I believe in

Lee Ziemba on Gene Chizik:

Ziemba said there's no mistaking what the identity of this program will be under Chizik.

"He's always preaching to us about continuing what Auburn was built on, and that's down and dirty hard work," Ziemba said. "A man can only count on what he earns. That's basically what coach Chizik is trying to instill in us.

A head coach that preaches the Creed to his players, a head coach that tells his charges not to work hard because they represent Auburn but because hard work is what Auburn represents, that looks to build the foundation of his team not even on the tradition of Auburn's proud football program but on the tradition of our our even prouder, even stronger institution, our community, our family ...

This is a head coach who I will stand behind. War Eagle, Coach Chizik.




( p.s.: Yeah, I know it's just one quote from Ziemba, I know you have to ask if a guy who left Auburn for Texas really loves Auburn as much as I want him to. I don't care. He's "always preaching" the Creed to his players. That's it. I'm in.)

Captain Queeg?

A couple weeks back, Hobbes stopped by and left a comment that 1) quoted the following passage--

When Chizik told the players he inherited that he wasn't going to come down to their level, his legacy of all-hat-no-cattle sound bites was in motion. Few of those players had ever been part of anything as wretched as the two seasons Chizik presided over. He'd have been fortunate to have them bring him up to their level. And when he made the players spend 20 minutes of the first spring practice of 2007 precisely lining up their helmets, you wondered if a real life Captain Queeg hadn't taken over the ISU football program.

--from that widely read no-punches-pulled takedown of Chizik at the Iowa St. Rivals site 2) finished by saying "Nothing Chizik says or does re: spring sounds any different from what he did at ISU."

This was a bone-chilling comment to read, in part because at this point it really is awful hard to tell what changes Chizik's made to his personal approach from his arrival in Ames to his arrival on the Plains ... and in part because I realized I couldn't place the "Captain Queeg" reference and was in danger of having my English Geeks of America membership revoked. Turns out Captain Queeg is the obsessive, paranoiac captain of the U.S.S. Caine in The Caine Mutiny. From the Wikipedia article:

Another episode which highlights Queeg's behaviors occurs when a quart of strawberries vanish from the wardroom icebox. Remembering how he helped solve a mystery involving a similar theft when he was an ensign earlier in his career, Queeg attempts to recreate his former accomplishment by insisting the strawberries were pilfered by a crewmember with a duplicate key. Queeg orders every key on the ship collected, and a thorough search made. During the search, the captain is confronted with evidence that the messboys ate the strawberries. Queeg loses all enthusiasm for the search, though he orders it to continue, and it is continued in a desultory way amid public mocking of the captain.

Now, let me preface the rest of this post with the following: Gene Chizik has done precious little--if anything--wrong since being hired as the Auburn head coach. His assembled staff is light-years better than most Auburn fans expected and just about as good as we could have possibly imagined. He's evinced a genuine sense of affection for and gratitude towards Auburn, both the school and the community. His Signing Day haul was genuinely inspiring given the many, many factors working against him. More than anything, he's instilled a sense of confidence and hope around the program I for one hadn't expected to feel for a much, much longer period of time.

But there are still, of course, a ton of "buts," and one of the them was how violently disliked Chizik seemed to be at ISU. It's one thing for a coach leaving for a bigger and better job--especially after leaving the previous one in worse shape than he found it--to come in for some bitterness and sniping, but the abuse heaped on Chizik by both the ISU media and his former players went far past hurt feelings. His critics there didn't just see him as a poor coach and a turncoat--they just didn't like the guy. Their complaints were personal as well as business. And that's troubling--it's not been my experience that football teams play their hardest for head coaches they don't respect.

The reports coming out of Auburn's spring practice don't completely explain how Chizik came to be so unpopular in Ames ... but they do maybe give us a starting point. Most players aren't going to take naturally to a rigid dress code, to rules about how neat a locker has to be, to an atmosphere revolving around the word "strict." Chizik has talked about how he wants his players to take a professional approach about playing for Auburn ... but don't we all want to have a little fun at our jobs? Don't we all want our bosses to treat us like responsible adults? I'm not saying Chizik's rules are aimed at squashing fun like some kind of Footloose-style dance ban or should make our players feel like children, but they don't exactly encourage the players to feel comfortable or at ease, either.

Certainly, the feedback to this point has been nothing but positive, and as long as Auburn wins, it'll stay that way. But players are always unhappy when their efforts in practice don't pay off in victories. If the extra effort to keep one's locker clean and check your cleats at the door and remember not to wear your lucky chain doesn't pay off, well, I'm guessing those are going to be the first things players question when they wonder why they're doing what they're doing. Really: what does not wearing an earring in the locker room have to do with winning football games? Win, and of course it has everything to do with winning. Lose, and that Caine Mutiny analogy starts hitting a lot closer to home.

Beyond that, what does it say about Chizik himself that he's worried about this level of detail? I understand the argument that you have to take care of the little things before you can worry about the big things, but there's also a point at which the little things are so little they're not worth worrying about, a point where you're so detail-oriented all you see are details. That story about Chizik spending 20 minutes of his first practice focusing on how the Cyclone's helmets should be lined up could be exaggerated or apocryphal ... but does it doesn't exactly clash with what we've seen from Chizik in Auburn, does it? If Chizik feels such an overwhelming need to be in control that he can't bring himself to tell reporters the scoring system for his team's scrimmages, much less let reporters watch said scrimmage, it's not so hard to see him taking up precious practice time slide-ruling those helmets into place, right?

And so I wonder. When things go wrong this season, and next--and things will go wrong, from time to time--how is Chizik going to respond? Is he going to continue to let the offensive and defensive coordinators do their jobs rather than jerking his knee and taking responsibility himself? Is he going to make adjustments that will help the team, or will he just demand that lockers be even neater, sideburns be even more neatly trimmed, helmets be even straighter? You can't be a good captain if you're wasting your time looking for a quart of strawberries, so to speak.

With all of that said: I don't think all this is going to be a big issue. I think Chizik has learned from at least some of his mistakes in Ames. I think Malzahn and Roof and Taylor and Luper and Rocker are smart enough to help keep the train on the tracks. I think the team is simply too talented to slip into 3-9, 2-10 despair. I don't think Chizik really is Captain Queeg.

But until the games start for real, can I help but wonder? Not yet, anyway.

Don't panic ...

... though I wouldn't really blame you, John and Jane Q. Auburn Fan, if you did after reading this post at Blutarsky's. The good Senator contrasts some of Tuberville's "No, seriously, we're going to run out of the spread, even though the coordinator I've hired to set our spread up has never operated it like that in his career!" quotes with this tidbit from Chizik, courtesy of the Albany (Ga.) Herald:

As far as new coaches, the hiring of Tulsa co-offensive coordinator Gus Malzahn might on the surface imply the Tigers are leaning toward an all-out spread passing attack, though Chizik is not so sure.

“Well, there are so many different versions of the spread and what that means,” said Chizik, who won the Frank Broyles Award as the country’s top assistant (defensive coordinator) when Auburn finished the 2004 season undefeated. “I really see us more of a run-the-football type of team, so I’m not sure what the appropriate name of the offense is. Obviously, we’ll do some one-back, two-back things of that nature. It’s still going to be a downhill, physical running game.”

