Getty Image / Don Juan Moore
It has been 4 seasons since Gus Malzahn was at Auburn, time he spent fruitlessly trying to turn the UCF Knights into a more attractive collegiate football program, and it has been less than 2 weeks since Gus joined the Florida State Seminoles as Mike Norvell’s new Offensive Coordinator in Tallahassee. By all approximations, Gus Malzahn appears to be a solid fit for FSU who is in dire need of revamping the program after the worst season in FSU’s illustrious history.
Now that Malzahn is getting settled at my alma mater in Tallahassee there is no shortage of articles coming out about how he is adjusting to the new role. One excerpt from one such article caught my attention because it sounds like this dude is getting unintentionally hazed and/or emotionally tortured every day on the new job.
In an Associated Press article from Bob Ferrante, they painted a picture of how the reminders of Malzahn’s past shortcomings are omnipresent. There’s a picture hanging right outside of his office that commemorates one of the toughest moments of the former Auburn head coach’s career, the moment the Seminoles came roaring back to beat the Auburn Tigers in the 2013 National Championship after they figure out that Gus Malzahn was stealing FSU’s signs through Auburn position coach Dameyune Craig who had coached at FSU the previous season and recognized that FSU wasn’t mixing up or masking its signals. That excerpt reads:
Near Gus Malzahn’s new office hangs a picture of Kelvin Benjamin hauling in a touchdown pass from Jameis Winston, the play that helped Florida State beat Malzahn and his Auburn Tigers in the 2013 national championship game. It’s a daily reminder of Malzahn’s connection to the Seminoles.
“I’ve got to walk by the picture of the guy catching the ball as I go to the office every day,” Malzahn said Wednesday. “That was a real special game. There were a lot of great players on the field. It went down to the very end. It was probably entertaining or a great game to watch. It was tough, obviously, to be on the losing side.”
I watched every second of every FSU game in that 2013 season with Jameis Winston and remember being completely dumbfounded by how impotent FSU’s offense, which was setting records by the game, looked in that National Championship against the Auburn Tigers. Truly, I remember thinking there must’ve been some reason the offense couldn’t get going that wasn’t just ‘Auburn looks good’ because that wasn’t it.
Once wide receiver Kelvin Benjamin came over to then-head coach Jimbo Fisher after a 3-and-out to start the second half and said “Dameyune calling all the plays, coach” the game changed on a dime. FSU brought out towels to mask the signs and the offense nearly doubled in yardage per play. Auburn had no answers for that Seminoles offense that came roaring back to snatch the Natty away from Gus Malzahn’s Auburn Tigers that just barely eked into the game after ‘The Kick Six’ from Chris Davis against Alabama, which may be the single most exciting play in College Football history.
In addition to just wanting to point out how Gus Malzahn is forced to face his demons every day in the hallways of Doak Campbell Stadium, I mention all of that because I want to illustrate how those moments will stay with Gus Malzahn not just at FSU but forever. He was SEC Coach of the Year in 2013 in addition to winning a host of other awards but the offensive coordinator role at FSU is his chance to turn his career around and do it with a program that’s also in dire need of help.
FSU stinks right now. Straight up. And there’s really no sign of life yet that things will be better next year. There’s hope from the Seminoles that they can find a path to redemption through the transfer portal but Gus Malzahn will play an instrumental role in turning things around. Perhaps he’ll be able to leech off some talent through the pipeline he’d developed at UCF, if such a pipeline exists, because FSU has relied far too heavily on the transfer portal in recent years in lieu of recruting at the high school level. Only time will tell.