How I would Fix This Team: Part Crow

So it’s the bye week and we are supposed to write articles about how we would “fix” this team. I think that’s all well and good, but I really shouldn’t pretend to know more about football than the coaches of this team. That is ludicrously presumptuous at best and laughably intolerable at worst. Instead, I am pretending that I am now the Sporting Director of Auburn Football and my wallet is bottomless and I have been asked to make the hires necessary to finish this season strong and build for the future.

Crow, are you saying we should fire the coach we have? Pish posh, no. If the team across the state has taught us anything, it’s that having one head coach on staff is child’s play. What you need is a team of coaches all titled “analyst” and all adding intricacies to your attack. You need fresh eyes with winning experience to take a look at your practices and game film. You need another winner in the locker room. So, as acting Sporting Director of Auburn Football, the first call I make is to the one man who has “fixed” so many teams.

Photo by Alex Livesey/Getty Images

Pep Guardiola. The man who broke world football. This coach has won at every level with a style that decimates even the best defenses on the planet. Everywhere he goes, his teams win the league in his second year. No matter where they were the year prior. He is a soccer savant whose quick passing and open space game would be perfect for Ryan Davis and Jarrett Stidham. Auburn would nickel and dime teams all the way down the field until it caught the safety sleeping, then BAM! Deep Ball for 6. Is that Chip’s offensive philosophy from Arizona State? Maybe. Imagine bringing in someone who could harness the egos in the Auburn locker room the way he took the egos of Xavi, Iniesta, Messi, Dani Alves, Thierry Henry, and others of the most brilliant and highest paid soccer players in the world and made the 2008-2009 Barcelona squad a single organism designed to kill and score loads of points. Remember scoring points? Wouldn’t that be fun?

Look at him addressing his Manchester City FC squad after they decimated all in their path last season in the Premier league:

He is addressing a room full of spoiled soccer stars and they are enraptured with he has to say, why? because he is the most technically sound coach on the planet and what he says wins games. He destroyed football.

Now, on to a more serious addition. There is only one rule Gus Malzahn needs to live by from here on out and it comes from Russell Crowe’s best movie:

Win the crowd, Gus. Win the crowd. Whatever it takes to turn Jordan-Hare Stadium back into the most teeth-rattlingly loud building in college sports. Auburn fans are fickle, yes, but they are loud as a chainsaw cutting a barrel full of old batteries. Get the crowd on your side, win the game.

Cheering for a personal foul penalty at Ole Miss showed Auburn fans are thirsty for a coach who shows some fire on the sidelines. If Gus comes out next game and starts jawing at Jimbo like Stone Cold Steve Austin wearing only a sweater vest, you watch the Auburn crowd come to its feet.

Gus has won this crowd before, and it was glorious. He can do it again. Trick plays and style points and all-out blitzes are exactly what it will take.

Lastly, we need a change of philosophy at offensive line. You know it’s been bad, I know it’s been bad, I’m sure they are tired of hearing about how bad they’ve been. We need to bring in another analyst who has a proven record of turning raw offensive line talent into elite players: Sandra Bullock.

I know, that’s a fake movie. But she takes a kid off the street and makes him a 5 star recruit in one practice. We can’t take 4 star recruits and get them to block Alabama State after being on campus for months. Imagine what she could do with our players! Blind Side Mom is a proven developer of talent and it’s a joke frankly that she doesn’t have a gig yet. Get her out there with her folksy analogies and southern charm and we will have an impenetrable wall for Stidham to stand behind and find wide open Ryan Davis running a free and open Pep Guardiola-inspired attack. That will win the crowd. Gus will win freedom from the hot seat.

Anyway, that’s my two cents on how I could fix this team with two hires and a philosophy change. If you don’t like it, tweet @RyanSSterritt and tell him why.