OK, breathe. Breathe. This is one quote delivered in February to a random Albany beat guy while Chizik happened to be in town for the E. Cleve Wester Scholarship Quail Hunt. It's not really all that different from the same kinds of chicken-soup quotes Chizik (and even Malzahn) have been offering to soothe the spread-hating Auburn soul ever since he was hired. But man ... no point in pretending it doesn't sound exactly like what Tubby was saying in defense of Franklin. Tubby's quotes ended up being not so much the typical media fluff as an indication of some deeply held, serious differences in offensive philosophy that eventually wrecked the entire team. Hearing something so similar come out of the Chiznick's mouth makes me awful nervous. But I think we'll be OK. Here's why:

1. As I've detailed before, this conception of Malzahn's spread as being an analog for the Mumme-Franklin Airraid (one perpetuatedis just flat wrong. Tulsa ran more often this past year than Auburn ran under Borges in 2007. It's decisively, unabashedly, a run-to-set-up-the-pass offense. What Malzahn's offense isn't is a "downhill, physical," "two-back" offense, but if what Auburn runs is similar to what Tulsa ran, Auburn will still be a "run-the-football type of team."

2. Given the Tubby vs. Franklin history, the relationship between Chizik and his new OC and how much input Chizik is going to have in the operation of Auburn's offense is going to be a h-o-double-t HOTT topic from now until kickoff this fall. To this point, we've gotten mixed signals--Chizik has made some noises like these about smash-mouth running that Malzahn's offense isn't really built to do, but both he and Malzahn have also stated repeatedly that Malzahn's going to be in total control of the offense. I think the best guess is that we'll wind up somewhere in the middle of those two poles: there's going to be a leeeeetle bit of compromise on Malzahn's end to Chizik's HULK SMASH wishes, but that the end product will still bear a much closer resemblance to what Malzahn ran at Tulsa than Franklin's Spread Eagle did to what he ran at Troy. Until we see it on the field, though, we can expect a whole lot of comments from both sides of both Chizik's and Malzahn's mouths as they to reassure fans that Spread Eagle 2.0 will be both entirely Malzahn's creation and as smash-mouth as Chizik wants it.

3. Whatever happens, Malzahn isn't going to hate the position coaches working under him and have the position coaches working under him hate him. That was pretty much a one-time thing.

So, do I wish Chizik would come out and say things like "We're going to run the ball, but we're going to do it from the spread, getting our talented guys into space and using the entire field to create mismatches, the same way Gus did at Tulsa. He's one of the best in the business, and I trust that he'll find a way to move the ball on the ground, whether that's out of the spread, the Wildcat, a two-back set, whatever. He'll make it work," rather than trying to sell us a bill-of-PHYSICAL! PHYSICAL! PHYSICAL!-goods? Yep.

But I also don't think we ought to throw our hands up and expect a second philosophical tug-of-war between Auburn's head coach and his spread-happy OC, either. (Not that anybody is, mind you--just for argument's sake.) Malzahn came on board for a reason and Chizik hired him for a reason. They both knew what they were getting from the other. They're going to be on the same page, or at the very least we'll have Malzahn on the front of the page and Chizik on the back. Or something. The point is that these are two very, very smart coaches--Chizik wouldn't have put together the staff he's built if he wasn't--and they'll figure out an offense where both of them will be happy, no matter what they're telling the Albany Herald.

Well, this is a pleasant surprise

OK, not that I'd really spent that much time wondering about the identity of Auburn's future secondary coach or coaches--there was, like, the two minutes after the Roof hiring, and then another four two days before Signing Day--but when I did, I didn't generally think "Well, it'll probably be an ace recruiter from Butch Davis's staff at North Carolina making a lateral-at-best move away from his alma mater."

But hey, turns out Gene Chizik's had one last hiring trick up his sleeve after all:

North Carolina assistant Tommy Thigpen and Auburn director of NFL operations Phillip Lolley will take over as coaches in the secondary, the university confirmed in a release Sunday evening ...

Chizik scored another one of the nation’s top, young recruiters in Thigpen.

A 38-year-old Virginia native, Thigpen was named a Rivals.com Top 25 recruiter in 2007 and 2009. The Tar Heels just put the wraps on the eighth-ranked recruiting class in the country, according to Rivals, and Thigpen had a hand in landing six four-star recruits.

“Tommy has had a tremendous amount of success at every stop he’s made as an assistant coach,” Chizik said. “I’ve been well aware of him since his days as a standout player at North Carolina and have followed his professional career very closely. I’m extremely pleased to be adding someone with his professionalism and coaching expertise to this staff.”

Thigpen spent the past four years as the linebackers coach at North Carolina, his alma mater. He began his coaching career there in 1998 as a graduate assistant. The three-time all-ACC linebacker moved on to coach linebackers at Tennessee State in 2000, cornerbacks and special teams at Bowling Green from 2001-02, cornerbacks at Illinois in 2003 and was moved to linebackers with the Illini for the 2004 season.

I mean, wow. Really? You're kickin' it with Davis at your alma mater, the smart bet to become the next decade's answer to 1990s Florida St., but when Chizik offers you the chance to coach safeties at Auburn, you say "Hey, sure, that sounds great"? You, Tommy Thigpen, a la Taylor or Rocker once again have me far, far more fired up over the hiring of a position coach than I ever expected to be.

Because clearly, whatever else you'd like to say about him, when Gene Chizik talks people do, in fact, listen. It's obviously still very much yet to be seen how much that will matter on the football field, but back in those dark days when the staff was allegedly going to be a Whitman's Sampler of Pat Dye retreads, a staff chockful o' quality assistants ganked from the staffs of other top-25 and rising programs was not what I imagined. For a head coach who was alleged to do ... well, nothing well, it's hard to see how he could have done this staff hiring thing any better. Serious kudos to the Chiznick once again.

This is the part of the post where the wags point out that I'm ignoring the other secondary hire, the same Mr. Phillip Lolley who got demoted from his secondary-coaching duties back in 2003 and has been twiddling his thumbs as Auburn's "Director of NFL Relations" ever since. Whatever, says he Auburn press release:

Lolley coached Auburn's secondary in 2002-03, helping the Tigers finish 13th in nation in scoring defense in 2002 and ninth in 2003. Lolley coached Thorpe Award winner Carlos Rogers and Junior Rosegreen, who both went on to earn All-America honors in 2004. During his two years, he coached numerous future NFL players including Rogers, Rosegreen, Will Herring, Kevin Hobbs, Roderick Hood, Travaris Robinson, and Horace Willis.

OK, so you don't really want Will Herring's time in the secondary attached to your resume, but still ... Chizik knows what he's getting and it's not like his first rodeo was a disaster. All those years coaching Alabama high schools might help get outsiders like Taylor, Luper, etc. in those in-state doors, too.

So, your final staff listing:

Defensive coordinator/linebackers: Ted Roof
Defensive line: Tracy Rocker
Cornerbacks: Phillip Lolley
Safeties: Tommy Thigpen

Offensive coordinator: Gus Malzahn
WR and assistant head coach: Trooper Taylor
Offensive line: Jeff Grimes
Running backs and recruiting coordinator: Curtis Luper
Tight ends and special teams coordinator: Jay Boulware

Yessir, I believe I can live with that.

The Numbers

After the dismissal of Clinton Durst, a lot of the response ran along the same lines: We have 85 scholarships to hand out and a bunch of guys just walked away from the team. Can we really not afford to give one of them to our best special teams player?

That got me wondering: how many scholarships does Auburn actually have available? I know from last year's infamous Brian Cook vs. Tuscaloosa Torch and Pitchfork Society imbroglio that these things can be difficult to pin down, but I haven't even seen a guesstimate on the part of any MSM types. So, I figure, it's time to pull out my own calculator and take my own guess.

