Watching Auburn coach Tommy Tuberville last Saturday and listening to Arkansas coach Bobby Petrino last Monday confirmed a belief in believing.

It underscored a head coach, even a great head coach, coaching what he doesn’t truly believe won’t be truly successful.

Fads, fans, recruiting, administration pressure... any number of things can make a coach switch gears.

Sticking to your guns and by your staff can be tough, Petrino acknowledged, when you struggle as his Hogs struggled, particularly defensively, until beating Auburn last Saturday heading into this Saturday’s game at Kentucky.

“ I think it plays a lot more to the coaching staff of staying with what we’re doing, staying with what we believe in, ” Petrino said of the improvement of defensive coordinator Willy Robinson’s crew. “ That’s probably the hardest thing when you are not having success is staying with what you believe. ”

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Let a coach switch too drastically from his comfort zone, and usually you’ll see what you saw with Camden native Tuberville last Saturday.

The coach whose approval of a run-oriented, augmented by play-action pass, offense carried Auburn to a 14-0 season in 2004 now supervises an offensively indecipherable hybrid shambles. Auburn crosses bits of the offense it used to run with the Spread offense Tuberville felt compelled to adopt but couldn’t adapt.

Now with new Spread formation offensive coordinator Tony Franklin fired, Tuberville coaches a confused team that once ranked No. 8 but now tumbles out of the Top 20 and just became the first SEC victim for Petrino’s Razorbacks.

Though Auburn has beaten archrival Alabama six straight years, the now No. 2 nationally ranked Crimson Tide has made considerable recruiting noise under second-year Alabama coach Nick Saban. Tuberville apparently felt leaping on the Spread formation craze was the way to combat it.

He is far from the first and won’t be the last successful coach to abandon what he does best for what others think he best should do.

It happens to the very best of them. Even a Hall of Fame coach like retired Arkansas coach / athletic director Frank Broyles.

The Delaware T formation was the college football craze when a young Broyles came to Arkansas in 1958 after one year coaching Missouri.

The new coach installed the new formation he hadn’t run and promptly went 0-6.

He won the last four switching back to the offense he knew and proceeded to win or share Southwest Conference titles from 1959-61, go 9-2 as the SWC runnerup in ‘ 62 and won the national championship at 11-0 in ‘ 64 after a down 5-5 year in ‘ 63.

Even as a veteran coach, Broyles wasn’t immune to trying what’s hot though for him it was not.

Both in 1973 and ‘ 74, Broyles opened campaigns coaching the Wishbone that was then sweeping the country like the leisure suit.

Broyles’ Wishbone lasted two games in ‘ 73 and didn’t tarry much longer in ‘ 74.

In 1975, he found an offense he that liked, the Veer, and a dynamic offensive coordinator he liked, Bo Rein, and won the SWC and the Cotton Bowl.

Think back on some unworkable, under-pressure Arkansas head coach / offense and offensive coordinator pairings like Jack Crowe and Greg Davis in 1992, Danny Ford and Kay Stephenson in 1997 and Houston Nutt and Gus Malzahn in 2006.

Nutt and Malzahn did win 10 games and the SEC West together in 2006.

However reviewing all the distractions accompanying their pairing, those 10 victories seem most to belong to Darren McFadden and Felix Jones and their teammates grimly tired of two losing seasons.

What Stephenson accomplished in the NFL before his Arkansas days and what Davis and Malzahn have and are accomplishing at Texas and Tulsa since their Arkansas tenures prove they are good coaches with good systems.

However even good coaches and good systems aren’t a good mix with a head coach in only reluctant accord that what’s been good for them will be good for him and good for his team.

That seems unlikely ever to be a problem for Petrino.

“ I learned a long time ago, ” Petrino said, “ when you start changing and you want to change this and you want to change that, you are never going to improve. ”

He said he learned that creed as a young assistant.

“ I can’t even remember who the head coach was but things weren’t going very good and one of his biggest messages was, ‘ Let’s just keep doing what we do, ’” Petrino said. “‘ If you keep making changes, then you never ever show improvement. ’ That message always stuck with me. ”

A head coach’s core beliefs always should.

Nate Allen covers University of Arkansas athletics for the Northwest Arkansas Times.