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Houston Nutt, right, laughs with offensive coordinator Gus Malzahn, left, during a news conference at the Broyles Center in Fayetteville, Ark., Friday, Dec. 9, 2005. Nutt hired Malzahn to lead the Arkansas Razorbacks' offense after he led Springdale High (Ark.) School to a 14-0 season in 2005. (AP Photo/April L. Brown

(Auburn coach Gus Malzahn's rise through the high school ranks was celebrated last week with his induction into the Arkansas High School Coaches Association Hall of Fame. As Malzahn approaches his first season as an SEC head coach, AL.com takes a road trip through Arkansas to chronicle Malzahn's ascension from Hughes to Springdale that included several championship runs and the development of his hurry-up, no-huddle offense -- all before an eventual jump into the college coaching ranks.)

FAYETTEVILLE, Arkansas -- Mitch Mustain grew up an Arkansas fan, and only needed one reason -- no matter how fleeting -- to sign and play quarterback for the Razorbacks.

For the consensus No. 1 rated quarterback recruit in 2005 out of Springdale (Ark.) High, that choice was cemented on Dec. 9 of that year when Springdale head coach Gus Malzahn was hired by Houston Nutt as the Razorbacks' offensive coordinator.

Ultimately, the bond between Mustain and Malzahn could not withstand the turbulence of an embattled head coach thrashing to maintain control of his program.

That lead to the exits of all three, carving a new path that within time would lead Malzahn to the head coaching job at Auburn.

"There was just a long time that I think neither one of us felt the need to say anything about it and went our own ways and didn't really talk for a long time," Mustain told AL.com last week in an exclusive interview. "You know, things chill out and time heals wounds. We've moved on from it and now we talk about what he's doing, what I'm doing and what's going to happen in the future."

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No one could hide their excitement in December of 2005. Malzahn's hurry-up, no-huddle offense was making its way to the Southeastern Conference, and for an Arkansas fan base looking to accelerate and improve a stagnant offense that resulted in back-to-back losing seasons, it seemed to be the perfect fit.

The timing seemed perfect, too, for all the parties involved.

Nutt was hearing it from the fans, and Malzahn was the hottest name in the state. In fact, Malzahn's "Springdale Five" – the moniker for his quintet of hot recruits – were seemingly talked about more than the Razorbacks' games from week to week.

Nutt's popularity was waning before the hiring of Malzahn, a move which seemed to reinvigorate the fans' belief this homegrown Arkansas coach was ready to prove himself at the collegiate level with Nutt's support.

“I’m going to let Gus go. I’m going to turn him loose,” Nutt told reporters during SEC Media Days in 2006. “I don’t think you can mess with a play-caller and veto every play. I think you’re going to disrupt, you’re going to hurt (if you do that)."

A new era had dawned at Arkansas, but could Malzahn's high school offense work on the college level?

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Gus Malzahn answers a question during a news conference called by coach Houston Nutt to announce Malzahn's hire as Arkansas' offensive coordinator at the Broyles Center in Fayetteville, Ark., Friday, Dec. 9, 2005. (AP Photo/April L. Brown)

Mustain was the biggest quarterback to sign with the Razorbacks in arguably a generation. Fans couldn't help but dream of an SEC championship led by the laser arm of Mustain, the play-calling of Malzahn and Nutt's penchant for rallying teams.

Beneath the surface, something else was going on. It seemed the offense -- the plan and the promise -- was already falling apart at the seams.

It was late May 2006. Incoming players from Springdale had just graduated high school and were moving into their Arkansas dorms. Mustain and receiver Damian Williams were the first Springdale players to arrive on campus with plenty of enthusiasm.

They began offseason conditioning work, but once they got the playbook they began to hear about changes in the plans from the coaches' offices.

"We went from, 'Let's install the whole thing,' to 'let's install this half of it, these parts of it,' and then we started mixing the verbiage," Mustain said. "We kept the old protections, we kept the old run scheme, we incorporated a bit of the passing game here. We kept the old formations. It was kind of a cluster."

Mustain said Arkansas' old guard was already backpedaling from the thought of handing the offense completely to Malzahn.

Seven years later, Nutt denies such promises being made.

"It wasn't promised," Nutt said. "What we said we were going to do is, eventually, we would get to that fast-pace offense."