The Numbers

Looking at how many scholarships are still occupied, by recruiting class*:

2005: Billings, Coleman, McCain, McFadden, McKenzie, Odom, Savage, Trott.
Total: 8

2006: Berry, Blanc, Caudle, Clayton, Eddins, Etheridge, Fannin, Goggans, Hawthorne, Isom, Ricks, Roseman, Shoemaker, Stevens, Tate, Zachery.
Total: 16

2007: Burns, Bynes, Byrum, Carr, Carter, Cooper, Coulahan, Douglas, Greene, Herring, McNeil, Pugh, Slade, Slusher, Woods, Ziemba.
Total: 16

2008: D. Adams, H. Adams, Barnes, Bell, Cole, Dellenbach, Henderson, Hood, Jemison, "Lipscomb," Lykes, Pierre-Louis, Pybus, Savage, E. Smith, V. Smith, Thompson, Todd, Trotter, Wadley, Winter.
Total: 21.

Walk-ons and transfers currently on scholarship: Do we know of any? I don't remember any reports of walk-ons getting the bump, I can't think of any notable transfers, and I've gone over the roster pretty closely without seeing any likely candidates. Someone please alert me if I've missed any possibilities, but I don't see anyone who ever sees the field--like, at all--other than Morgan Hull and Clayton Crofoot, neither of which did enough, I imagine, to warrant Tubby handing over one of the 85. If I'm wrong, someone correct me, but I'm setting this total at 0 for now.

Subtractions: Since in theory a fifth-year senior will have already graduated and will no longer need his scholarship for academic purposes, it's common (I'm told) to not renew a non-contributing player's scholarship for a fifth year. It's not something I'm particularly comfortable with if the player hasn't graduated, but Oh Well. Auburn does have one such candidate, rising senior offensive lineman Rudy Odom, who has made one appearance, against Tennessee Tech last year, in his Auburn career. I'm guessing after the Durst decision that Chizik views this as an available scholarship if he needs it, so this number is -1.

The math: 8 + 16 + 16 + 21 - 1 = 60. Unless a player already on the roster has been offered a scholarship I'm not aware of, Auburn will be able to take on a full class of 25 signees this season if they so choose.

Conclusions

Dropping Durst was even more idiotic than it seemed at first. First things first: Auburn is not particularly pressed for scholarships at this time. It would be one thing if Chizik had only 16 or 17 scholarships available and giving one to Durst meant not offering one to the likes of Blake or Rollison or Hotshot Recruit X. But that's not the case. We're talking about recruit No. 24 or No. 25, guys who will-- like all of Auburn's recruits--have their fair shot at contributing and becoming a key member of the program. But they will also be recruits whose guru-established odds will be stacked against them. It's very, very possible that Chizik has decided to give up Durst in order to sign the next James Swinton.

Second, remember that Chizik would not have been offering Durst one of the four-year rides he's handing out on the recruiting trail. Durst was already a junior last year and will graduate soon, so his scholarship would have only lasted a year. The only recruiting class he would have affected would have been the current one, and it appears it's going to be filled to the brim anyway.

So ... one year of Durst and the chance to recruit a stud next year, or four years of recruit No. 25? It seems like an impossibly easy choice, and Chizik took Option B anyway.

Offering this many recruits right now seems like a mistake. You can see it already: Auburn's recruiting class of 2010 is just not going to be very big. Look at the class of '06: precisely two of those 16 guys (Tate and Ricks) skipped a redshirt and will be seniors this year; nearly all of the remaining 14 contribute in some fashion and will be offered a fifth year for 2010; and none look like NFL flight risks. Take the eight departing seniors, add Chris Todd and maybe two or three guys of the '06 class who won't be renewed for a fifth year, and that's only 11 or 12 open slots before accounting for random attrition. Sure, Auburn lost, what, 8 or 9 guys to random attrition in 2008 ... but what are the odds of there being that much turnover two years in a row? In all likelihood, Auburn is going to only have 17 or 18 scholarships to offer in 2010, and that's even before we get into this grayshirting talk, which would cut that number even further.

So I have to ask: why rob Peter to pay Paul? Next year the ugliness of the coaching turnover will be well behind us, the Malzahn/Taylor/Luper/Roof/Rocker engine will be at full steam, and recruits will theoretically have been able to see the benefits of the Spread Eagle 2.0 in action. It's the Class of 2010, not '09, that's going to be Chizik and crew's real chance at making a statement in the recruiting wars. So why shrink that one in order to pack in as many, uh, "sleeper" recruits as possible into the current one?

A big class, with as many Tubby commits as possible plus a few extra ... sure. That makes sense. But a full 25? I know I am but a lowly Auburn Blogger who is not the head coach of a multi-million dollar football program and must surely not know what he is talking about, but I don't get it.

(A quick aside: I'm assuming Auburn is going to get to 25 by hook or crook, or that I'm miscounting the scholarships available, because leaving a scholarship open after telling Durst to buzz off would be beyond stupid.)

(A second quick aside: if Chizik's answer to this problem is to follow Nick Saban's and Butch Davis's lead, yours truly is going to be one very unhappy camper. This isn't likely to be an issue ... but, for the record, not happy.)

Just so we're clear: I'm not unhappy about any particular recruit being offered (how would I know whether any individual guy is worth the gamble or not?) or upset over any of Chizik's other non-Clinton Durst-related recruiting choices. By doing things like "convincing Trooper Taylor to come to Auburn" and "hiring Ted Roof" he's earned the benefit of the doubt. I'm just confused, is all.

I can't wait for Signing Day. Because every time I think about recruiting for this long, I want to take a bath and rinse the crazy off of me, and it's happening a depressing amount lately.

*I don't see any Tez Doolittle-style sixth-year seniors on the roster, so no one's left over from the 2004 class.

Coaching update

Yes please.

So, your first bit of Auburn coaching news: Oklahoma St. running backs coach Curtis Luper is now Auburn running backs coach Curtis Luper. In your face, Boone Pickens. Why the lateral move? He called Chizik--with who he worked as a grad assistant way back at Stephen F. Austin--"my mentor," so I guess it was just that easy. (Well, that and offering him a huge raise.) No issues with the resume, certainly, given the way Okie St. has run the ball the last couple of years.

But Chizik's efforts to raid Stillwater might have landed an even bigger fish on the hook: he's asked for and received permission to talk to Trooper Taylor. Taylor, I'm sure I don't have to tell you, was seen as one of the SEC's brightest young coaching prospects when he was at Tennessee and Okie St.'s success this year hasn't exactly hurt his stock. If Chizik can get him to Auburn ... I mean, Malzahn's schemes with Taylor's wideouts? The mind reels and the heart leaps. Our Tigers would go from having one of the SEC's most dysfunctional offensive coaching staffs to one of its most dynamic overnight.

The question, of course, is whether Taylor will show up. Having Luper around can't hurt, but we can be frank: this is a lateral move for him at best, and I do mean "at best." At OSU he's a receivers coach-slash-co-OC who doesn't call plays; at Auburn, he will be, at most, a receivers coach-slash-co-OC who doesn't call plays. And now is pretty much the best possible time to be at Stillwater--the bowl game crash-n'-burn and potential pro defections notwithstanding, everyone returns and if Tech, Oklahoma, and Texas come back to earth a bit, there's no real reason State couldn't be what Missouri was in 2007. Or more. Unless Auburn can also offer Taylor a big raise (which they may be able to do) or Taylor and Luper are seriously tight, I can't see why he'd come. And that's not even considering that Randy Shannon and Miami may be offering him the full OC's chair and play-calling position, which certainly seems like Taylor's logical next move.

