At the top here, I want to quickly explain, first, that this is a reissue, and the original story ran back around when Gus Malzahn was hired at UCF in February. UCF is next up on the preview list, and rather than rewriting all of this stuff again, I want to instead go through and update/correct anything that’s changed since February, in hopes of getting the most accurate and up-to-date preview possible for UCF fans. You can find every 2021 preview right here.
However, I feel the same way about this hire now that I did then, and I don’t think that have anything unique to say beyond the original points of the article. Malzahn was at one point on the cutting edge of offense, I don’t think that he is anymore, and I think that’s a problem for UCF. Let’s get into it.
It’s pretty easy to run the gamut of emotions when thinking about UCF’s decision to hire former Auburn head coach Gus Malzahn to replace Josh Heupel, which was announced on Feb. 15 after a short search. Malzahn’s name carries a lot of weight with it, which UCF addressed directly as a positive in his introductory press conference. There’s a lot of baggage here, both good and bad and the college football world is more aware of that with Malzahn than it is with almost any other coach in the sport.
The good: Malzahn won consistently at Auburn and beat Nick Saban more than anyone else in the SEC has since his arrival. He was on the cutting edge of the zone read revolution and is known as one of the sport’s most brilliant offensive minds, even if his more recent offenses haven’t been especially electric. At his best, a Malzahn offense looked a lot like the kind of thing that has been working in the AAC for years now. His recruiting was consistently good. He has that name recognition and comes from the best conference in football.
The bad: Malzahn didn’t win consistently enough to stay at Auburn and lost at least four games in every season after his first. He struggled to innovate on pace with the sport at the end of his tenure and was frequently carried by defensive coordinator Kevin Steele, who he won’t have in Orlando. His offenses often felt disjointed, which tends to happen when you don’t commit fully to the schemes that your OC brings in, both on the field and in recruiting – yes, this is a roundabout way to say that Sean White probably wasn’t the right fit for Rhett Lashlee, nor was Bo Nix for Chad Morris.
It’s hard to look at Malzahn without immediately making a mental pros and cons list.
I’m conflicted on this. The Auburn offense in the early Malzahn era was inarguably excellent and inspired a ton of innovation around the sport, especially in the SEC. Late-stage Malzahn was just about the opposite. It felt stale and lifeless. Getting a coach fresh off of that is very hard to swing as a good thing, given the results that it yielded most recently at Arizona under Kevin Sumlin. Innovators that don’t innovate anymore will not work in a new place and I’m concerned that Malzahn fits that billing.
UCF’s success under Malzahn is going to hinge on the version of him that it gets. If Malzahn is as he says – refreshed, the best version of himself – there’s plenty of reason for optimism, especially if he’s leaning into what he knows in recruiting and staffing hires. He didn’t suddenly forget how to coach football after all, and his old QB-run centric offense can still work very well with some tweaking – just look at Miami under Lashlee in 2020 or Coastal Carolina, among others. RPO is the name of the game now, but there are still plenty of teams having success with the more traditional (how funny to describe this as traditional, given how it was viewed eight years ago) spread option system.
If he isn’t inspired, this is going to go very poorly, very quickly. UCF wasn’t under the guidance of a good coach with Heupel at the helm, but it did have a genuinely unstoppable offense to consistently rely on, made even easier by the baseline level of talent that UCF is pretty much always going to nab in recruiting.
That baseline talent will remain through the Malzahn tenure, but without that unstoppable, plug-and-play offense paired with elite quarterback production, I just don’t think UCF can do what it wants to do in the American. This is not a conference that grandfathers in stagnant teams, just look at Temple.
That brings about the million-dollar question. What does a successful Malzahn tenure at UCF look like? How does he get there?
I’m going to go back to 2013 to answer that question. The start of the Malzahn era also happened to be the peak of what we can loosely refer to as “The Gus Offense,” as it has come to be known. With a converted defensive back at quarterback, this was Malzahn’s most creative and lethal rushing attack. I think that’s the right tact for him moving forward: Leaning into creating an unstoppable and creative rushing attack and populating that rushing attack with the fastest athletes in the AAC by recruiting Florida and Georgia like crazy.
It’s not terribly far from what UCF was already doing under Heupel, just a shift in where those athletes are going (running back instead of receiver) and on what the biggest key to the system is (offensive line instead of quarterback). It’s not like UCF isn’t already the fastest team in the conference, this is just embracing that further and transforming what those elite athletes are doing. The ideal UCF team under Malzahn looks a lot like 2013 Auburn, with a speedy quarterback, good running backs, elite line play and a defense that isn’t amazing, but that has the talent up front needed to win the line of scrimmage and create havoc.
Now, recognizing that the 2013 Auburn team is the model and actually building to and deploying that model are two very different things. Malzahn chased that high for seven seasons and never found it again. Defenses started to understand how to better defend it pretty quickly as teams like Alabama realized that they no longer needed 260-pound linebackers. Malzahn noticed, went to adjust, but over-adapted in recruiting and in his staff hires without changing his own ideology.
In other words, he did everything needed to innovate without ever actually wanting to innovate. His offense became an amalgamation of a bunch of systems both in its scheme and in personnel, none of which ever fit together especially well. The idea of building on that core QB-run game in 2013, adding in some newer looks (including, yes, RPO stuff) is a sound one, but actually doing it proved pretty difficult for Malzahn at Auburn.
