AUBURN | Gus Malzahn will return for his eighth season at Auburn in 2020. If he wants to return for a ninth and potentially many more, he needs to make one big change in the offseason.
Malzahn needs to turn over the offense to Chad Morris lock, stock and barrel.
He’s tried before to varying degrees, giving the play-calling duties to Rhett Lashlee for a brief period and hiring Chip Lindsey to run the RPO offense, but couldn’t keep from interfering. Now is the time to finally hand over the reins for good if he wants to do what’s best for Auburn and for his career.
Going into 2019, Malzahn took full control of the offense. He was going back to his roots, what he did best, what he loved to do. Unfortunately, it just wasn’t good enough, not for the Tigers to compete at the highest levels.
Auburn finished 9-4, the sixth consecutive season a Malzahn-led team has finished with four or more losses, and those defeats were largely due to the inadequacies of his offense. The Tigers finished 64th nationally and sixth in the SEC in total offense with 406.5 yards per game, and 28th nationally and third in the conference averaging 33.2 points per game.
If you don’t understand that it’s offense that wins championships now, well, you haven’t been paying attention. LSU, Clemson, Oklahoma and Ohio State are all in the top six nationally in total offense and scoring offense.
And it’s the passing offenses that really make the difference, and that’s where Auburn really comes up short. The Tigers ranked 87th nationally and ninth in the SEC averaging 207.5 passing yards per game. Its 6.8 yards per attempt ranked 97th nationally and ninth in the SEC.
Auburn has to improve by leaps and bounds in that area if it wants to legitimately compete at the top of the SEC and for a spot in the college football playoff.
When I look at next year’s offense. I view quarterback Bo Nix as Auburn’s best player and the one you have to build the offense around. I see Anthony Schwartz and Seth Williams as AU’s two best playmakers. It all adds up to an offense that should feature those three players first and foremost.
Malzahn’s run/play-action offense needs to be deposited in the dustbin of history and he needs to let Morris install a 21st century passing attack that incorporates the entire depth and width of the field and allows Nix to make decisions and be the natural playmaker he is without having to look to the sidelines for every minor adjustment.
Maybe it’s asking too much, maybe Malzahn’s just incapable of doing it, but if he can just focus on running the program, which he already does quite well, and perhaps put a little more effort into his 1-on-1 recruiting, Auburn would be much better served and perhaps he can elevate this program into competing for championships on a much more consistent basis.
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Switching over to the hardwood, what a huge win that was for Auburn at Mississippi State and what a great start to conference play. It was just a year ago that the Tigers suffered a blowout 82-67 loss at Ole Miss to open SEC play.
To be honest, I wouldn’t have been surprised with a similar result in Starkville Saturday afternoon, but instead Bruce Pearl and his players put on another defensive masterpiece. Even more impressive to me was the poise the players showed when they got off to such a poor start offensively and were down by nine points with seven and a half minutes left in the first half. AU outscored MSU 71-50 the final 32 minutes of the game.
Auburn’s chances of winning the regular season SEC Championship for a second time in three years will probably come down to games against Kentucky — at home Feb. 1 and away Feb. 29 — but wins like the one at MSU will go a long way in putting AU in position to win the title going down the stretch.
Going into Starkville, Pearl called it an opportunity game, the type of road test that most conference teams wouldn’t be able to pass. Well, the Tigers passed this one with flying colors and that gives them an early leg up on the rest of their competition.
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Today’s music journey takes us back exactly 47 years to Jan. 6, 1973 and the chart-topping rise of one of the most popular and talked about singles of the 1970s. Carly Simon’s You’re So Vain, which spent three weeks at No. 1 in the early weeks of 73, has been a staple of 70s music stations and the subject of much speculation over the true identity of the song’s antagonist.
Simon, a Bronx, N.Y., native, began her career with her sister, Lucy Simon, in the group the Simon Sisters. She quickly started a solo career in 1971 with the self-titled album Carly Simon, which won her a Grammy Award for Best New Artist. With her 1988 hit, Let the River Run from the film Working Girl, Simon became the first artist to win a Grammy Award, Academy Award and Golden Globe Award for a song composed, written and performed entirely by a solo artist. Simon has 13 top 40 hits in her career including Anticipation, You Belong To Me, Jesse and Nobody Does It Better. She was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1994. She has two children with her former husband, singer-songwriter Jamey Taylor. Her father, Richard L. Simon, was the co-founder of Simon & Schuster publishing company.
After dropping hints over the years, Simon finally admitted in 2015 that actor Warren Beatty, who she briefly dated in the early 70s, is one of three men that she based You’re So Vain on. The second verse, in particular, is about Beatty, which includes the lyrics:
You had me several years ago when I will still quite naive
Well you said that we made such a pretty pair
And that you would never leave