But hey, at least we've got our foot in the door. And here's the even better news: Gene Chizik has once again shown that, Approved by Pat Dye list be damned, he's going to go out and try to hire the best guys he can. Even if we don't get Taylor, my faith that Chizik will fill out his staff with quality coaches has never been higher. The stock arrow continues to point upward.

UPDATE: Evan Woodberry was doing work this morning, providing a terrific on-the-scene report as both Luper and Taylor arrived on the Plains aboard the same plane from Oklahoma. Woodberry got a whole bunch of thrilling quotes from Luper, the most titillating one being this:

Would Luper like to be joined in Auburn by Taylor? "Absolutely. That's why he's on the airplane right here. You'll see how good of a recruiter I am pretty soon, I hope."

Fingers crossed. Also of note: Luper said he'd probably eventually recruit Texas, which on the one hand ... is it really the best strategy for Auburn to go head-to-head with Texas and Oklahoma and the thousand other D-I schools out there? Terry Bowden tried that in Florida once upon a time and it didn't work out so well. On the other hand, Luper has a track record, and if he really can pull Texas athletes out of there and bring them to Auburn, that's going to be a Very Good Thing. And on the third hand, I don't have that much of a clue when it comes to recruiting.

Woodberry also gives us this awesome little slice-of-Auburn-life:

A couple of fans were on hand to greet the two coaches. One yelled "War Eagle" as the coaches left the plane.

A few minutes later, I overhead Luper ask, "What exactly does 'War Eagle' mean?" An Auburn staffer explained that it was both a cheer and a greeting or salutation, and he could simply reply, "War Eagle!" in response.

Both Luper and Taylor took the time to shake hands with the fans, and Luper gave a "War Eagle" yell as he departed.

War Eagle, coach.

Where we stand ... or maybe, rather than "stand," are walking forward, even?

So, a quick overview of how things went during these critical early days of the Gene Chizik era while the JCCW was away ...

Staffing. Yeah, so Stacy Searels stayed in Athens. I don't think anyone's all that surprised or even that disappointed--we all knew we'd probably have to offer him the offensive coordinator's chair to get him to move, and we didn't, so he didn't. Would it have been awesome if the glory of his alma mater's Plains alone would have been enough to bring him to Auburn? Yes, yes it would have. But he's got a good situation at UGA, no question, and if he wants to hold out for an OC position* somewhere, fair enough.

Everything else? Champagne wishes and caviar dreams to this point, man. Start with the retention of James Willis, which while kind of a well, duh move is also the kind of well, duh move that shows Chizik's not really so dumb as to throw the previous regime's babies out with the bathwater. And then yesterday we get the Gus Malzahn bombshell dropped on us. I'll delve more deeply into what we can expect from Malzahn later today, but suffice it to say for now that it's hard to pick out anyone available who would have been a better choice.

Perhaps the best part of the Malzahn hire is this: what we've been hearing ever since Chizik was hired was how Auburn was hauling itself 20 years back in time to the Pat Dye era. "200 years old" Pat Dye offensive mindset, Pat Dye coaches, Pat Dye himself. But as it turns out, that talk (to this point, at least) has been pretty cheap, since Chizik just filled the most important position on his staff with the most revolutionary, forward-thinking offensive mind this side of Mike Leach. Gus Malzahn wants to snap the ball as fast as possible, run from the spread or the Wildcat, take long shots down the field as often as possible, and go for it on any makeable fourth down, even in your own half of the field. It's not possible Chizik could have made a hire more removed from the Pat Dye mindset. This? Is an awesome and very reassuring thing, especially when one has lived in terror of Pat Nix for the last few weeks.

There's still time for Chizik to fill out the rest of the staff with Dye retreads, I guess, but you couldn't ask for a better indication that those fears aren't entirely well-founded. (And of course some of those retreads--Rodney Garner--would be welcome.)

Recruitin'. Honestly? I think it could be a lot worse. Auburn had two JUCOs in the class--Eltoro Freeman and Onterio McCalebb--who were generally seen as must-get, immediate impact-type players. Freeman's already in the fold and by all accounts McCalebb's going to arrive soon as well. Add in Nick Fairley's commitment at an area of substantial need--DT--and Freeman's stunningly positive response to Chizik's visit and this might even be seen as a "good" start. Sure, there's going to be decommits along the way--at last word Jermaine Johnson is off to Miami, if he ends up going off to anywhere--but there's nothing that can be done about a lot of them in the wake of a regime change and with another spread guy on board, the chances of locking up the Franklin-impressed likes of Phillip Lutzenkirchen or Travante Stallworth have to be a lot greater than they were before Malzahn came on board. Again: things aren't perfect, but I think it's totally fair to say they're at least looking up.

General buzz. Things had to get better. When your football program has hired a 5-19 head coach and it gets roasted over a national media flame for a solid week for allegedly taking football race relations back to 1961, that's pretty much rock bottom. There was nowhere to go but up. (Well, hiring Pat Nix as OC would have proven this theory decisively wrong, but we didn't hire Pat Nix, did we?)

But, nonetheless, things are looking up. For the above staffing-and-recruiting reasons, for the simple passage of time healing ever-so-slightly the initial wounds of the Chizik hire, for tidbits like this one from K-Scar:

At Auburn's insistence, Chizik didn't use his agent, Jimmy Sexton, to negotiate a preliminary letter of agreement outlining the general terms of the deal. That's almost unheard of for new coaches at major programs.

In addition, it appears that Chizik has cut ties with Sexton, although their working relationship was barely two years old.

Due, that's ... that's just awesome is what that is. Chizik had a choice between what was best for Auburn and what was best for Jimmy Sexton, and he chose Auburn. As much as I love and appreciate Tommy Tuberville, there were times in the past couple of years where he's had that same choice to make, and he's sided with his agent. Between this, and Chizik's willingness (reported in that same article) to forego salary to lure in the assistants he wants, and the repeated, repeated statements of how badly he wanted this job and how much he enjoys Auburn ... I think it's quite possible Chizik really does enjoy Auburn about as much as he says he does. Or at the very least, wants to win at Auburn as much as he says he does.

That wouldn't matter much if recruits were ignoring him and he was hiring his staff straight from the Pat Dye Recommended Reading list. Thus far, though, that hasn't been the case. So it does matter. Auburn's stock arrow: up. Again, it would be hard after the firestorm of the hire for it to point further down. But it's not, and after the neverending slog that has been the Season of DEATH, it's not for the first time in what seems like a very, very long time. I'll take it.

*Don't call it that.

5 More Reasons Gene Chizik Will Win at Auburn, No. 2: Gene Chizik

Optimism Day!'s No. 2 new reason Gene Chizik will win at Auburn:



Gene Chizik.

Let me explain, because I know that makes no sense. It's not really so much that "Gene Chizik" is the reason that Gene Chizik will win, but that other things aren't going to be the reason he fails. Specifically, nebulous, intangible, not-really-football-related things like "buzz" or "negative atmosphere."

Look, things have sucked lately. That the national media wants to juice its ratings by calling Auburn's administration a bunch of closeted Klansmen sucks. That Auburn fans have been hacking each other and Auburn's leadership to pieces over the Internet--and occasionally driving to the airport to boo--for the better part of two weeks sucks. That every college football fan in America looks at Auburn as the quickest and easiest punchline in the football comedy book at the moment sucks.

But none of that is going to win or lose Auburn any football games. Sure, the race comments will sting a little bit on the recruiting trail, probably, but nowhere near as much as hiring a new, 5-19 coach will. Everything else is temporary, a firestorm that will pass on somewhere else in a few weeks when our natural fan anger burns itself off and the media need something else to honk their car horns about. What's leave behind will be the hard work of building a football program and nothing else.

