BamaInBham
BamaNation First Team
Join Date: Feb 2007
Posts: 820
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Re: Auburn's Offensive Coordinator, Gus Malzahn, getting it done!
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He was essentially relieved of his OC duties mid season at Ark because he wanted to throw the ball with Mustain rather than run McFadden and Jones.
None of us were there behind closed doors, but you would have to get Malzahn to personally call me on my cell phone and admit to what you just wrote above before I would
consider believing it....and even then I might just think one of the Springdale parents was holding a gun to his head.
Look at his history....as short as it is, there is no reason to think he didn't want to run McFadden and Jones, that's just ridiculous. Look at interviews he's had about 2007 and 2008 Tulsa. In 2007 they threw the ball over 385 yards and ran it for only 170+. However, he stated that it was because they weren't effective at running the ball and he would have preferred to run it more. In 2008, the line was better and so he did run it more...nearly 100 yards more (almost 270 yards a game) and threw for just over 300.
He probably wanted to throw more than the 15 attempts per game that they did, but to say he didn't want to run McFadden and Jones just goes against everything we've observed about Malzahn.
Regardless of the play-calling preference that he may have had or not had, there are two things you can look at to see that he had zero freedom in controlling the offense
his way.....number of plays and tempo.
Since you claim he was relieved of his duties midway, look just at the first six games.
Here are the number of plays run game by game:
59, 60, 59, 53, 55, and 64 (58 avg). Compare that to his first five games at Auburn this year:
79, 83, 74, 63, and 83 (76 avg). To make it so simple as "he didn't want to run McFadden and Jones" is just a Nutt version of why things didn't work out. It's obvious that from game one (59 plays), Nutt wasn't letting Malzahn control the offense. That was the problem....anything beyond that (passing or running) is irrelevant.