What’s the solution?
If you ask me, it’s all about finding an offensive coordinator that understands how to modernize the Malzahn-style spread option so that Malzahn can evolve his original system without needing to change his ideology. I don’t know that I can say definitively that adding Tim Harris from FIU and G.J. Kinne from Hawaii counts as doing that.
He never looked especially interested in leaning into that Auburn, because he didn’t seem to think that doubling down would work in the evolving SEC.
Maybe he was right then. But now? In a fully-modernized, pass-crazy AAC? Look at who wins games. Cincinnati under Luke Fickell. Memphis under Mike Norvell and now Ryan Silverfield. Even Sonny Dykes ran the ball more than he passed in 2020 at SMU. All strong rushing attacks. This is a league all about putting athletes all over the field, but if you can build out a bruising offensive line with Florida speed around it at UCF – and put those guys into something similar to what Coastal Carolina is doing now – with one of the godfathers of spread option football running it, you’re going to win a lot of fucking games.
It’s not like Malzahn is new to those wacky formations and motion looks, either. He was doing this stuff in 2013, almost to a T. Here’s a full house zone read, with the halfback motioning into the backfield pre-snap. The line is blocking with the handoff to create space for the halfback if the isolated defensive end stays in place, while the fullbacks (in this case, a fullback and defensive tackle) kick out to the second-level away from the line as lead blockers for a quarterback keep.
Even against an eight-man box with just seven blockers, Auburn has a numbers advantage here because the quarterback is a part of the running game. The isolated end leaves seven-on-seven from the start, with the zone blocking to the back side plucking off two linebackers and three defensive linemen, leaving the outermost linebacker and box safety for those fullbacks to pick up. They do, and Nick Marshall can basically walk into the end zone.
This is the kind of creativity that defined old Malzahn offenses and was completely missing from new ones. Zone read again, this time with just one tight end on a slice block, making this much closer to an inside zone split read, though the tight end isn’t picking up the unblocked defensive end – he’s getting into the second-level, creating the numbers advantage with that QB keep threat again. Malzahn' still had zone read stuff like this in his playbook by the end of his time at Auburn, but the window-dressing, the motion, the creativity to invent a numbers advantage was gone.
Finding an offensive coordinator that can tap into this creativity again and rework it into a system that embraces misdirection and window-dressing instead of avoiding it is going to make or break the Malzahn era at UCF. No more of this attempting to modernize by changing the Malzahn offense to something that wants to pass more or something that wants a real, downfield thrower. Go out and get an option OC, find a new Nick Marshall, and lean into a damn identity on offense for the first time since 2014.
Does have those guys now?
Because this is the UCF preview, it would probably be worthwhile to at least talk about what the Knights bring back for Malzahn’s first season. The short answer is not much, at least not in the way of proven talent. The team returns 73 percent of its production, good enough for 90th overall.
The offensive side of the ball, even though it’s more experienced, isn’t exactly in a great spot, because those numbers are held up at least in decent part by quarterback Dillon Gabriel. I’m not going to dance around this. Gabriel is a great quarterback that doesn’t fit in this system and won’t work if Malzahn runs what he knows best. He’s factored into those rankings because he’s an extremely productive player, but I’ll be surprised if he plays well for UCF in a true Malzahn offense. Maybe Malzahn can adjust for a pass-first quarterback, it’ll just be the first time in his career than he does.
Past him, the top two leading rushers are gone, as are the No’s. 1 and 3 receivers from 2020 and the No. 3 receiver from 2019 that played just four games in 2020. Returning halfback Bentavious Thompson and wideouts Jaylon Robinson and Ryan O’Keefe prevent the floor from being especially low, but Malzahn isn’t exactly walking into an experienced skill group here on offense. And, he’s without a dedicated run-first quarterback to alleviate that issue in the first year. The line should be solid and I think Thompson is a pretty good player, but this may be a little rough in the early going. Several P5 transfers could help, but it’s again hard to say at this point that they will. They’re here for a reason.
Defensively, the personnel landscape is similarly worrying, but I will note that I like new defensive coordinator Travis Williams quite a bit. He was a fantastic linebackers coach with Auburn, and while he hasn’t coordinated a defense at the college level before, he spent seven years under Steele and should have a very good idea of what that defense should look like. That he’s also an excellent recruiter, specifically in Georgia (which UCF is going to hit HARD under Malzahn), is a big bonus.
I don’t expect an awesome year from his group in year one, because there’s just not a ton of experience here (though he should have pretty solid linebacker play from Eriq Gilyard, Tatum Bethune and Jeremiah Jean-Baptiste). A ton of young players earned playing time and even starts in 2020, which is encouraging, but my guess is that this defense is a year away from being anything especially interesting. Big Kat Bryant, and cornerbacks Marco Domio and Jarvis Ware raise the ceiling, but it’s not by much.
That feels like the synopsis at large for 2021 UCF. This offensive personnel isn’t really going to fit the scheme unless Malzahn is a brand new man. Meanwhile, the defense doesn’t yet have the experience to be as good as it would need to be to uphold an offense going through growing pains as it learns a new system. If UCF leans into the identity that Malzahn built in his early years at Auburn, this could be something special. It just… might take a minute. And in the 2021 AAC, there really isn’t a minute to spare.