Posted on September 21st, 2009 by Admin

BY KEVIN STRICKLAND – AUBURN WAR EAGLE GAMEDAY

A Day in the Life of Gus Malzhan

5:07 a.m.

Auburn offensive coordinator Gus Malzhan wakes up without the benefit of an alarm clock. He doesn’t need one, because the offensive machine that is his brain has a self-timer and turns on automatically.

Why not wake up at 5:00 or 5:15? Because waking up at 5:07 is not what people expect. Malzhan likes to keep them guessing. Tomorrow, he might wake up at 5:12.

His eyes open, he reaches for one of the four pens lined up on his nightstand. On a yellow legal pad, he sketches out the visions that came to him during his sleep. One involves the center turned sideways and snapping the ball directly to a wide receiver.

He once had an alarm clock, but one morning lined it up as a toaster. It was so successful at that position it now resides in his kitchen, where it is currently leading all appliances in charred-bread production.

5:45 – 7 a.m.

Malzhan eats breakfast.

His alarm clock has the toast prepared. Malzhan has a three-minute egg—trimmed down to a 1:11—and a bowl of instant oatmeal. He is working on something faster than instant because the oatmeal’s pace annoys him, but he hasn’t yet figured out how to rip the time-space continuum and have it cooked before it is opened.

After breakfast, Malzhan retrieves the paper from the front porch. It’s always sitting perfectly on his door mat. When he first moved to the neighborhood, he had to retrieve the paper from the bushes a few times, but he took the paperboy aside and showed him an overhand throwing technique that allows him to make both the short and long throws with accuracy.

He also took a look at the paperboy’s route and re-ordered a couple of stops. What used to take the paperboy two hours to complete now takes an hour and 16 minutes. Malzhan is convinced he can still trim that by four minutes.

He never reads the sports section, because it only tells him what has happened. Malzhan is more interested in what will happen.

He works the Soduku puzzle. In pen. Instead of whole numbers, Malzhan uses values like 4.25 and 3.333 to make it more interesting. He finishes in four minutes and nine seconds. The numbers all add up.

He works the crossword puzzle. In pen. He forgoes English and uses words from a variety of different languages to complete the grid. He finishes in six minutes and 34 seconds. The words all connect. Reading them sequentially, he has written a short story warning about the travails of inefficiency. And a haiku.

Malzhan doesn’t read the comics. He doesn’t have time to laugh.

Besides, he noticed something about Lucy’s hold that could help Charlie Brown connect with the football. He’s also got some advice on the number of steps Brown takes before attempting the kick.

If he cut those down, he’s sure Brown could score on the play. But Charles Schultz is dead and won’t take his calls, so he can’t get it corrected. This annoys Malzhan.

Malzhan spends The remainder of the morning sorting out his impressive visor collection.

7:04 a.m.

Malzhan departs for work. Today it’s 7:04. Tomorrow? You’ll have to wait and see.

Yesterday, Malzhan turned left out of his driveway. Today, he turns right.

Yesterday, he drove a unicycle to work because he could dodge between cars and get there faster.

Today, he’s on foot. Carrying a canoe. Malzhan cuts across the field across from his abode, drops the canoe in a stream, floats under the highway and steers it to the creek bank. He carries the canoe up a hill and then slides down the grass to the parking lot. He parks the canoe in his space and heads into his office.

His boss, Gene Chizik, left for work at 6:45 and had less distance to cover than Malzhan. When Chizik arrives after fighting morning traffic, Malzhan’s canoe is already parked. For all Chizik knows, there will be a pair of rollerskates and a box of bottle rockets in Malzhan’s space tomorrow. He’s no longer surprised.

8:12 a.m. – 10:03 a.m.

Why 8:12? Because… yeah, the element of surprise.

Malzhan watches samurai movies and Westerns. Not because he enjoys them, but because the samurai teach him methods of attack and the Westerns give him ideas for herding. He sometimes likes to think of his offenses as cowboys on horseback herding the defenses where they want them to go.

Then branding them.

Malzhan thinks cows are dumb. Like opposing defenders. He likes to brand them. Lots of opposing defenders carry his searing, still-smoking brand.

10:04 – 12:18

For over two hours, Malzhan does nothing but sketch plays. In pen.

The first 23 minutes are devoted solely to the sideways snap to the wide receiver concept that came to him in a vision. By 10:31, the play has fourteen variations depending on personnel.

In one, the center becomes an eligible receiver. Malzhan knows this isn’t permitted by NCAA rules, but he likes thinking up things like this in case he’s ever in charge of the NCAA and can eliminate such ridiculous constraints. The NCAA annoys him.

