re: New Head Coach Thread: Officially Official 2020

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Malzahn made every recruiting decision on offense – who to recruit, who to offer, who to sign, everything.

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This may have been true for some amount of time and for some positions but certainly wasn’t last year or when Dillingham was here. Dilly had offered essentially the whole state of arizona and Morris offered tons of Texas guys. Hand certainly did his own recruiting work.

Obviously wrong items like this make me question the other things I’m less knowledgeable about

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Other than OL does anyone really have an other issues with the talent on offense?

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Well, Oline is the most important part of the offense. Doesn’t matter if you have Peyton Manning if you have a crappy Oline.

We all know Craig and Gus didn’t get along and he was eventually replaced.

Regardless, Tate has a similar article touching on Gus’s faults and why people think Steele can fix them.

He says people think Steele can do some great politicking and build up a base of allies. Tuberville like.

He is also a southern defensive coach that likes tough arse football...much like how people were endeared to Pat Dye. (I could see this being the case but I’m concerned to hear about traditional offense whatever the frick that means.

He is also supposedly good at recruiting, and people believe he can clean up Gus’s struggles in recruiting.

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He is also supposedly good at recruiting, and people believe he can clean up Gus’s struggles in recruiting.

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Steele would get eaten alive in recruiting. He’s fine for DC, but not the head guy.

Tate’s post:

Steele is a good recruiter. A couple blocs of Important People believe he can clean up the problems Auburn's had with recruiting, hire some terrific assistants/coordinators and get moving in the right direction quickly. I can see that plan working.


To clarify, he also went on about why some blocs wanted MC so this wasn’t primarily a “Time to accept Kevin as HC” kind of article.

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I'll do you one better. I'll paste the part about Malzahn. I've already made up my mind I'm not renewing my sub with them and so its whatever..

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So all these problems but the players and Gus were dancing and having fun at the end of the MSU game? Smells like BS and click bait from PM.

The players loved Gus. T-Will and his Twitter posts over the years say he’s been pretty dang happy too! 247 is off it’s rocker.

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Steele would get eaten alive in recruiting. He’s fine for DC, but not the head guy.

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Imagine being a recruit and having Saban, Kirby and Steele after you:

Saban tosses out 6 natty rings
Kirby shows off a ton of million dollar NFL contracts
Steele shows off the SEC West title and few contracts

I don’t know what Cristobal is doing to get these top classes, but recruiting is the pipeline and life blood.

Tate’s full post

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Athletic director Allen Greene today announced that an advisory group would "assist with the search for the program's next football coach." This decision took several Important People by surprise. This group was assembled, we're told, at the request of AU president Jay Gogue, who is famous for demanding that everything follows a standard process. Still, this is not a standard situation — National Signing Day is tomorrow — and shouldn't be managed in a standard manner, but here we are. Understand that predicting the results of a search requires a lot of guesswork. Everybody has an agenda, a guy they're favoring or a plan they're favoring, and folks promote their own agenda as folks often do. So reporters must take those (intentionally or unintentionally) biased insights and try to distill truth from the spin. There is a lot of spin out there right now, friends. I'm certain that Auburn reached out to Mario Cristobal's people (agent) in an unofficial capacity. Was that simply to gauge his interest? Was that because this person or persons representing Auburn were preparing to make a move? I'm not sure, but I know things on that end are slowed right now for at least two reasons: Oregon is playing this weekend and this committee was just created and therefore things go back to (or close to) Step 1 as a result. I'm also certain that Kevin Steele is very much a factor here. I've seen that Steele's candidacy hasn't been taken well on the Bunker. That's a diplomatic take on it, too. He's older than the other candidates and hasn't been a head coach since 1992. His last head coaching gig didn't go well at all. So you're probably wondering: Why is this dude even on the list? The answer requires a dissection of what ultimately wrecked Gus Malzahn. There are a few main reasons why the Malzahn era ended the way it did (OL/DL recruiting, offensive failure, staffing at QB, player assessment) but I'm convinced that Malzahn could have remained afloat even with all that stuff going wrong. How? He needed allies. Malzahn spent little time creating relationships with people beyond the complex. Some would even say he didn't pay enough attention to people inside the complex. So when the seas got rough and the storms set in, Malzahn didn't really have anyone to call for counsel. Few people were willing to vouch for him because few people knew him well enough to vouch for him. He saw himself as a football coach. He didn't view himself as a politician. Kevin Steele understands this delineation and he's brilliant in both roles. He has spent time getting to know everyone of note involved with football and athletics administration. He has many people to call for counsel. Tommy Tuberville was great at this until he quit caring. Now he's an actual politician. Coaches who remain in the same position for a long period of time are either legends (Saban/Beamer/Bobby Bowden) or they understand how to curry favor among the power brokers or both. If you're not a legend, and Malzahn certainly wasn't, you simply cannot ignore the other side of the job. Malzahn paid a price for ignoring it. Steele has not and will not make that mistake. So Steele has more friends? That's all it takes? It's deeper than that. Networking is a crucial element of any job, let's be honest, but Steele also portrays himself (genuinely IMO) as an old-fashioned, Southern-talking, Southern-acting, defensive coach who likes hard-hitting, tough-arse football. Do you know anyone else like that? I do. His name was Pat Dye. The parallels there are impossible to ignore — and I think it's a big reason why Steele is so popular in certain Auburn circles. Steele is a good recruiter. A couple blocs of Important People believe he can clean up the problems Auburn's had with recruiting, hire some terrific assistants/coordinators and get moving in the right direction quickly. I can see that plan working. Cristobal also has clumps of supporters among Important People. They don't know him personally, though, and that "hurts" his cause to some degree. I'd argue that hiring fresh blood certainly can be a plus in a general sense, so a lack of familiarity shouldn't be a minus. Some see it that way, however. Where does that leave us? I see two primary candidates, a couple more in the periphery (Billy Napier/Steve Sarkisian) and a few smokescreens. I'm most curious right now about the committee. Why now? Why wasn't this done Sunday night? Why not Monday morning? It feels like Gogue threw a wrench into a process that was well underway. It's almost as if he said to everyone involved: Whoa, buddy, why are y'all in such a hurry? Were they in a hurry? And why would Gogue want to slow it down?

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I think MC is locked up and they fired Gus on Sunday with plans to give 24 hrs to view the body then announce MC today but Wash pulling out of the champ game threw a major wrench in those plans. Now we have the smokescreen committee buying time until Sat night or Sunday.

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This is where I’m at. The longer this goes on the more confident I am Cristobal is coming to the Plains.

Now that is half my gut feeling and half keeping myself from downing this bottle of Elijah Craig to keep the thoughts of a Steele led Auburn team next year out of my mind.

If he was good at recruiting why have we struggled so badly on D lately? Btw, we aren’t dominate and that equates coaching