UCF coach Gus Malzahn needs to make up his mind about calling plays | Commentary

Head coach Gus Malzahn created quite a flood of discussion and debate a few days ago when he revealed that he will go back to being the chief offensive play-caller next season for UCF.

Personally, I don’t understand why there is so much debate about this. Malzahn, after all, has been one of the great offensive minds in college football over the last two decades.

However, I do have one question:

Why does he keep giving up the play-calling duties and then changing his mind?

I hearken back to something another renowned college football play-calling head coach, Steve Spurrier, once told me when I asked him why he was unlike so many other offensive-minded head coaches who cede the job of calling plays to an offensive coordinator?

“Why would I do that?” Spurrier replied. “Drawing up ball plays and calling them during the game is the fun part of the job. Besides, play-calling is the reason I got a chance to be a head coach in the first place.”

It’s the same for Malzahn. He was a high school coaching legend in Arkansas who would go on to become one of college football’s great offensive coordinators. Malzahn was one of the inventors of the hurry-up, no-huddle offense that has become all the rage today. Malzahn literally wrote the book on the up-tempo spread offense two decades ago.

However, Malzahn gave up the play-calling duties multiple times during his final years as the head coach at Auburn, and, quite frankly, it didn’t go well at all. When he took the job at UCF, he acknowledged that calling plays is what he is good at and what he loves, and he vowed he’d never, ever relinquish play-calling duties again.

Well, that lasted until a year ago when Malzahn decided to stop calling plays, in part, because he said he needed to focus on recruiting, the transfer portal, raising money for NIL and managing UCF’s…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/ucf-coach-gus-malzahn-needs-010000416.html

Author : Orlando Sentinel

Publish date : 2024-01-31 01:00:00

Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source.