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Arkansas opened the '06 season against Southern California. The game was entertaining for the first half, but the Trojans could not be stopped offensively.

A 50-14 final score followed, which wasn't much of a surprise considering the 70-17 blowout top-ranked USC put together against the Hogs the year prior in Los Angeles.

One positive came in the fourth quarter when Mustain and Williams made their collegiate debuts. The dwindling crowd perked up when they saw their prize recruits step onto the field. They were cheering louder than they had all night inside Razorback Stadium.

Arkansas' football future was on the field, and the few fans remaining couldn't walk out now anticipating happier days.

Mustain began with a 4-yard pass, then a 1-yard pass. A draw play to Felix Jones resulted in a 23-yard gain and suddenly what had been a stagnant offense was nearing a touchdown.

Mustain then rifled a pass 43 yards down the right sideline to Williams, which set up Mustain's 4-yard quarterback keeper to cap his first collegiate drive with a touchdown run of 4 yards.

"You are witnessing the beginning of what could be the Mitch Mustain era at Arkansas," ESPN announcer Mike Patrick said just before the scoring play.

Arkansas football appeared to have a promising future in retrospect. Mustain shared the backfield with future NFL running backs Darren McFadden, Jones and Peyton Hillis. The offense reflected Malzahn's style on that final drive, which included several hallmarks of his hurry-up, no-huddle offense.

Mustain won over the fans and, a few days later, the starting job. The Razorbacks would win their next 10 games, including a 27-10 upset of No. 3 Auburn on the road.

The offense seemed to be clicking, yet trouble was bubbling below even while the Hogs seemed to be chugging right along.

Nutt tugged on the play-calling reins when he noticed the 11-minute disparity in time of possession after the loss in Week 1. Malzahn's offense concerns itself little with time of possession, but Nutt found it hard to side with that belief following the 36-point loss.

"I thought Gus did a good job gradually introducing some hurry, hurry, some no huddle," Nutt said. "But we just couldn't live on it. What we tried to do is have a happy medium between both and that's what disappointed the freshmen."

Behind the scenes, Mustain said, the playbook was a confusing mess.

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Arkansas freshman quarterback Mitch Mustain (16) celebrates the Razorbacks' 27-10 victory over No. 2 Auburn on Saturday, Oct. 7, 2006 at Jordan-Hare Stadium in Auburn. (Mobile Press-Register file photo)

Like any popular assistant coach, Malzahn made a few stops in the preseason to talk to Arkansas booster clubs and at civic events.

He discussed the misconceptions of his offense, which many believed would lead to the Razorbacks throwing the football more often.

Near his hometown, Malzahn answered a reporter's question at an event in Van Buren about the offense. He pointed to the stacked backfield and how running the football should be a priority, knocking down any preconceived notions that he was going to throw the football on nearly every down.

Still, a lot of Malzahn's offense lost in translation as Nutt and others tried to mesh the old with the new. For one, Malzahn's offense, like any, starts with some core concepts and formations that lead to others. He also refers to players by numbers rather than letters, something that helped the offense branch into further areas of terminology.

"It seemed like things were getting pulled a little more and a little more," Mustain said. "If nothing else we just never reconciled the two offenses with each other and I think that was very problematic. You had the older guys who ran the old system not really understanding the new stuff we were doing. In order to understand the entire offense -- any offense -- you need to understand the concepts in full. You need to understand what the core is, what the base of the offense is in order to work everything else. Everything else spins off it. If you add your core formations, protections, routes and then from there you have your core concepts.

"We never had that."

Outside Arkansas' program, it appeared a shape-shifting cluster of ideas. It mostly worked, of course, with McFadden and Jones toting the football and carving up defenses. The 10-game winning streak, after all, was not achieved with luck and bad play-calling. The offense, though, did not look like Malzahn's system at Springdale and what he would later utilize as an assistant first at Tulsa and then Auburn.

"I knew Gus' system," said Don Struebing, Malzahn's offensive line coach at Springdale High. "There were times I saw some trademarks and at times not so much. Because of his character, he never talked about any of that -- to me or anyone else. Regardless of the situation, one of his coin mottos is to take the high road. That's what he's always going to do."

Malzahn never hinted publicly about there being any problems behind the scenes. Rumors of Nutt ripping the play-calling duties out of Malzahn's hands and tension between Malzahn and Nutt's longtime assistants spilled onto the Internet late in the season.