Malzhan has his secretary draft a letter to the NCAA asking them to consider a variety of changes, including one that would allow the entire offensive line to go in motion, leaving a receiver to snap the ball.

His secretary types 432 words per minute, and he’s convinced he can have her hitting the 450 mark by December.

Malzhan checks in with offensive line coach Jeff Grimes to see if he’s ever taught a sideways snapping technique. When Grimes says no, Malzhan drops to the ground, grabs a potted plant and executes a perfect sideways snap down the hallway.

“Like that,” he says.

In the quiet of his office, Chizik hears the potted plant hit the wall and explode. He sighs, but doesn’t look up. Yesterday Malzhan destroyed a picture frame while explaining a new blocking alignment to receivers coach Curtis Luper.

The day before that, Malzhan tore off all the moulding around Chizik’s door to demonstrate a potential offensive set he’d learned from a samurai movie.

Malzhan returns to the office, takes his sketches, orders them in a notebook and puts them in a safe. His safe is large because it contains 1,697 notebooks. Each notebook contains 1,000 pages. Each page contains five offensive plays.

Later he’ll have his secretary laminate the pages. On game day. he’ll pull one page out of one book at random. Doesn’t matter which book. It’s all he needs.

Malzhan knows that if archeologists from the planet Barbaton find his notebooks a thousand years from now, they’ll be able to use the information contained in them to score against the rival Trampatodes. A lot.

12:19 – 1:14

Malzhan eats breakfast again. Sort of.

Yes, it’s supposed to be lunch time, but Malzhan likes to keep people guessing. He orders two pancakes smothered in onion gravy. He’s ordered the same thing for three straight days. When he comes back tomorrow, the waitress will think she knows what he’s going to do.

Boy will she be surprisesd.

Malzhan will order French toast with ranch dressing tomorrow. The waitress won’t know what hit her. It’s part of the plan.

1:14 – 1:18

Malzhan draws devil horns, glasses and a beard on a picture of Houston Nutt. Just for fun, he blacks out a few of Nutt’s teeth.

1:24 – 6:36

The remainder of Malzhan’s work day is occupied with practice and team meetings.

The matters discussed during this time are privileged and confidential. Were they disclosed, you’d have to be debriefed. Nobody wants you walking around without your briefs.

Besides, the totality of Malzhan’s overall scheme is too much for the average mind to handle. If you saw it, you couldn’t comprehend it. You would drive yourself insane trying to grasp it.

Does a tree that falls in the forest make noise if no one is there to hear it? Malzhan knows the answer to this question. He also knows how to make the tree lead the nation in total fallage. And foliage.

But forestry isn’t his passion. Too bad for the trees.

6:37 – on

From 6:37 on, Malzhan isn’t a football coach any more. He’s just an average dad, playing with his kids, talking to his wife and doing the normal mundane things every dad in the world does.

If every dad were an offensive genius.

He helps his wife with the dishes by first drawing out an alignment where the youngest child lines up behind his wife and takes a direct snap of the rinsed glasses so he can place them on the dishwasher rack. Dishwashing time is trimmed in half. Malzhan knows, because he times it with a stopwatch.

He reads to his children, taking care to explain that Hansel and Gretel could easily have avoided the grasp of the witch if Hansel had lined up in an offset formation and been used as a decoy. He would have drawn the witch in, and before she realized what was happening, the pair could have scored a huge snack from her gingerbread house.

Malzhan also thinks the three little pigs should have gone on the offensive, as they clearly had a numbers advantage on the wolf.

When he and his wife retire for the night, she puts her foot down.

“Offensive genius or not, Mr. Malzhan, you’re leaving the stopwatch on the counter. You are not bringing it in there,” she says with a nod of her head toward the bedroom door.

Malzhan contemplates pointing out how many more times he can score when he’s efficient, but in the end agrees.

Besides, he has a clock in his head and she can’t stop him from ticking off the mental seconds. It’s all about precision and timing.

The house, long dark, grows quiet.

As Malzhan drifts off to sleep, the wheels in his brain start to spin, conjuring up new visions, new formations, new ways to attack defenses. Tomorrow morning when he wakes at 5:12, or maybe 5:03, he’ll start a new day of sketching, scheming and planning.

Malzhan’s sleep is peaceful.

Around the country, however, ten head coaches and ten defensive coordinators who know they will soon match wits with Malzhan across the football field do not sleep nearly as soundly.

Their dreams are not so pleasant.