AUBURN, Ala. -- There are no roller coasters in Auburn. But on national signing day, the buildings scattered around Jordan-Hare Stadium should have come equipped with seat belts and shoulder harnesses.
The wild ride for the Auburn Tigers football coaching staff started at 9:10 a.m. ET Wednesday, climbing to the peak of signing the nation’s top-rated high school football player, defensive end Byron Cowart out of Armwood (Florida) High. The climb continued 80 minutes later, when another ESPN 50 player, linebacker Jeffery Holland, also signed on.
Each announcement was met with screams and cheers that echoed throughout the campus, shouts that started in the coaching staff’s war room.
“We just got better!” Malzahn announced to his staff moments after Cowart yanked an Auburn ball cap onto his head live on ESPNU.
“A lot better!” replied Auburn’s new defensive coordinator Will Muschamp, the recently departed Florida head coach.
But by the time the lunch spread was laid out in the Rane Reception Room, sandwiches served beneath Bo Jackson’s Heisman Trophy, there were too many nervous stomachs in the building to do much eating. Cowart’s national letter of intent, the paperwork that makes a player’s announcement official, had yet to come across the war room fax machine.
“Yeah,” Malzhan admitted hours later, “There was little drama for y’all, wasn’t there?”
Drama for y’all? More like drama for all.
Cowart was the signee that had catapulted Auburn into the top 10 of the 2015 recruiting classes. Cowart was the school’s first-ever top-ranked recruit. Cowart was the kid expected to lead a conga line of Floridians onto the Plains, followed by Holland and other potential Florida-to-Auburn Muschamp devotees such as Martez Ivey (No. 5) and CeCe Jefferson (No. 9).
But while Cowart’s signed letter sat in the Armwood High School office unfaxed, Ivey and Jefferson both chose Florida. Meanwhile, the corner of the Internet dedicated to college football recruiting caught fire.
There was a report that Cowart was confused as to why his high school coach, Sean Callahan, simply hadn’t sent it in yet. Then there was a report that there were actually two signed letters, one each for Auburn and Florida, both sitting in the school office while Callahan waited on the green light for one or the other. Then there was the chatter that Cowart was getting cold feet, waiting to see what Jefferson was going to do before he made his final decision. And to cap it all, there were the conspiracy theories that said Callahan was holding up the whole process because his son also happens to be the new defensive backs coach at Florida.
Callahan gave one version of what happened. Cowart gave another. Both seemed agitated about the experience, particularly Callahan, who eventually told ESPN.com he was “sick of being in the middle of all this.”
In the end, no one at Auburn cared about the long and winding road that Cowart’s letter took to finally click and whir its way through the receiving end of the Tigers' war room fax machine. The staff was just relieved that it finally did.
Fittingly, it was Muschamp that pulled it off the printer at 4:06 p.m. ET, nearly seven full hours after Cowart’s televised announcement. He handed it to Malzahn just as the head coach was hitting the stairs to go down the auditorium to host his mandatory signing day news conference.
He blew in the door with a smile that had been missing since morning and started his meeting with the media by announcing that Auburn had indeed signed the nation’s No. 1 high school football player. “We need to be able to rush the quarterback,” he said of a unit that mustered fewer than two sacks per game in 2014 and ranked 12th in the SEC in passing defense.
“Today we added players to do that.”
“Honestly, we felt pretty good about the class all day, but it didn’t come together as early as we were expecting, obviously,” he explained after the news conference, speaking of a 27-player haul. “But yes, we felt good about it. We feel good about it. But we’re also glad it’s over with.”
Ultimately, six defensive players came from Florida. Between them they share two common traits among the group. First, they are very good. Second, they can’t stop talking about “Coach Will” and “T-Rob,” speaking of Muschamp, who got his start in coaching as a graduate assistant at Auburn in 1995 and served at defensive coordinator in ’06-07, and Travaris Robinson, the defensive backs coach who came with Muschamp from Florida and played safety for Auburn in 1999-2002.
“[Muschamp] got us in the game with guys that we weren’t in the game with until he was hired,” Malzahn explained. “And he’s the best defensive mind in football. Players see that. And they want to play for a guy like that.”
Wednesday’s recruiting results only bolstered that theory. Auburn didn’t get every player on the Auburn/Florida fence, but they got half. And they were in the mix for them all, especially the one with the world’s slowest fax machine.