Blowhards like Mandel who claim that Chizik will fail because he doesn't have "the support of the community"--and who exactly at Auburn isn't supporting him?--never explain how "the support of the community" leads to winning football games. Yes, it would be better if Chizik was thought of as a rising star in the coaching profession. Yes, it would be better if Auburn was portrayed as a shrewdly-managed powerhouse rather than a program enveloped in turmoil and run by the chimps from the Career Builder commercials. Yes, it would be better if potential recruits couldn't log onto messageboards and read WDEEufaula76's prediction that Chizik will be fired after one year and replaced by a homeless guy wearing Pat Dye's pants.

But if Chizik can't get the current Auburn team to stop the bleeding and build some modicum of momentum, if he can't convince recruits that Internet morons like WDEEufula76 (or Jerry Hinnen) don't know what the hell they're talking about, it wouldn't matter if he'd been greeted as the man to bring about the 100-miles-per-gallon car, world peace, and a Talking Heads reunion. He'd fail. At the end of day, it's about Gene Chizik, his players, his staff--but mostly, Gene Chizik. Everything else is a red herring and nothing more.

Note: This picture is borrowed from flickr and is awesomely titled "Gene Chizik is my Homeboy."

5 More Reasons Gene Chizik Will Win at Auburn, No. 3: Rock-bottom

Optimism Day!'s third of five reasons that Gene Chizik will win at Auburn:



That's a screencap (click for big) of the bottom rungs of this year's total offense rankings at cfbstats. Now, consider the myriad circumstances that led to this putrid point:

1. A dire lack of recruiting when it comes to playmakers, particularly at wide receiver, stretching back years

2. The hiring of an offensive coordinator whose schemes and techniques were completely unfamiliar to the position coaches drafted to coach beneath him, resulting in an offense horribly lacking in cohesion and unified vision

3. Said offensive coordinator following in his predecessor's footsteps in one significant way: neglecting to encourage or develop Auburn's most talented quarterback prospect, leading to a quarterback controversy that only enhanced the offensive divisions

4. The firing of said coordinator midseason, resulting in yet another coordinator philosophy shift, the third in less than 12 months

5. Said firing resulting in Steve Ensminger becoming Auburn's acting offensive coordinator for the final six games of the season.

Now, how many of those circumstances will apply to Auburn's offense next season? No. 1 will, certainly, but the rest will not. Sure, the transition to yet another new coordinator's not going to be seamless, but it'll be light-years better than 2008's exercise in creating an offensive version of a rat king.

And the new guy's cupboard won't be entirely bare. Certainly, the same lack of explosiveness at wide receiver will be a problem unless the sudden absence of Greg Knox does even more for the likes of Hawthorne and Billings than we'd expect it to. Certainly, Burns isn't going to change into a world-beater overnight and certainly, getting the remaining linemen's heads screwed on straight again will be a challenge.

Still: seven returning starters including the quarterback and best running back is seven returning starters including the quarterback and best running back is seven returning starters including the quarterback and best running back. Add in the benefit of having one guy running the show, and it should be very, very difficult for Auburn's offense to suck quite as sucktastically as they did in 2008.

Meaning: to stop the bleeding and start building some kind of forward momentum, all Chizik really has to do in 2009 is a) hire someone who isn't the world's worst offensive coordinator* and then b) keep a defense that should also return the majority of its starters from any kind of serious regression.

That latter part is easier said than done, based on Chizik's ISU experience. But surely our defense-first, smash-mouth head coach can find a way.

*i.e., he should not hire Pat Nix.

5 More Reasons Gene Chizik Will Win at Auburn, No. 4: Ca$h

Optimism Day!'s No. 4 new reason Gene Chizik will win at Auburn:



He will have the full financial support of the Auburn administration.

Even on Optimism Day!, I can't bring myself to say it's a positive that Chizik is going to have to spend so much time kissing the rings of the administration who brought him in. Like everyone else, I have a hard time hearing Jacobs repeat over and over again that Chizik is "the right fit" and not think that "the right fit" means "the guy who won't give us any backtalk."

But if we can assume that Chizik has some, any, measure of independence from his Lowderian overlords, it's also fair to assume that said Lowderian overlords will back those measures with everything they've got, financially speaking. Jacobs certainly cannot survive Chizik's failure; if the good ship S.S. Right Fit goes down, Jacobs goes down with it. Maybe there's not quite as much at stake for the Overlords themselves, but I don't think it's fair to question their commitment or love for Auburn. It may be a strange, dark, and brutal love, the kind that causes husbands to do 200 hours of community service after charging into their wives' workplaces and beating up the first male sales clerk they see, but still: they haven't enjoyed seeing Auburn's name dragged through the mud this week any more than you or I have. They know that as big a black eye as this coaching search and hire have been so far, it's only going to get bigger if Chizik crashes and burns.

So as much as Auburn is currently doling out to ex-offensive coordinators, ex-head coaches, ex-position coaches, and possibly ex-waterboys and ex-laundry managers, if there's anything left over in the kitty for recruiting trips or assistant salaries or better washing machines for the current laundry managers, I have to think Chizik only needs to ask to get it. It's sad to the point of tears to believe Tubby wasn't given the same privileges during his tenure--and unfortunately, that is what I believe--but it's the S.S. Right Fit or nothin' at this point. I can't imagine whatever financial means this program has won't be put towards keeping her afloat.

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.

Presser reax

Sorry for the lateness. Real Life AAARRGGH.



Video of said presser here; something approaching a transcript here.

An introductory press conference is like the laser-light show to close the amusement park; sure, it's nice to look at all the pretty lights, but you come for the roller coasters and thrill rides and to have your kids get an autograph from a dude sweating his life away inside a wool cartoon character's costume. Likewise, I watched the presser video and read the transcripts pretty closely, but Chizik convincing a single recruit-on-the-fence to re-commit would be bigger news.

Nonetheless, here's a few impressions ...

1. I'll give Chizik some credit for finessing that "Why did you leave Auburn if you love it so much?" question as well as he did. I don't think "Because I wanted to come back to Auburn" makes a lot of sense--has Chizik been reading his Catch-22?-- but it's as good an answer as there is. Zen-clever, if you ask me.

2. Most football coaches are physically impressive and/or good public speakers, so the fact that Chizik is physically impressive and a good public speaker doesn't count for a ton at the JCCW. But man, you have to admit that's a hell of a jawline he's got. We're talking Clark Kent-square. Friend-of-the-blog Justin compared it to Tom Glavine's:



and I think that's a pretty apt comparison. So, hey, he's got that going for him.

3. As for the actual content of what Chizik said, most of it was what you'd hope to hear. Recruiting and the staff is job No. 1, great, Auburn is the bestest place ever, you bet it is, the players and coaches and administration all needs to be one big Auburn Family, I hear ya boss. But not hearing that sort of stuff would be more noteworthy than actually hearing it since, hey, what else is he gonna say? Of mild interest were his comments specifically referring to beating the bushes with Alabama high school coaches--still doesn't really mean anything, but that's a better-sounding and more focused-sounding start than "Hey, we're gonna really recruit!", I guess.

4. Not everything was peachy-keen, however, in my humble opinion. Chizik "never deviated" from his "blueprint"? So the blueprint included demoting his coordinators and firing a couple of position coaches? Really? Just tell us you made a couple of mistakes and that you learned from them, please, rather than pretending everything was going just swimmingly in Ames before you came to Auburn. We can't really argue with Jacobs' claim that Chizik was "on the path at Iowa State to turn that program around," since we didn't get too far down the path, but we can agree the blueprint wasn't entirely perfect, can't we?

