JONESBORO — SELF
PORTRAIT
Date and place of birth:
Oct. 28, 1965, in Irving, Texas
Family:
Wife Kristi, daughters Kylie and Kenzie
Occupation:
Head football coach, Arkansas State University
When I’m stressed out I
coach, just do my job.
Something people might be surprised to learn about me:
I feel like I’m a pretty boring guy ... I like ’80s music.
The biggest difference between high school and college is
the recruiting. The coaching and interaction with players on and off the field is the same.
An athlete outside football I enjoy watching is
Kobe Bryant. I was a Michael Jordan fan, a Larry Bird fan, and those are probably three of the best players who ever played. They’re all winners.
The question I get asked the most:
I get asked all the time about Cam Newton and what it was like to coach him.
My favorite subject in school was
history.
If I had an extra hour every day, I would
spend more time with my family.
My favorite food is
Mexican. I could eat it every day.
The guests at my fantasy dinner party would be
Tom Landry and Tom Osborne.
When I’m driving in my car, I like to listen to
Christian music and ’80s.
A phrase to sum me up:
“Extremely focused on the task at hand."
Gus Malzahn doesn’t get nervous before games.
He used to get nervous. When Malzahn was a wide receiver for Fort Smith Christian, and later at Henderson State University, he would get plenty nervous before games.
As a coach, though, he feels something entirely different.
“It’s adrenaline,” Malzahn says. “It usually confirms to me that I’m ready. True nervousness, I feel like, is only if you’re not prepared. But that adrenaline, that means you’re ready for the game - you’re prepared.”
A lack of preparation has never been an issue for Arkansas State University’s new head football coach. He dedicated long hours to football when he was the offensive coordinator at Auburn University, crafting an offense that resulted in a national championship and a No. 1 selection in the 2011 NFL Draft for quarterback Cam Newton.
This kind of devotion is nothing new, nor is the success that accompanies it. Malzahn coached the 2005 Springdale High Bulldogs to a state championship, and onto the short list of the greatest highschool football teams in Arkansas history. He led Shiloh Christian to consecutive state titles in the late 1990s, turning heads with explosive offenses, and before that, he led Hughes High School to a statechampionship game appearance in 1994.
“I’ve got one of those personalities where I’ve always put in long hours,” Malzahn says. “I don’t want anyone to outwork me. I’m one of those workaholics.”
Malzahn’s existence is consumed with football, with family and church being the only regular breaks he permits. He used to golf, but rarely has time for that anymore, and although the 46-year-old looks to be in decent shape, he says he doesn’t have any sort of workout routine; it’s all football, almost all the time.
At the hot core of all this effort are raging competitive fires. Malzahn cannot stand to lose, and the more he works, the more likely his team is to outscore its opponent.
Of course, all coaches hate to lose - they wouldn’t have gotten into the business if they enjoyed finishing second - but Malzahn truly cannot stand it. It’s not just in football; it’s everything.
He’s so competitive that he wants to win “Monopoly, anything and everything,” says Malzahn’s wife of 24 years, Kristi. “We’ll be driving home from church in two different cars, and he’s racing between doors.”
The losses pain Malzahn, more deeply than the wins thrill him. At least once a week, he says, he agonizes over Hughes’ 17-13 loss to Lonoke in the 1994 Class AA championship game.
He blames himself for the defeat, and no matter how many titles and awards he wins, he can’t let it go.
“He beats himself up over it, what he could have done differently,” says Rob Coleman of Bentonville, who coached with Malzahn for four years at Hughes and a year at Springdale.
“He’s never watched the film of that game,” Kristi Malzahn adds.
A win is something Gus Malzahn savors when he’s running across the field, shaking hands with the defeated coach, and in those few minutes that follow in the locker room, when it’s just he and his team.
Then the moment’s gone, and Malzahn’s preparing for the next opponent.
The lengths he’s willing to go to avoid losing show in the record books. In 1992, Malzahn’s first year as a head coach, Hughes went 4-6.