Today, Nutt admits there was a "little bit" of tension, but only because Malzahn cared so much about his players from Springdale on the roster.

"We treated him very well, very respectful," Nutt said of Malzahn. "It was just a tough transition because their guys were always used to having success. You can't always just jump in from Friday night hero and be a Saturday night hero."

Mustain was 7-0 as a starter heading into a road game at South Carolina, when suddenly some past comments would pull him to the ground. A book chronicling Springdale's historic run in '05 was hitting bookshelves, and deep inside was a passage in which Mustain was critical of Nutt, his future college coach.

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Robert Johnson, left, was named Arkansas' starter in preseason camp in 2006. Casey Dick, right, took the starting job from Johnson during the 2005 season, but a back injury in the offseason sidelined Dick for the first half of the 2006 season. Freshman Mitch Mustain (not pictured) became the starting quarterback following a 50-14 loss to Southern Cal in Week 1, and held on to the starting job until a late-season game at South Carolina, where Dick would take over following an interception on Mustain's first throw of the game. (AP Photo/April L. Brown)

The late-season game in 2005 didn't change much for the Razorbacks that season, but the post-game interview did draw some attention.

Arkansas rallied back from a 10-point deficit to win 28-17 at Ole Miss thanks to freshman quarterback Casey Dick, who threw three touchdown passes in the second half. Nutt was under fire from the fan base for his conservative play calling, and in a postgame radio interview the excitable Nutt made a few comments about a game-changing play that rubbed fans -- and Mustain -- the wrong way.

"That was a called play and I called it Chuck," Nutt said. "Hey, Chuck, and I made some good calls today."

Mustain, watching it unfold on a television newscast, couldn't believe what he was hearing and referred to Nutt as a "dork."

The comment was included in "Year of the Dog: One Year, One Team, One Goal."

Mustain maintains today the comments Nutt made were "undoubtedly unprofessional" for a win against an "average" Ole Miss team that provided Arkansas its first SEC win in six tries. The book excerpt leaked prior to a trip to South Carolina, and Mustain said he started hearing rumblings Nutt wasn't happy with the comment.

Nutt said this week he was alerted of the book a week or two before the trip to South Carolina when he asked Malzahn about Mustain's recent struggles at practice.

Mustain later heard he would be replaced by Dick the very moment he made a mistake.

Dick, Nutt contends, was injured most of the season after recovering from a back injury he suffered in the spring and had been ready to play for at least two weeks.

On his very first throw, Mustain threw an interception, and Nutt immediately replaced Mustain with Dick, who would start at quarterback the remainder of the season.

"And that was that," Mustain said. "I got pulled from that one and there wasn't a word said, no corrective measures taken. I would think there would be, especially with a freshman quarterback. That was the end of my time there."

Arkansas defeated South Carolina and capped the 10-game winning streak with victories against No. 15 Tennessee and unranked Mississippi State. The Razorbacks jumped as high as No. 5 in the polls and won the SEC West title, but lost their next three games with Dick as the starter.

"That's when things changed in Mitch's mind," Nutt said. "He's just a freshman. He's fine. I told him, look, there are a lot of things going on and I don't care about the book. I'm not worried about the book. I'm just worried about winning games right now and we've got a real chance to get to Atlanta. I want you to hang in there and I"m going to go with Casey. We beat (Steve) Spurrier, but from that time on it was just a bad relationship because he was a little bit bitter."

Meanwhile, frustration was mounting in Springdale. Parents of the Springdale players on the roster expressed frustration with athletics director Frank Broyles. Tight end Ben Cleveland's father, Rick, told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that they were sold a "bill of goods" by Nutt when he promised to install Malzahn's offense.

Arkansas' Ben Cleveland clutches a touchdown pass from Mitch Mustain during the second overtime of the Razorbacks' 24-23 victory over Alabama on Sept. 23, 2006 at Reynolds Razorback Stadium in Fayetteville, Ark. The touchdown tied the game, and Arkansas won when Jeremy Davis kicked the extra point. (Mobile Press-Register file photo)

"Our boys are used to catching 60 passes a year," he told the newspaper. "They want to go to a college where they get the same opportunity."

Still, Arkansas was very successful that season running the jumbled offense that sided with the conservative pages in the playbook as the season progressed. A 38-28 loss to Florida in the SEC Championship Game was especially heartbreaking.