5. He claims he doesn't want to "mircomanage" his coordinators, but perhaps in the case of Wayne Bolt, his ISU DC, perhaps a bit of micromanagement was needed before his team landed at 111th in the nation in total defense? Just sayin'.

6. And here's the twin lowlights of the press conference: first, Chizik saying that his offensive philosophy is "200 years old":

On offense right now, you've got to run the football. That doesn't mean we're not going to throw the football. It means that you have to be physical. That doesn't pigeonhole me into any one offense. So many offenses are not one-dimensional anymore.

So, tell, me, bigshot wide receiver and quarterback recruits whose absence have been the bane of Auburn's offense for going on three seasons now ... how excited are you to play for a "200-year-old" offense that's "got to run the football" although don't worry, even if it doesn't have to throw the football, it "doesn't mean we're not going to throw the football." Got that? You excited?

I shouldn't be so snarky, I know that--Chizik has his philosophy and his style, and I though I wish he'd just made them sound a little jazzier and innovative than he did (and possibly they are), at least he's being upfront about them. What really bothers me isn't Chizik's style. What bothers me, kills me, is that that style in and of itself, regardless of how well it was working, is apparently a big part of what got him hired. Take it away, Fail Jacobs:

He'll re-energize Auburn with his physical, smash-mouth brand of football. All Auburn people will come together.

See, in the SEC, you can't get too hung up on "moving the football" or "scoring points" or even "winning football games." The first thing you gotta do, the most important thing, is just to go out there and smash somebody in the mouth. Doesn't matter why, doesn't matter what it accomplishes. In the SEC, you just gotta smash someone in the mouth, and let everything else take care of itself. You might ask why we'd refuse to even give the time of day to a coach who went 11-1 and then hire a coach who went 2-10 while competing in the same conference, but I know our fans. They're SEC fans, and they don't really care about those silly "wins" and "losses" just so long as they can see one guy smash another guy in the mouth.



Oh well. At least Jacobs didn't mention "SEC experience" as a big selling point to the hire, I mean, I think it's been proven pretty conclusively that it doesn't mean anything. If even us pissant bloggers are smart enough to figure it out, surely someone whose job it is to know ...

"We wanted someone who was a relentless recruiter, a guy with unbelievable character and integrity, someone who has been in the SEC and had been successful, somebody who has a passion for football -- Auburn football -- and his family."

*head explodes*

Coachapalooza, signing off: let's do this, Gene Chizik

Previous, now sadly obsolete examples in the series here and here.



First, could we get him? Yes! Yes we can! Finally, I can say this without any doubt whatsoever: Auburn was and is entirely capable of hiring away Iowa St. head coach Gene Chizik!

Pros

Let there be no mistake about this: Gene Chizik is a hell of a defensive coordinator.

Even going all the way back to his first year at Central Florida, when the 1998 Knight squad held Auburn to 10 turnover-fueled points, the defenses Chizik has coordinated have been better than the ones coordinated by his predecessors or followers at the same school. In 2001, Central Florida ranked 16th in the country in total defense, and Auburn 39th; in 2002, only a season after Chizik had moved from Orlando to the Plains, it was Auburn who ranked 26th and UCF who finished 45th.

From there, Chizik only got better; you just don't call defensive plays for 26 consecutive games between 2004 and 2005 and win every single one of them by accident. It wasn't some huge leap forward either, at least in Auburn's case: Chizik's 2003 defense finished 5th in total defense, 9th in scoring. Of course, that was just the warm-up for 2004--the Tigers again finished 5th in total defense, and on top of that topped the national rankings in scoring defense. For my money, it's the best defense Tommy Tuberville ever fielded at Auburn, and Chizik's work is even more impressive when you consider what he was working with--check out the starting lineup and participation report from the 2005 Sugar Bowl. Yes, names like Carlos Rogers and Junior Rosegreen and big Tommy Jackson and the off-the-bench tag-team of Quentin Groves and Stanley McClover pop off the screen, and of course Jay Ratliff is still in the league but ... Derrick Graves? Doug Langenfeld? Montavis Pitts, fresh off his aborted rap career? Good players all, but hardly immortal, and compared to the 2004 offense and it's five first-round draft choices* ... forget it. No matter--Chizik turned them into a force.

And just in case you're wondering how much Tubby had to do with that, Chizik kept it rolling at Texas. The Longhorns went from 23rd in total defense and 19th in scoring defense in 2004 to 10th and 8th, respectively, in 2005. Chizik's arrival cut a full half-yard off the 'Horns' per-play average allowed, from 4.9 to 4.4., a stunning improvement for a team whose high-octane offense scored so quickly they spent plenty of time on the field.

The 2006 Horns regressed fairly substantially--all the way to 40th per-play, though still top-25 scoring-wise--but after the highs of Chizik's past two seasons and the departure of several key 'Horns, some regression to the mean was inevitable. The bottom line: Chizik knows his way around designing and implementing a defense.

As for other pros, well, those are more difficult to come by. Obviously, there's not much positive to say about his Iowa St. tenure, but it might not be quite as bad as some of the worst critics might think. The Cyclones haven't actually regressed statistically during his tenure, despite the 4 wins (in Dan McCarney's final year)-to-3-wins-to-2 slide in the final record. ISU finished with a net per-play average of -1.2 in 2006 and won their four games over Toledo, UNLV, I-AA Northern Iowa, and Missouri by a combined 14 points. Under Chizik, the Cyclones put up a -1.4 net per-play mark in 2007 and bumped it up to -1.2 this year. Those are more-or-less terrible numbers all the way around, but nonetheless ISU was pretty unfortunate not win at least one or two more games this season--they outgained Iowa by a substantial margin and saw the game turn on a punt return, then lost to UNLV, Kansas, Colorado, and Kansas St. by a combined 15 points. The Cyclones weren't good. But they weren't quite 2-10 bad, either. Chizik never got them moving forward, but for whatever tiny amount it's worth, it's more accurate to say they were running in place. And given that Chizik had huge personnel losses to deal with both years--only 11 returning starters in 2007, 25 lettermen (48 percent of the team, according to Steele) lost entering 2008--maybe running in place was actually an accomplishment.

Then again, here's your giant screaming caveat: after playing Texas Tech, Oklahoma, and Texas in 2007, ISU had all three drop from their Big 12 schedule to be replaced by Baylor, Texas A&M, and Oklahoma St. The Cyclones played the easiest Big 12 schedule possible, and still went winless and outscored by an average of 20 points a game. So maybe the biggest positive from Chizik's time in Ames is that it's one fewer opportunity in a coaching career we all know isn't going to offer many. As friend-of-the-blog Derek e-mailed the other day:

Chizik will work as hard as he humanly can to make Auburn better. After a 5-19 record, he is getting a step up programwise and Jonna gets to return closer to home. If he screws it up, he will NEVER be anything more than good coordinator. Terrible at Iowa State, terrible at Auburn after Auburn goes out on a limb for him. His head coaching career is OVER, and it will be hard for him to be a coordinator somewhere good as well.

It sort of makes sense that Jacobs would wind up introducing a coach who has every bit as much at stake as he does--they will sink-or-swim together, both of them, for better, for worse, for either the defining triumph or the bitter end of their respective careers. In short: I doubt Chizik will lack for motivation in any way. How much that's worth, you decide.

One other thing that has to be mentioned, as much as it hurts my soul to do so: that Chizik was willing to come cheap is a good thing for an athletic department that's spending as much on football coaches not currently actively employed by the football program as Auburn is. Sigh.

