The Lost Year: Houston Nutt, Gus Malzahn, Mitch Mustain (Article Link Inside)

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"It seemed like things were getting pulled a little more and a little more," Mustain said. "If nothing else we just never reconciled the two offenses with each other and I think that was very problematic. You had the older guys who ran the old system not really understanding the new stuff we were doing. In order to understand the entire offense -- any offense -- you need to understand the concepts in full. You need to understand what the core is, what the base of the offense is in order to work everything else. Everything else spins off it. If you add your core formations, protections, routes and then from there you have your core concepts.

"We never had that."

Malzahn left two weeks after the Capital One Bowl to take the offensive coordinator job at Tulsa.

"He felt he had an opportunity to go and run exactly the playbook that he had at Springdale, and do it immediately," Nutt said. "I just think, because of Mitch and the relationship that he had with him in high school, he lost that and I'm sure they felt I was responsible for that. I don't hold any hard feelings but I just think he was ready to move on and do exactly the thing that he wanted to do. The thing I kept trying to impress on him is that, look, we're going to get to that point but it just doesn't make sense when you have McFadden, Felix Jones, Peyton Hillis, Marcus Monk."

Malzahn doesn't talk much about his one-year stint at Arkansas, which included 10 wins, and seemingly enough drama to fill a small book.

"You know what, that year gave me a chance to get into college football and I learned a lot about myself and I learned about college football," Malzahn said last week. "It helped me along the way."

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