Gus Malzahn Won’t Rekindle 2010 BCS National Championship Magic at Auburn

Feb 6, 2013; Auburn, AL, USA: Carolina Panthers quarterback Cam Newton and Auburn Tigers head football coach Gus Malzahn talk during the game against the Alabama Crimson Tide at Auburn Arena. The Tigers beat the Tide 49-37. Mandatory Credit: John Reed-USA TODAY Sports

For as long as anyone cares to remember, Gus Malzahn has always done things at one speed. Fast.

In 2010, Malzahn’s offense, led by eventual Heisman Trophy winner Cam Newton, took the Southeastern Conference by storm, playing at a reckless pace the league simply hadn’t seen before. They took everyone off guard. They wore defenses thin. They dominated.

In that season, the Auburn Tigers would capture the BCS National Championship, their first, and their first undisputed national title of any kind since 1957. And while former Auburn front-man Gene Chizik may go down as the head coach of record in 2010, many will look to Newton and Malzahn as the cause of the Tigers’ success.

Rarely in college football do we see such a perfect combination of quarterback and coordinator, but Cam Newton and Gus Malzahn simply fit.

There are many machinations of the spread, and Malzahn’s is unique both in its simplicity and its design. Its potency relies on tempo, and while the concept in and of itself isn’t entirely original, Malzahn is. In Arkansas, he spruced up the single-wing, gave it a testosterone-injected name and made it cool again. A couple of years later “The Wildcat” was being run by several NFL franchises.

When Gus Malzahn was paired with Cam Newton at Auburn, it all just sort of made sense. For years, Malzahn had cultivated a system that simplified offense into going fast and getting the football into the hands of the most talented playmakers on the field. With Newton, all it took was the snap.

The Auburn Tigers scored 41.2 points per game and racked up just under 500 yards of total offense per contest. Newton put up 4,327 yards of total offense on his own and scored 50 touchdowns, becoming the second player (after Tim Tebow) to both run and throw for more than 20 touchdowns in a single season. For his part, Gus Malzahn won the Frank Broyles Award, which is given to the nation’s top assistant coach.

However, while Malzahn may never be privileged to an athlete of Cam’s caliber ever again, he didn’t stop finding ways to simplify things. Without Newton, Auburn’s offensive production predictably fell in 2011, but they still managed eight wins on The Plains. After the season, Gus shockingly bolted for the head coaching job at Arkansas State, a move we can now presume Malzahn made preemptively to jump Chizik’s sinking, leather-bound ship.

At Arkansas State he continued to validate his offensive genius, as he led the Red Wolves to a 10-win season. Once again, his offense was dominant, scoring nearly 35 points a game and racking up 466.7 yards of total offense per diem, and a season later, Chizik’s collapse now complete, Malzahn returned to Auburn to run the show. War Damn Eagle.

Looking back on it, the only thing more up-tempo than Gus Malzahn’s offenses has been his career arc. In 2005, Malzahn was the head coach of Springdale High in Arkansas, where he seemingly rode Mitch Mustain’s stardom to a Class 5A state championship and a job on the Arkansas staff via some form of reverse nepotism.

However, with Mustain having flamed out at both Arkansas and USC it’s clear that Gus Malzahn was always the rising star in that relationship, Mustain tethered to Malzahn’s brilliance. Eight years and six coaching stops later, Malzahn is now a head coach in the SEC with, arguably, one of the 25 best coaching jobs in college football. Mitch Mustain pitches for the Chicago White Sox farm system.

Now that Malzahn has returned to Auburn, the expectation will be that he recreates the magic of the 2010 BCS National Championship season. The folks of eastern Alabama will expect a seamless return to dominance with the Tigers reclaiming the Iron Throne in Alabama’s real-life version of GoT.

And Gus Malzahn may eventually raise a banner in Jordan-Hare Stadium and return Tammy to her rightful place as Queen Overlord of the Paul Finebaum World, but don’t expect him to rekindle the majestry of 2010.

Kiehl Frazier may have been looked upon as the poor-man’s version of Cam Newton when he was recruited by Malzahn to Auburn in 2011, but we know now that’s he’s a caricature of a caricature of a poor-man’s version of Cam Newton. He’ll certainly be better off in a Malzahn offense, but he isn’t someone currently capable of carrying a football team.

Gus Malzahn will need time, as all new college football coaches do.

He has a track-record for finding ways to score quickly, but now he’s tasked with building an entire program. Not only that, but he’ll have to break free from the ghost of Gene Chizik’s leather jacket. It’s been restricting Auburn’s movement for the last two years. Leather is pretty unforgiving.

Even after Malzahn puts his own watermark on the Auburn program, it may never be the same as it was in 2010. That’s why it’s called once in a lifetime.

Eventually, Gus Malzahn will have the Auburn Tigers competitive in the SEC West, and I suspect it will be sooner than later. He’s always done things fast. But with Auburn having fired Gene Chizik two years removed from a national title, the question is can he move fast enough?