That was the last time Malzahn was involved with a team that lost more games than it won. It’s not by luck; it’s by design and hard work.
“All my life, I’ve never known anyone that hated losing more than Gus,” says childhood friend David Little, the offensive coordinator at Fordyce High School. “He was the most competitive person I’ve ever known, and he still is; it didn’t matter if it washorseshoes, football, basketball or pingpong.”
INFLUENTIAL COACHES
The truth is, Malzahn says, he really wasn’t good enough to play football at Arkansas.
He entered the Razorbacks program as a walk-on, and actually managed to get on the field in one game - Sept. 28, 1985, in Little Rock, against New Mexico State - but after two years, it was obvious to Malzahn that he simply lacked the ability to play for the Hogs. He attended Ouachita Baptist for a semester, then transferred to Henderson State, where he played wide receiver and earned his bachelor’s degree.
Yet while he didn’t see much game action, the time at Arkansas was valuable to Malzahn, because it afforded him the opportunity to be around then-Razorbacks coach Ken Hatfield. Watching the way Hatfield operated, as a Christian and a coach, left a deep impression on Malzahn.
This was a recurring theme throughout Malzahn’s early years. Whether it was his American Legion baseball coach, Squeaky Smith; his coach at Fort Smith Christian, Bob McClure; or longtime Henderson State coach Sporty Carpenter, Malzahn was constantly being coached by men who taught their players how to win, and how to live.
“There’s no doubt that I kind of got my values through athletics,” Malzahn says. “I really looked up to coaches and wanted to please them. I was fortunate in junior high and high school and college.”
Born in Texas, Malzahn was 6 years old when his parents split up. He lived in Tulsa and Little Rock for short periods, and his mother and stepfather moved to Fort Smith before Malzahn began fourth grade.
He was a sports-crazed kid, and by the time he was a teenager, he knew he was going to spend his life involved with athletics.
“That was the only thing he ever discussed [after school],” Kristi Malzahn says. “I knew that about him before we were dating, that he either wanted to play or he wanted to coach.”
Gus Malzahn attended public schools through his sophomore year of high school; then he and Little decided to transfer to Fort Smith Christian (today Union Christian Academy) as juniors. Malzahn shone at the tiny private school, excelling in baseball, basketball and football.
He wasn’t sure which sport he was going to pursue beyond high school until his senior year, when a strong football season made his choice clear. Malzahn played wide receiver, where he benefited from major changes McClure had installed.
During their junior year, Little says, Fort Smith Christian had relied heavily on the run, as the overwhelming majority of high-school teams did in those days.
During their senior year, though, McClure opened things up on offense.
“We threw the ball quite a bit our senior year, using a spread package a lot of schools use now,” Little explains. “Back in 1983, I don’t know who all else was doing it. We were fairly successful, because not a lot of people were doing it.”
AN OFFENSIVE PHILOSOPHY
Today, high school teams in Arkansas throw the ball all the time - in no small part due to Malzahn.
He’s regarded as a great offensive innovator. His book, 2003’s The Hurry Up No-Huddle: An Offensive Philosophy, is veritable gospel for high-school coaches who want to amp it up onoffense.
Malzahn has lost track of the number of coaches who have contacted him after reading the book, wanting to talk offense with him. One was Allen (Texas) High School coach Todd Graham - who later brought Malzahn on board when Graham was the head coach at Tulsa.
“Gus is always one to help high school coaches, especially in Arkansas,” Little says. “He wants everyone in Arkansas to become better, and in the end, that’s going to benefit Gus.” (Malzahn made headlines earlier this year when he and his staff announced they would visit every football-playing high school in Arkansas.)
Malzahn’s teams have put up amazing numbers.
In 1998, Shiloh Christian set a national record with 66 passing touchdowns, since eclipsed. That same season, he won the first of his three Arkansas state championships; it was in the middle of a stretch in which Malzahntook teams to the state-championship game seven times in 12 years.