Something that is neither pro nor con. If you're an Auburn fan looking for one more way for your heart to skip a beat, I suggest gandering at this little nugget from Chizik's Wikipedia page, no doubt left there by a Tiger fan who's maybe even a little less enthralled with Coach C than most:

Rivals.com ranked Iowa State's 2007, 2008, and 2009 recruiting classes 60th, 62nd, and 76th, respectively. The 2009 ranking was updated on December 13, 2008, the day of his hiring by Auburn. On the other hand, McCarney's last three classes ranked 42nd, 58th, and 63rd.

On one hand: Yikes.

But there's a few points to make on the other, too. For starters, it's not entirely fair to take the ranking of the current class at face value when there's still another two months or so left in the recruiting season. For another, sure, 60th and 62nd aren't exactly mindblowing and apparently aren't even that great by most of McCarney's previous standards, but they're at least holding the line from McCarney's last class. Most importantly, though, Chizik landed in Ames without any connections to high school coaches or the Big 12 or anything that would help him recruit up there. He won't have those disadvantages at Auburn, where he's got some name-recognition, a much stronger support system, and perhaps more of a chance to take advantage of his old Texas and Florida ties. (Incidentally, this is the only way Chizik's "Auburn ties" and "SEC coaching experience" matter in the slightest. And I do mean they matter in the very slightest way possible.) Add in what I expect to be plenty of drive from a 46-year-old who knows his ass and a lot of other people's asses are on the line, and I think you could make an argument that Chizik's recruiting ability at Auburn isn't fairly represented by his time at Iowa St.

Then again, it's not like we have any reason to believe he'll recruit especially well, either. If he couldn't improve on McCarney's efforts at all, why would he improve on Tubby's in the face of rising challenges from the Tide and Dawgs? By not listing this as a "con" and simply declaring that we don't have a firm read on how he'll do long-term--and won't for a while, since this upcoming class won't be a fair measure at all, I don't think, after all the fallout--I think I'm being generous.

Cons

Obviously we're spoiled for choice here, but for me, here's your biggest one:

Iowa St., yards-per-play allowed

2002: 4.9
2003: 6.2
2004: 4.7
2005: 4.8
2006: 6.1
----------
2007: 5.8
2008: 6.7

In the second year of running his systems and with seven returning starters, Chizik's defense was worse than any McCarney had fielded this decade. Sure, Big 12 aerial circuses and whatnot, but remember, "easiest Big 12 schedule possible" and even within the closed circle of the Big 12, the Cyclones were horrible: worst in the conference at a full 7 yards allowed per-play in Big 12 games. In total defense, ISU slipped from 65th in 2007 to--I still can't believe this--111th this year. Here, let me emphasize this last point in some italicized and bolded terms we'll all understand:

Defense-first head coach Gene Chizik's 2008 defense was worse than Auburn's 2008 offense.

Ye gods. I have to assume Chizik knows what he's doing on defense, but the difficulty he's displaying in putting that knowledge to use as a head coach is staggering**.

OK, so a certain number of Auburn fans are trying to explain Chizik's failures as "It's Iowa St.; no one could win at Iowa St." And, well, it's not an easy job, that's for damn sure. But it's not impossible. Over McCarney's final eight seasons at ISU, he failed to win at least four games once--and unlucky or not, it took Chizik just two years to double that total. It's also not like McCarney strung together a bunch of 5-7 and 6-6 years--the 2000 Seneca Wallace team went 9-3, and as recently as 2005 the Cyclones were probably the best team in the Big 12 North. That year's squad finished 7-5 but crushed Iowa, Kansas St., Colorado, Texas A&M, and Okie St. while losing not one, not two, but three overtime games in the Big 12, all on the road, any one of which would have sent the Cyclones to the Big 12 title game. Even in the North, the Big 12's tougher than it was then or in 2000, but the point holds: you can build good teams in Ames.

Admittedly, it took McCarney a long time to build those good teams--he won a total of nine games his first four years. Maybe Chizik would have had similar success if he'd had that long to build the program. But a) it's not like he's going to be afforded anything that kind of time at Auburn, making his inability to show any kind of immediate improvement all the more troubling** b) even in today's Big 12 South, it's possible for a new coach to move his team forward from Day 1. I don't think anyone's going to argue the ISU job is that much tougher than Baylor, and when Art Briles took over the Bears job after Guy Morriss was forced out following an 0-8 2007 Big 12 season, it's not like he had that much more talent than Chizik inherited in Ames. Didn't matter--Briles went out and recruited arguably the best freshman quarterback in the country, then turned his team's net per-play around from -1.1 to +.6 in a year, all while competing in the toughest single six-team division in college football history. The bottom line: blindly tossing Chizik's head coaching record aside is folly. No amount of excuse-making should hide the fact of 5-19. 5-19. 5-19!

OK, I'll make the non-record-and-stat-related stuff quick, since it honestly doesn't matter as much. For starters, we all saw the negative reaction from the press and the Auburn family coming a mile away; that's a necessary evil if you're hiring an unknown guy with a credible record (like Briles, for instance) or someone like Leach who's liable to win the doubters over via good old-fashioned winning, but inviting it in order to hire a coach who seems as massive a risk as Chizik strikes me as foolhardy.

Secondly, I'm not inclined to give too much credence to the bitter claims of the deserted AD and players back in Ames, but I can't say that this level of anger reassures me that he was either entirely forthright with them or on especially good terms with his players.

Even more troubling, though, is that his first attempt at filling out a staff failed so utterly miserably. As you've no doubt heard, at season's end he fired two position coaches and demoted his coordinators. With his lack of offensive expertise and limited recruiting experience, Chizik is a coach who will desperately need an excellent staff to succeed at Auburn--that his only attempt on record at creating such a staff ended in disaster is just one more black mark on a resume chock-ful of them.

Final endorsement? Please believe me: I don't want to write a post like this one. I desperately, desperately wish there were a bunch of hidden reasons I could point to that would show Chizik will be a great hire, some sort of underplayed-but-definitive piece of evidence that indicates that once all the anger and disappointment are scraped away, what Auburn fans will really find are victories. I want to be the guy who "gets behind the coach."

But I can't find those reasons. That evidence isn't there. The best thing we've got is Chizik's defensive expertise, which dissolved so completely in his move to the head coach's chair at ISU his defense wound up one of the worst in the nation. All we're left with after that is wild hopes about his motivation work ethic and platitudes about his "blueprint" and "plan." Those are nice, but results speak louder. And the results say that Chizik will fail. It hurts to type that, I swear. Hurts like hell. But it's the truth.

I'm not guaranteeing failure, of course. I think there are two things in play which would totally buck the trend suggested by Chizik's previous results. He'll have to do the following:

1. Recruit like absolutely nobody's business. There's enough leeway in the Iowa St. results to think that if Chizik makes the right hires on staff and busts his ass and inspires much more confidence in person than his 5-19 record would suggest and somehow scrapes up some early momentum this fall, he could make some genuine headway here. If there's not much reason for confidence at the moment, there's not honestly much reason to assume that Chizik won't be able to recruit well. We'll see if he can salvage anything over the next two months--hopefully that'll tell us something.

