Has Alabama football coach Nick Saban seen the last of Gus Malzahn yet? | Hurt

Cecil Hurt
The Tuscaloosa News

Gus Malzahn’s last coaching appearance for Auburn against Alabama football wasn’t especially memorable, a low 42-13 speed bump for the turbo-charged Crimson Tide offense along its road to bigger things.

Auburn had a tougher time of things in 2020, for reasons ranging from COVID-19 to its own internal affairs, and the game fell into what had become something of a pattern in the past decade. In odd-numbered years at Jordan-Hare Stadium, Auburn seemed to have a powerful hex on Alabama, powered in part by Malzahn’s play-calling and in part by some kind of pact with the voodoo gods that demanded a bi-annual sacrifice of a Tiger fan or two to the carnivorous shrubbery that surrounds Pat Dye Field.

But whether you considered Malzahn to be Nick Saban’s kryptonite or simply a thorn in his side, one fact remains: He won more against Saban than anyone else.

Will Malzahn ever get another chance to beat Saban, now that he has driven his Brinks truck full of Auburn payout money south to Orlando, where he replaces Josh Heupel as head coach at Central Florida? One never says never. Alabama doesn’t make the College Football Playoff every year, although it certainly seems like it. Central Florida might never make it past the zealous Power Five guardians on the CFP Selection Committee, but it could certainly make a New Year’s Day bowl game as the Group of Five representative.

After all, the Knights have done it before.

Seeing Saban again is secondary for Malzahn and UCF. What will be more intriguing, at least for a year or two, will be the inevitable comparisons between Malzahn and two new coaches in the SEC: Bryan Harsin, who has Malzahn’s old job at Auburn, and Heupel, who is now head coach at Tennessee. 

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Every major college football program operates by its own internal logic. That’s true in Tuscaloosa as much as anywhere else, although things seem like a well-oiled machine either because things have generally been well-run for a century or because UA happened to have the good fortune to be in the right place at the right time to hire the greatest two coaches in college football history. If the goal at Tennessee or Auburn (or LSU or Georgia or anywhere else) is to replicate that, there’s no wonder that those programs are doomed to frustration. No one has a bottle big enough to catch that kind of lightning twice. 

Gus Malzahn introduced as the UCF football coach on Feb. 15, 2021.

If the goal is to succeed on your own terms, the journey of Malzahn is intriguing. Perhaps he had simply run his course at Auburn. That can happen at some places. Auburn exceeded all reasonable expectations in some years under Malzahn, but it fell short in others. I’ll never be convinced that there was a secret apolitical plan to hire Harsin all along, but he has a fresh start and might turn out well. 

At Tennessee, one has to ask a different question: why would a program that is 0-for-Saban since he arrived in Tuscaloosa not consider a coach who had beaten Saban three times in the same span of time – one with SEC experience and, possibly, a sense of invigoration? Nothing would have been guaranteed, but nothing is guaranteed with Heupel, either.

UCF seems like a great spot for Malzahn, especially if he’s not distracted by his new buyout wealth. I never thought Malzahn was an extraordinary recruiter, but that might have been because of an unfair comparison with the relentless Saban. At any rate, Orlando is to football recruits what Kuwait is to crude oil. There are plenty to go around, and Malzahn simply needs to hire a competent staff to have a perennially strong roster. He says he’s taking full command of play-calling, which is another of his strengths. 

Will he ever coach against Saban again? That might depend on one of two things occurring: He elevates UCF to new heights, or he does so well for a few years that some other, mightier program (perhaps in the SEC) hires him away. In either case, while nothing is certain in college football, UCF seems to have strengthened its hand by hiring him.

Reach Cecil Hurt at cecil@tidesports.com or via Twitter @cecilhurt