After a Week 7 loss to Tennessee (yes, that Tennessee), Auburn has some soul-searching to do. The once-logical pick to dethrone Alabama in the SEC West this year — if any team could do it — has made 6-6 look like it’d be a decent final record.
Did the Kick Six create unrealistic expectations for Gus Malzahn’s Auburn?
The further we get away from 2013, the more it looks like that season was a bug, not a feature of Auburn’s success.
Photo by Michael Chang/Getty Images
That’s after a promising 10-4 season in 2017, in which the Tigers beat both of the teams that matched up in the national championship game.
It’s clear that halfway through the 2018 season, Auburn just isn’t a good football team. Gus Malzahn has serious questions to answer about why his team is 4-3. The locker room is reportedly not in a good place, and neither is the on-field product.
But what we think Auburn can be year-in and year-out is a story about the power of results, and the miraculous nature of close games in sports.
The night of 2013’s Kick Six was special, but did that and the Prayer At Jordan-Hare create an unrealistic ceiling for the Gus Malzahn Auburn Tigers?
Those two incredible plays (the one against Alabama, the other against Georgia) were the difference between a 10-win regular season and a 12-win regular season. Both the Miracle and the Prayer led to wins, as was the subsequent SEC Championship Game against Missouri that Auburn played its way into thanks to those plays.
If the Kick Six didn’t go down and that Bama game had gone to overtime, anything could have happened. But even if Auburn had won it, a 10-win regular season would be the high water mark for the program under Malzahn in the years since. Auburn’s recent win totals: eight, six, eight, 10, and now on tracking toward something between six and eight.
Those are really good regular seasons for a ton of programs. But when you inject the level of emotion that Auburn’s 2013 included, and being this close to a national championship in the 2013 title game against Florida State, it starts to look like lightning a bottle as time wears on.
The Tigers are 23-23 against Power 5 teams since the Kick Six. Compare that to this company:
Auburn is 3-2 against LSU since the Kick Six — losing to LSU comebacks in each of the last two seasons — plus 1-3 against Alabama, 1-4 against Georgia, and 2-3 against Mississippi State.
All of this is not to say that Malzahn isn’t a good coach. But much of what’s made him successful isn’t working right now.
Malzahn is an offensive innovator by leaning on the old reliables, and I don’t mean that as a just a figure of speech. Malzahn’s offense borrows single-wing tactics that were en vogue 100 years ago. And the problem is that it’s some of those schemes that are failing Auburn in 2018. It’s a huge deal, given that the Tigers make their bones running the ball:
In three of Gus Malzahn’s first five years as head coach, the Tigers finished between fourth and 17th nationally in yards per carry, plus two top-11 finishes in his three years as OC.
His Tigers have never been as bad as they’re pacing to be through six weeks of 2018: 82nd out of 130 FBS teams at a 4.18-yard average. And they haven’t even gotten all the way into the hardest part of the SEC schedule yet.
And the last part of that passage is key, because Auburn’s schedule is just going to get tougher. Tennessee was supposed to be a layup. Instead, it was a loss, prompting real worry about how bad things could get in the home stretch. College and Magnolia writes:
Auburn now sits at 4-3, and there are serious — SERIOUS — questions from everyone about the capability of Gus Malzahn and his staff to keep things together and rally this team. It won’t get any easier with Texas A&M, Georgia, and Alabama all left on the schedule. The Tigers get Ole Miss on the road next Saturday for another 11 AM kickoff in Oxford.
With that schedule, Auburn doesn’t have much of a margin for error coming home. It has to go 2-3 the rest of the way with three difficult games, one layup (against Liberty), and a tossup against Ole Miss. That’s just to get to bowl eligibility.
This is where success can work against a coach.
Because although Auburn’s 2017 season was excellent, the Tigers showed that they couldn’t keep that level of play up. They’ve barely approached it since.
Whether Auburn will be OK with Malzahn looking more like a good coach than a championship-level coach remains to be seen. But it would cost Auburn more than $32 million to fire him this season or right after it, thanks to an extension he signed after the Tigers’ loss to Georgia in 2017’s SEC title game.
2013 seems like a long time ago.
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