The ups-and-downs of 2019 have been something of a microcosm of what Gus Malzahn does well.

And what he does badly.

The season’s bowl game was no exception. When the defense handed him a short field and a reeling opponent early on, Malzahn didn’t reach for the dagger. He instead hewed to his pregame script and again insisted on trying to run inside — when Auburn had not been able to do so early in games against any decent opponent.

The resulting three-snaps-and-a-field goal took the pressure off of Minnesota and gave the Golden Gopher defense confidence that it could stop Auburn’s running game, which they did.

They allowed approximately 50 yards over the rest of the contest.

Auburn never adjusted offensively afterwards. Malzahn stuck with trying the inside run with little success. The defense was left on the field for most of the first half as well as the final quarter, and fatigue wore away its ability to close and tackle. The results were fatal.

As I’ve noted before in similar situations, the old U2 song is correct: Nothing changes on New Year’s Day. At the end of a season, you are what you are and a few extra practices in December are not going to change that.

Malzahn is a child of the 80’s, but apparently he didn’t listen to a lot of alternative rock from Ireland.

If Gus ever schemed the actual Minnesota defense to try and attack its weaknesses, you couldn’t tell it from the game plan. Instead we just got more of the same schemes that failed against Georgia and Florida and LSU.

Auburn still had an offensive line that doesn’t get much of a push. There was no reason to think that was going to change by January 1 — no matter how much the head coach wanted to run the ball.

The way this game unfolded made me think, perhaps counter-intuitively, that Auburn was very fortunate for Anthony Schwartz having played just one snap against Alabama.

We learned after the fact that Malzahn had built the Alabama game plan around Schwartz. When the sophomore speed demon went out injured after a single play, it forced Gus to ditch his script and make a new plan on the fly.

And guess what? Calling a game based on the realities on the field as opposed to what Gus thought ought to happen the week before worked pretty damn well.

It was an example of what Malzahn used to be known for — the old high school ethos of taking what you have and making the most of it. This is in diametric opposition to his usual plan of forcing square pegs into round holes to prove some kind of point.

It’s also something we’ve rarely seen from Malzahn since about the 2014 season. Instead, we usually get a stubborn refusal to deviate from a predetermined game plan, regardless of whether it’s working or not.

The real test of any football coach (or any leader, for that matter) is to recognize when they are failing. Then they must adjust. There’s a perfect example of that at the top of the rankings right now — holding up a shiny new SEC championship trophy and reaching out for a bigger one.

Ed Orgeron failed at Ole Miss about as completely as any coach in recent memory His troubles were far more acute than anything we've seen from Gus Malzahn. He was literally a punch line when the curtain finally fell on his initial tenure as a head coach.

But to his great credit, when he got a couple of unexpected second chances, “Coach O” had the good sense to set his ego aside, learn from his previous mistakes and change his approach.

That didn’t happen overnight. Orgeron feuded with a couple of different offensive schemes at LSU before realizing that was he was doing wasn’t going to work. His latest results since speak for themselves.

Yes, personnel matters a lot, but so does coaching. LSU quarterback Joe Burrow went from a lightly regarded cast-off to a runaway Heisman winner thanks in no small part to the development he’s received over the last two years.

Does anybody think Bo Nix has developed over the last year? To my eyes it looks like he’s actually regressed in his mechanics and field vision. Nix played a lot better in the second half against Oregon than he did in most of the bowl game four months later.

So we now find ourselves pondering another four-loss season. You always hear people say that their expectation is to be competitive whether games are actually won or lost. And this time around, Auburn was competitive in every game. There were no blowouts.

Two huge games were won late; twice as many more were lost when the Tigers couldn’t get it done in the fourth quarter. Some would call that bad luck against a tough schedule. There was plenty of bad luck to go around in 2019.

But others see a great defense that only needed a consistent, not necessarily great, offense to get to a higher level than a nice second-tier bowl in Florida.

And then they look at who is indisputably in charge of that offense and remember: Nothing changes on New Year’s Day.

Or any day after that, apparently.

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