AUBURN | First-year offensive coordinator Kenny Dillingham is going to bring some new wrinkles to Auburn’s offense — eventually — but any new twists will have to wait a while.

With four quarterbacks competing for the starting position, Gus Malzahn is going to keep it simple during the first part of spring practice.

“We're rotating four quarterbacks. We can't get too ahead of ourselves,” Malzahn said. “We're going to be fairly bland with our offense, at least early, to give our quarterbacks a chance to get things going. There will be a point to where we'll start adding things.

“The thing about Kenny is that you've always got to kind of stay ahead of things. Kenny will bring some really good, fresh ideas from his time with (Mike) Norvell at Memphis and all that. Really, you won't see a lot of that, at least the first half of spring. We're really going to focus on the execution part and the foundation and being able to evaluate quarterbacks.”

Malzahn plans to give equal reps to junior Malik Willis, redshirt freshmen Joey Gatewood and Cord Sandberg, and true freshman Bo Nix to begin spring drills. He’s not setting a timetable for choosing a starter or even how and when he’ll begin to thin the ranks.

Malzahn is going to let the competition evolve on its own.

“We'll see kind of where that goes,” he said. “No timetable on narrowing things down or naming starters. We're just gonna let those guys compete, and it's an open position and looking forward to watching that competition.”

Auburn will hold major scrimmages at Jordan-Hare Stadium on March 30 and April 6, and Malzahn is not ruling out the possibility of letting his quarterbacks go live to help in the evaluation process.

“It's possible. We have done that in the past, we'll kind of see where things go, and how guys separate themselves,” Malzahn said. “In the past, if guys really haven't separated themselves, usually you can find out in a couple series of going live. But I'm not ready to say that right now, but it is a possibility.”

Auburn held the first of 15 spring practices Monday afternoon, and will practice again Wednesday, Friday and Saturday this week. The A-Day game will be April 13 at 3 p.m. CT on SEC Network.