovall and the list goes on and on with people that you enjoy and respect. I kid them that I'm younger than most of them, and I have some fun with that occasionally."

MATT JONES ON BRET BIELEMA

Matt Jones played quarterback at Arkansas from 2001 through 2004. He said there are precedents indicating Razorbacks new coach Bret Bielema will do well after leaving Wisconsin for the SEC:
"You look at the Big Ten success. Nick Saban, right? Les Miles. And the way they go about that -- that kind of road plan. Run the ball, be physical, control the clock, control the tempo. Here's a stat: Last three years, coach Bielema's teams only had one double-digit loss. They had nine losses in the last three years, they were all but one single-digit losses. That tells you they're disciplined, they're smart, they're going to be able to stay in the game. We're excited at Arkansas. We definitely think we got one of the best coaches in the country."

R.C. SLOCUM ON RESPECT

R.C. Slocum has more victories than any coach in Texas A&M history. Now, he's in the College Football Hall of Fame. He said most coaches are not adversaries:

"I would say that there might be a few of those kinds of contentious relationships, but by and large, coaches respect each other. They compete hard against each other, but that's really what competition should be about. I tried to teach my players, I never taught hate. I thought the world has enough hate in it without coaches teaching kids how to hate. I talked in terms of respect - really doing your best and going out and giving your best effort to win the game and playing out of respect for your opponent. Those kids, a lot of times in Texas, the guys that would be on the other team were guys I knew their parents and I tried to recruit them and I had high school teammates of theirs, so there's no way I was going to have animosity toward them. No one knows how difficult coaching is better than coaches, so you look at your opponent a lot of times that he's going through the same challenges you are, so you develop a respect for them, especially the good guys, and most coaches I met during my career I would consider good guys."

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.

***

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."

***

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.

***

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.

***

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."

What Now?

Now that new baseball and softball head coaches are hired, what now do we have to think about in Auburn athletics?  Nothing, I think.  We can hibernate until football starts... I don't know anything about softball, but Myers sounds incredible.  Two national championships and seven CWS appearances in eight seasons.  Can't get any better than that for softball.  Galloway is quite successful too.  He sounds as good as the other names we heard.  At least on paper, we did as well as we could with the new hires.

Tired

I am tired of reading about recruiting.  I could not care less who we are targeting or who has committed.  Enough.

Pawlowski is Fired

Well, what did you expect?  Auburn finishes 10th in a 14-team league and loses to Alabama in a play-in game in the SEC Tournament in Coach Pawloski's 5th year.  According to Phillip Marshall, the team faces in effect a major rebulding job next year.  What choice did Jacobs have?  None.