The Fall of Gus Malzahn Part 3
Hurry up and wait
Hey guys thanks for joining me for part 3 of my thoughts on Gus Malzahn and why he faltered as the head coach at AU. If you enjoy my blogs — drop a comment and subscribe so these will go straight to your email.
When Malzahn was first named the OC at Auburn most everyone was excited to see this HUNH (hurry up no huddle) offense that he was going to bring back to the SEC. We had seen glimpses of it when he was Arkansas, but we hadn’t seen the full effect. Initially, his offense caused defenses to have major headaches because of his ability to substitute quickly with a new formation and/or personnel group. When he did this successfully the defense didn’t have time to identify what formation or personnel group was on the field and by the time they did the ball was already snapped. Evidence of this really showed through during the 2010 and 2013 seasons which hosted Malzahn’s best offenses during his tenure as OC or HC at AU.
The HUNH caused so many issues for opposing coaches that more than one coach publicly advocated for the NCAA to implement a rule that allowed the defense to substitute whenever the offense did. I completely understand why they wanted the rule to be put in place, but the issue I had was the complaints only came after losses or after they realized how hard it was to stop. But, like I said I do understand the player safety aspect of the rule although I do not believe their true intent was “player safety”. Once this rule was put into place I wondered how Malzahn would adjust his offense or if it would even change his approach — he did not change his approach and thats where, in my opinion, the end of his offensive prowess began.
Malzahn’s offense was predicated on going fast, change personnel quickly, and giving the defense a lot of “eye candy” with his formations. At the core, Malzahn wanted to run the ball effectively so he could set up his play action shot plays, but he still needed to go HUNH and out formation the defense. Malzahn loved to substitute in certain players for a specific formation or play. Once the defense was given time to substitute that also gave them a change to see who was on the field for Auburn and where they were lined up. Once defensive coaches caught on to the tendencies they were able to predict which handful of plays Malzahn would call out of certain formations and personnel groups. Why was that so easy?
Well another quirk of Malzahn’s offense was receivers specialized in certain routes and formation position. Simply put — if you played the X receiver then you only knew the plays from that position. the X would never line up in the slot or on the other side of the formation. That made in easier for the defense to identify what was coming. Later in his career Malzahn had decided to “train” all the receivers to play all the positions so they did not have to stop to substitute but it never worked out the way the fans envisioned it working.
Another example of defenses being able to catch on is the formations Malzahn would use for screen passes. When he could go HUNH, uninterrupted, the opposition may not catch on the the blocking WR had lined up in front of, close to, or on the same side of the formation as the WR that was most likely going to catch a screen pass. But, once the defense had time to substitute the opposing defensive coaches could identify the formation and alert their players accordingly. During the 2018 UT game I could hear the UT sideline yelling screen during certain plays —that did, in fact, result in AU calling a screen pass. That was pretty discouraging.
For all the good Malzahn did with his offense early in his career I believe not adapting his formations and personnel groups may have hindered him the second most out of everything that we could point to that went wrong. I would like to point out that early in his career Malzahn was considered a pioneer of the HUNH and is credited, with a few others, as bringing it into higher - level college football. I just believe other coaches have taken his offense and adapted it through the years to make it their own. They are many coaches that took his ideas, added their own spin to it, evolved it and are still successful offensive coaches today. Malzahn just seemed to be too stubborn to realize that some changes were needed.
There were times he gave up play calling to Rhett Lashlee who only knew Malzahn’s offense, but has since evolved it into a pretty successful offense at Miami and also gave up play calling duties to Chip Lindsey, but he eventually took them back from Lashlee and then while still allowing Lindsey to call plays made him call plays from the gameplan Malzahn had laid out. Both Lashlee and Lindsey had really good success calling plays at AU, but at the first sign of trouble Malzahn decided he needed to take them back over. When he hired Chad Morris everyone thought Morris wouldn’t come to AU without the abilities to call his own plays and develop his own gameplan. I believe early in the year Morris was free to do what was needed, but as the year progressed Malzahn become more and more involved in the gameplan. Much like with the QB coaching you can only point to one common denominator when trying to figure out what went wrong with the offense…
Until Next time…
War Eagle guys!
It would be hard to be a great high school team run the same 4plays in different directions..Gus is only a average high school with great talent surrounding that program.
WAR EAGLE @ COACH