During his two years at Tulsa University (2007-’08), when Malzahn was co-offensive coordinator with Herb Hand, he twice led the No. 1 offense in the country. In2008, the Golden Hurricane put up a staggering average of 47.2 points per game.
“There are a lot of great coaches, and Gus is a great coach, but the thing that maybe is the No. 1 commonality is you have a system and you believe in it, then you’re able to develop relationships with the players where they believe in it, too,” Hand says. “Gus is a very straight-arrow guy, so a lot of people would say we were the odd couple, but there was a great mix between the two of us, just in terms of his ability to create relationships with players.”
The immediate success at Tulsa was satisfying for Malzahn, proving that his system could succeed on the college level as it had in high school. In 2006, he had beenthe offensive coordinator at Arkansas, but the Razorbacks did not fully implement his system.
After two years at Tulsa, he went to Auburn, and in January 2011, the Tigers won a national championship. He won the Broyles Award as thenation’s top assistant coach that year, and Auburn went undefeated on its way to the title - but, of course, there are things he believes could have been done better.
Improvement is a neverending quest for Malzahn. If he’s not looking for ways to get better as a coach, he believes, then he’s going to get left behind.
“[When you go undefeated] you look back on every game, every play, ask yourself, ‘Why did I call that play?’ and you make notes,” Malzahn says. “You can’t buy into people patting you on the back. You’ve got to be the toughest self-evaluator you can be.”
PREPARING TO OUTWORK
There’s little doubt that ASU will be going to theair early and often in 2012. When asked what the biggest strength of the Red Wolves is, the first person Malzahn mentions is his quarterback, Ryan Aplin.
Malzahn wasn’t always so aggressive on offense. Therewas a time when he was downright traditional.
“My first year, I didn’t have a clue what I was doing,” he says. “You think you do, and then you get out there and it takes about five minutes before you figure out you didn’t.”
After graduating from college, Malzahn got a job with Cintas, a uniform company in Fort Smith. He did that for half a year, during which time he sent resumes all over the state.
Lacking connections that would help him get his foot in the door, he was thrilled when Hughes offered him a position as its defensive coordinator for the 1990 season. He “didn’t even know there was such a thing as Hughes, Arkansas,” but leapt at the opportunity, driving across the state to sign a contract, then returning to pick up Kristi and move tothe state’s northeast corner.
Malzahn spent a year as Hughes’ defensive coordinator, then became the head coach in 1991. He ran a Delaware Wing-T, a traditional run-oriented offense.
“That year, it was learning on the fly,” Coleman says. “From year one to year two, he had a better idea of what he wanted to do.”
The improvement came because Malzahn asked questions. A 4-6 record wasn’t good enough for him, so he sought out some of the state’s most-respected coaches and asked them for advice.
When Malzahn met with Barry Lunney, then the coach at Fort Smith Southside, Lunney asked him how many plays he had in Hughes’ play book. Malzahn answered that he had somewhere in the 200-300 range.
Lunney told him this was too many, that he needed to pick out four or five and perfect them - and to not add another until those were successful against any defense he faced. It was “the best advice I ever got” as a coach Malzahn says.
In his second year, Hughes had a winning record, and by year three, the team made the state championship game.
“He was [developing] big ideas on throwing the ball and the spread offense, but we really didn’t have the type of kids we could do that with,” Coleman says. “He grew into [his offensive philosophy], but we always ran the ball predominantly over there.”
The effects of Lunney’s advice - quality over quantity - can plainly be seen in the offenses Malzahn runs today. Yes, the playbook ASU will use this season will be complex, but each play will have been meticulously practiced by the Red Wolves, each scenario thoroughly imagined by their coaches.
It goes back to preparation. If there’s anything that can be done to ready his team, Malzahn will do it.
“His whole thing is he’s going to outwork his opponent,” Little says. “[The Red Wolves are] going to be more prepared for everything they go into, because that’s his philosophy, to outwork people. That’s an equation for success.”
Northwest Profile, Pages 31 on 08/19/2012