Chizik: Auburn Still 1 Recruiting Class Away at LinesMaker

Chizik: Auburn Still 1 Recruiting Class Away

AUBURN (CFB/Newsfeed) – The steady drum­beat of con­struc­tion equip­ment pounded through Gene Chizik’s office Thurs­day morn­ing, a sign of the work in progress at Auburn.

That national cham­pi­onship 15-plus months ago didn’t mean the Tigers had fin­ished the rebuild­ing job remark­ably ahead of sched­ule. To Chizik, Auburn’s fourth-year coach, a pos­i­tive sign his pro­gram is clos­ing in on that com­ple­tion came dur­ing the spring with all the com­pe­ti­tion for start­ing jobs on a team that has only a hand­ful of vacancies.

“If you look at our senior class this past year, it’s very rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the crater there in our num­bers,” Chizik told The Asso­ci­ated Press. “We’ve had to really sig­nif­i­cantly work through the last cou­ple of years in terms of build­ing our num­bers up in recruit­ing. We’re def­i­nitely on track. This upcom­ing recruit­ing class is going to be huge in what we con­sider solid­i­fy­ing four really great foun­da­tional recruit­ing classes.

“We feel like this fourth one is going to get us where we need to be.”

He’s not count­ing the first class that was largely assem­bled before his hir­ing by Tommy Tuberville’s staff. Even with 17 return­ing starters on offense and defense, Auburn’s youth move­ment continues.

Some 70 per­cent of the Tigers’ ros­ter of schol­ar­ship play­ers is com­prised of fresh­men or sopho­mores, a slight increase from 2011.

Progress hasn’t been too painful, on the field. Auburn has won 31 games in Chizik’s first three sea­sons, includ­ing the Cam Newton-led national cham­pi­onship team in 2010.

Dressed in a gray pin-striped suit with pur­ple tie and pur­ple and white ker­chief, Chizik mostly man­ages to ignore the noise that rep­re­sents the sounds of the equip­ment room’s expan­sion directly beneath his spa­cious office. It’s one part of the ath­letic facility’s upgrades that has already included the suite of offices where he and ath­letic direc­tor Jay Jacobs work, not to men­tion a new indoor prac­tice build­ing a year ago.

“It’s going to be really nice,” Chizik said.

On the field, Chizik dealt with the first big makeover to his coach­ing staff. He has hired offen­sive coor­di­na­tor Scot Loef­fler, defen­sive coor­di­na­tor Brian Van­Gorder and sec­ondary coach Willie Martinez.

Chizik is also seek­ing a start­ing quar­ter­back and a replace­ment for All-Southeastern Con­fer­ence tail­back Mike Dyer. Gus Malzahn took his fast-paced offense – and ulti­mately Dyer – to Arkansas State for his first col­lege head coach­ing job.

Chizik said the biggest dif­fer­ences in the offense will be much more fre­quent hud­dles and two-tight end for­ma­tions and fewer shot­gun snaps.

“Other than that, foot­ball is foot­ball,” he said. “Is that more of the stan­dard in people’s eyes? Yeah, because you’re not no-huddling every snap and you’re not fast-pacing every snap. But you’ve got to remem­ber, we didn’t fast-pace every snap last year. That’s the image and that’s kind of the impres­sion but we didn’t do that every snap. We didn’t do it in 2010; we didn’t go fast every snap.”

Sopho­more quar­ter­back Kiehl Fra­zier got a chance to get an upper hand this spring on Clint Mose­ley, who was lim­ited by a sore shoulder.

Chizik’s review was mixed about whether the spring con­vinced him that Fra­zier could be a suc­cess­ful starter in the South­east­ern Conference.

“I cer­tainly saw flashes that would indi­cate that he could, no ques­tion about that,” the coach said. “I feel like I saw some things this spring that indi­cated that he has the poten­tial for that. As we all know, that poten­tial word is a dan­ger­ous word, but we saw flashes of exactly why we recruited him. He’s got a lot of devel­op­ment to go but he’s got a chance to be a good player in this league.”

The Tigers have stock­piled block­ers for who­ever emerges as the No. 1 quar­ter­back in pre­sea­son camp. They have signed 10 offen­sive line­men and six defen­sive line­men in the past two years. Those areas have been ques­tion marks since defen­sive tackle Nick Fair­ley and four offen­sive line starters departed from the national title team.

“I feel like that’s where every­thing starts and I really feel like that’s where we’re mov­ing in the right direc­tion,” Chizik said. “Obvi­ously, recruit­ing is wher­ever they are on paper when you sign them. But just poten­tially on what we feel like down the road they will become in terms of the devel­op­ment of each one of those young guys. I think we’re in a really good place right now – on both sides.”

Chizik finds plenty of pos­i­tives in returnees get­ting chal­lenged for their start­ing spots.

“What we’ve expe­ri­enced in the spring, which gives our coach­ing staff a lot of opti­mism, is that we’re finally get­ting true com­pe­ti­tion at a lot of dif­fer­ent posi­tions,” he said. “Our ros­ter is built up enough in num­bers. Although they’re still young, they’re tal­ented, and they’re able to com­pete for jobs. That’s where you want to get to. We’re finally start­ing to get close to that point.”

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