5 More Reasons Gene Chizik Will Win at Auburn, No. 5: Mistakes

To celebrate Optimism Day! at the JCCW, I'm counting down five more reasons Gene Chizik will win at Auburn. I've offered a handful in the "Pros" section here and if you agree with me that Chizik's lantern-like jaw is a good sign of things to come, we covered that here.

But we're going to dig a bit deeper today, starting with your No. 5 new reason Gene Chizik will win at Auburn:



He will learn from his mistakes at Iowa St.

Even the very best of coordinators--and make no mistake, Chizik proved himself one of the best in the country during his time at Auburn and Texas--have to learn a few things when they make the transition to the head coaching position. There are always going to be adjustments, missteps, botched decisions. There's a tiny handful of megastars who make the leap seamlessly, but the overwhelming majority of new head coaches are bound to make a few errors along the way, and when rebuilding a (relatively) downtrodden program like Iowa St.'s, those errors are magnified. And let's be perfectly honest here: to go 5-19, it's safe to say Chizik had to make not just a handful of minor mistakes, but a series of major ones.

Here's the good news*: they don't count anymore. At Auburn, he gets a clean slate. He can put what he learned from those mistakes into practice and avoid them this second time around. As much as people have made the "If he was still at Texas, he'd be the No. 1 guy" argument, it's better for Auburn we're getting him now: with any luck, the errors that plagued him at ISU and that would have torn apart his hypothetical Auburn tenure are behind him, and he's ready to reboot both his coaching career and the Auburn program.

Assuming that Chizik is a smart enough coach to learn from what went wrong in Ames--and by virtually all accounts, Chizik's not a dummy--Auburn will be getting a better coach than the one Iowa St. hired. His head coaching experience at ISU might not be as much of a selling point as other coaches' head coaching experiences, but that doesn't mean it can't still be a positive for Gizik if applied correctly.

*Obviously, there is no good news from the Iowa St. perspective. Sorry, Cyclones.