HOG CALLS

Auburn, Missouri go from rags to riches

Missouri coach Gary Pinkel (top left) and first-year Auburn coach Gus Malzahn (top right) have guided their programs to the SEC championship game after both Tigers teams had losing records in 2012, while Mark Stoops (bottom left) and Bret Bielema (right) could not better their teams' records in their first seasons at Kentucky and Arkansas respectively.

FAYETTEVILLE - Saturday’s SEC Championship game in Atlanta matches 11-1, 7-1 West and East champion Auburn and Missouri teams that a year ago floundered 3-9 overall and 0-8 in the SEC and 5-7 overall and 2-6 in the SEC.

To the Razorbacks fans, players and coaches at Arkansas, just concluded in 2013 matching the 2012 Auburn Tigers’ 3-9, 0-8, the 2013 Auburn and Missouri turnarounds ought to provide some measured hope and inspiration.

Rags to riches can be achieved even in the all powerful SEC, Auburn and Missouri have proven.

Then again, misery often repeats itself. Kentucky with new Coach Mark Stoops in 201 3 matched the same 2-10, 0-8 that got former Coach Joker Phillips fired in 2012.

With rare exceptions, Phillips’ Kentucky fate has marked the usual end to the head football coaches’ tenure at the SEC’s only school unabashedly more basketball oriented than football oriented.

Gus Malzahn at Auburn and Gary Pinkel at Missouri did have some advantages helping them turn their teams around that brand new coaches Bret Bielema at Arkansas and former Florida State defensive coordinator Stoops at Kentucky did not as their inherited programs continued to skid.

Pinkel is in his 13th year coaching Mizzou. While his Tigers were jolted by the 2012 adjustment switching from the Big 12 to the SEC, Pinkel’s teams from 2007 through 2011 went 40-19 including12-2 in 2007 capped by demolishing Arkansas in the Cotton Bowl.

Obviously Pinkel is accustomed to winning and his Mizzou players accustomed to his coaching.

Malzahn is Auburn’s first-year head coach but very familiar with the school.

He was former Auburn Coach Gene Chizik’s offensive coordinator from 2009 to 2011, which included 2010 Heisman Trophy winner Cam Newton and the 2010 national championship.

A successful 2012 at Arkansas State proved Malzahn as a college head coach and returned him at Auburn to personnel he knew well. Firsthand post Newton in 2011 and from afar in 2012, Malzahn knew Auburn desperately needed a quarterback. He recruited a great one in junior college transfer Nick Marshall.

Bielema, toting the best head coaching pedigree (68-24 from 2006-2012 at Wisconsin) of all these aforementioned coaches when first hired to their current positions, inherited a program that Razorbacks fans know too well has plunged. The decline began as the Bobby Petrino regime ended in a motorcycle accident revealing his beyond repair breach of UA hiring policy and eventually exposing a suspected lack of beyond 2012 senior class recruiting.

The young talent shortage manifested a year early when the injury-plagued 2012 Hogs foundered 4-8, 2-6 under John L. Smith.

Bielema’s 2013 record retreated even from Smith’s 2012, but there is reason to believe Bielema has advanced the program’s discipline and academics and fostered players’ respect for the head coach that will make them his chief on-campus recruiters, often the greatest of recruiting assets.

That’s a long way from Malzahn’s and Pinkel’s 2013 success, but at least in those phases for 2014 Bielema catches up to their 2013 start.

Sports, Pages 18 on 12/02/2013