The Malzahn weirdness

What is it about football in the state of Alabama that produces such a high frequency of truly bizarre situations?

Tommy Tuberville was a fired man walking when his administrators took a (supposedly) private flight to Louisville to meet with Bobby Petrino. The Tony Franklin experiment blew up in short (and embarrassing) order.

And not even last year's BCS title was enough to keep the weirdness away from Auburn for long. It's good for Clemson because this is the team these Tigers will face in the 2012 season opener in Atlanta, and those Tigers are now missing their offensive and defensive coordinators.

Offensive guru Gus Malzahn, the toast of the college football world this time last year, is now the head coach at Arkansas State.

Arkansas State.

The guy seemed like a good candidate at North Carolina ... until he wasn't. He seemed like the guy at Kansas ... until he wasn't.

This mysterious fall to the Sun Belt makes you think his wife's craziness during this interview played a fairly integral role in the apparent disintegration of his head-coaching stock.

Malzahn didn't do a whole bunch to dispute the notion during this sitdown with reporters late last week.

"Any time you're in the public eye, a lot of things can happen," Malzahn said. "Kristi has been a great coach's wife and I would not be where I'm at today. I'm behind her 100 percent. She's behind me 100 percent. We're a team."

He was asked if the video may have cost him other head coaching jobs.

"I'll say this: Over the last year and a half there have been a lot of jobs that came open and I said the right place at the right time. From a coach's standpoint, we look at it different than probably the media or fans do," Malzahn said. "A certain job may look good to certain people, but we've got to ask ourselves, is it a place you can recruit and you're familiar with. Obviously, Arkansas State is that for me."

Last year, Malzahn turned down $3 million to coach Vanderbilt. There's no way Arkansas State is going to come close paying him the $1.3 million he was making at Auburn.

As we reported recently, Malzahn was confident enough in his chances of landing the Kansas job that he approached Chad Morris about running the Jayhawks' offense. The opportunity never came, and now Morris is the highest-paid assistant in college football at $1.3 million.

So it's reasonable to assume that The Interview cost him some jobs and a lot of money.

Here's a question I haven't seen anyone ask:

Did it cost him his job at Auburn?

LW