2. Put together a knockout staff. Again, Chizik's record-to-date here is hardly inspiring (and though I'll get into my reactions to the press conference tomorrow, consider me less than hopeful we'll be able to hire a splashy offensive coordinator to run a 200-year-old offense) and there are, unfortunately, reasons to think the Georgia assistants we've all been eyeing aren't going to bail on Athens. But who knows? Maybe armed with Auburn's resources and the experience from his baptism-by-fire in Ames, he'll be able to pick out some diamonds-in-the-rough that either weren't available to him or who he wasn't aware of at ISU, particularly a snazzy OC to bring in the wide receiving playmakers we so desperately need and a defensive staff who are able to implement his Tampa-2 schemes in a timely and effective manner

What are the odds of both those things happening? Not good, as I think the rest of this post makes clear. But I've been wrong before, Lord knows. And I don't know, when it comes to Auburn football, if I've ever hoped to be wrong the way I'm hoping now.

Prove me wrong, Gene Chizik. Please.

*I'm counting McNeill. That he didn't go in the first round was just stupid.

**I know the party line today was that Chizik mortgaged the present for the future at ISU by relying heavily on freshmen, but there are tons of teams out there just as crippled from a personnel standpoint, and most of them didn't finish 111th in total defense while being coached by a defensive-minded head coach. Sorry. I'm unconvinced.

The long winter

Three summers ago now, the Mrs. JCCW and I moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan.



Most days, I couldn't be happier with that decision. Certain Saturdays during the fall, when the closest I get to my football team is pay-per-view Underwater-o-Vision as called by Andy Burcham and Cole Cubelic, I'm more ambivalent. And then there's the long winter, when I don't just wonder why the hell we moved to this godforsaken icebox of a state, I wonder why anyone would have ever voluntarily chosen to live in a place that gets this damn cold.

But this past weekend, even with the thermometer hunkered down in the 20s and the wind chill driving the "feels like" reading into the teens, it felt right. This weekend, as an Auburn fan, it felt right to be surrounded by ice, and snow, and the filthy gray slush that accumulates in the gutters. It felt right to put on as many layers of clothing as possible and tromp out into the cold and wind knowing it wasn't going to be pleasant, but that you'd get where you were going eventually.

---------------------------------

Part of me wonders if it's just Auburn's time. After all, it's everyone's time eventually.

Before Pete Carroll, USC went six seasons without winning more than eight games in a year, went to only two low-level bowls, and lost them both. In the mid-90s, Ray Goff and Jim Donnan conspired to coach Georgia to four straight 5- or 6-win seasons. Between the Fred Akers, David McWilliams, and John Mackovic eras, Texas--Texas!--lost four or more games 12 times in 14 seasons between '84 and '97. I don't have to tell you what Alabama went through between Gene Stallings and Nick Saban. LSU, Oklahoma, the list goes on. And even Michigan--inviolable, invincible Michigan--spent the last two seasons watching first its best collection of offensive talent in a decade lose to Appalachian St. before its bajillion-year bowl-streak went down the tubes in a 3-9 debacle. Football death comes for us all, eventually.

But for the most part, even though Auburn has neither the recruiting base nor the grand tradition nor many other things that these programs have, our Tigers have been mostly immune to this kind of decay since the moment Pat Dye arrived on the Plains in 1981. Since then, Auburn has never had a three-year span in which they failed to win eight games in at least one season. The back-to-back five-win seasons to close out the Dye era were followed immediately by a perfect 11-0 campaign in 1993. The 3-8 and 5-6 seasons in '98 and '99 were bracketed by trips to Atlanta in '97 and 2000. For all the griping from certain corners of the Auburn fanbase about a general lack of championships (and sniping from Tide fans about the same, as if they wouldn't have traded any coach they had between Bryant and Saban, save Stallings, for Dye or Tubby in a heartbeat), we've had it very good for a very, very long time. For those of us born in the late '70s or early '80s who never knew the Barfield years or the nine-game streak, we've been so lucky as to never know Auburn as anything but a proven winner.

My expectation is that I'm going to remind myself of this many, many times over the next few seasons.

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Saturday night, my Michigan friends were trying to console me. "I'm sure weirder hires have worked out," one of them said.

I've spent at least part of every hour since trying to think of one, racking my brain for a coaching hire that made you say Huh? What on earth are they thinking? the way the announcement of Gene Chizik did, and then turned out all right.

I've failed. The two candidates from last year were Bill Stewart and Mike Sherman. Fail. The last two I can think of in the SEC were Ed Orgeron and Ron Zook. Fail. Remember when Nebraska fired Frank Solich and replaced him with Bill Callahan and we all thought they were dumb? They were. Remember when you found out, earlier this decade, that Army had hired some guy who was going to bring in a crazy West Coast passing scheme, and you thought "That'll never work?" It didn't. The closest I can come to new head coaches who were greeted with something less than wild enthusiasm and then went on to success are guys like Jim Tressel, Rich Brooks, and Les Miles, but all three of them had definitively successful head coaching stints already on their resume. Our guy, as you are aware, does not.

Tons of programs have been led astray by false optimism. If you know of one who's endured a bout of false pessimism, I'd love to be reminded of it.

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vs.



And so a hire that should have united Auburn fans in a way we haven't been since, oh, before the 2006 Arkansas loss only divides us again.

I don't support booing coaches or players; we're there for them, not the other way 'round. Gene Chizik deserved to be greeted with the second reaction, not the first. That he is Auburn's new coach won't change the fact that I'm going to live and die with the 2009 Tigers as much as I did with Tubby's teams, won't change my desire to return to Jordan-Hare in 2009, won't change how often I wear my Auburn t-shirts around Ann Arbor.

But I can't bring myself not to speak my mind, and I can't bring myself to believe that Gene Chizik will be a good head coach at Auburn. I'm trying. I would like to, since I think the many, many Auburn fans that are claiming we need to put aside our disappointment, get behind him, show him our support, etc., have their heart in the right place. Unity sounds a lot better than division right now.

But I haven't been able to believe. I can't. Not yet.

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My favorite book as a kid--and one my favorite books ever, period, still--is The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. And so there's come a point around each of the last two Februaries, when we haven't seen the sun for months and the plowed slushpiles in the parking lots rise higher than my head and I can't even remember the last time I went outside without coat-scarf-gloves-hat, that the fantastical part of my brain worries that we've been plunged into the White Witch's endless winter, that it's just going to stay icy and miserable forever and never even be Christmas. That's the same part of my brain I tried to drown Saturday night, the part that was worrying that Auburn was about to re-enter the Barfield days and that this time, in this new SEC of Meyerses and Sabans and Richts, we'd never come out, trapped in our horrible Shreveport winters forever.

The good news is that there's a reason that part of the brain is only a small part, and that the rest knows better, knows that eventually the sun is going to come out again, that eventually we'll be able to go to the park again, spread a blanket out on the grass, and spend all afternoon only reading about make-believe witches and eternal snowfall. Eventually, I know, Auburn will hire another Pat Dye or Tommy Tuberville and we'll all ride back to New Orleans together.

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No, I don't believe that's where Gene Chizik will take us. What I believe is that Auburn football is in for some cold and difficult seasons, and that there will be times this fall and maybe in subsequent falls when it will seem like Auburn football will never warm us again. I hope like hell I'm wrong about that. But right now, that's what I think.

But here's what I know: that if 2008--now, without question, the worst season of Auburn football of my lifetime--and the Chizik era represent an Auburn winter, spring's going to come some day. And in the meantime, winter isn't always the way it is in Michigan--when it snows back home, it's a reason for celebration, for snowballs hidden in the freezer and days away from school and homemade ice cream. If this is Auburn's winter, it won't be quite that fun, but we will have some laughs and some little victories along the way.

And so, finally, I would say to Auburn fans: Bundle up. Prepare for the worst. But know that we'll have our day in the sun again someday, and that--who knows?--it might come sooner than any of us dare to hope.

War Eagle: today, tomorrow, winter, spring, summer, forever. War Eagle.