Yet you could easily see Malzahn's influence that season.

A swinging gate trick play and, later, a touchdown pass from Mustain to Cleveland against Alabama helped the Razorbacks to a 24-23 win in overtime. Malzahn also installed the "Wild Hog" formation, which utilized McFadden at quarterback. It was a variation of the Wildcat formation Malzahn introduced at Springdale High in 2002.

At Arkansas, the Wild Hog caught the attention of fans and the Heisman voters, who mostly placed McFadden second on their ballots behind Ohio State's Troy Smith. McFadden also broke the school's rushing record for a single season.

History tends to muddy the waters, of course. Some credit David Lee, Malzahn's replacement in 2007, as the coach who made the Wildcat formation a fad in college football and beyond. In reality, Malzahn was doing it long before anyone else was utilizing it in important situations.

"We just basically started with the advent of running the jet sweep," Struebing said of the 2002 season at Springdale. "You see that a whole lot these days. We said, hey, let's fake the fly and run the quarterback keeper right up the gut. So, let's put our best athlete back there. That's how it started."

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The writing seemed to be on the wall -- and on Internet message boards -- those final weeks of the season.

Players and coaches usually kept their lips tight around reporters. Mustain says Malzahn was "pretty well marginalized in that system as well and wasn't going to stay around."

Williams left the team following the SEC Championship game and enrolled at USC before the Razorbacks lost to Wisconsin in the Capital One Bowl.

"I remember us talking a few times and it was apparent to me, from our conversations, that even he was kind of at a loss," Mustain said of Malzahn. "He had no control over anything or what was going on."

The Internet caught fire again in December, when an email from a booster with the subject line "Hello Mr. Interception King" emerged on a message board. Teresa Prewett, the author of the email, sent the derogatory message to Mustain's email address. Among other things, she called Mustain a "cancer."

Two months later it was revealed Prewett was not only an Arkansas booster, but a friend of the Nutt family.

Mustain played in the bowl game, completing 5-of-10 passes for 41 yards with an interception as the backup. He walked off the field and into the locker room afterward, but didn't even bother to shower after the game. He took off his pads and left his Razorbacks jersey in his locker. He changed quickly into street clothes and walked out the door never to return to the football team.

He returned to Arkansas for the first day of spring classes and requested his release. Nutt refused at first, asking that he stay through the spring, saying the offense was going to slowly evolve into the hurry-up approach Malzahn utiltized in high school. Nutt provided him his release after further discussions with Mustain's mother.

Mustain followed Williams to USC, leaving only two Springdale players on the Razorbacks' roster. Mustain's career never recovered, it seemed, even though his talent was undeniably apparent. He spent most of his career at USC as a backup behind Mark Sanchez, Matt Barkley and Aaron Corp. His first and only start as a Trojan didn't arrive until the second-to-last week of his senior season.

Nutt says he empathizes with Mustain. "We were both Arkansas kids," Nutt said. "We grew up wanting to be a Razorback, so I understood."

Their stories are eerily similar, too. Nutt transferred from Arkansas to Oklahoma State when it became clear after an 11-1 season in 1977 that Ron Calcagni would remain the No. 1 quarterback as long as Lou Holtz was the Hogs' coach.

Mustain and Nutt have not talked since the spring of 2007. The two may never talk again.

"What's really sad is I really thought a lot of Mitch," Nutt said. "I cared a lot about him. What's really sad is, what if he would have stayed? It's easy to transfer but I think he would have gotten more playing time and more out of everything had he just stayed."

Malzahn left two weeks after the Capital One Bowl to take the offensive coordinator job at Tulsa.

"He felt he had an opportunity to go and run exactly the playbook that he had at Springdale, and do it immediately," Nutt said. "I just think, because of Mitch and the relationship that he had with him in high school, he lost that and I'm sure they felt I was responsible for that. I don't hold any hard feelings but I just think he was ready to move on and do exactly the thing that he wanted to do. The thing I kept trying to impress on him is that, look, we're going to get to that point but it just doesn't make sense when you have McFadden, Felix Jones, Peyton Hillis, Marcus Monk."

Malzahn doesn't talk much about his one-year stint at Arkansas, which included 10 wins, and seemingly enough drama to fill a small book.

"You know what, that year gave me a chance to get into college football and I learned a lot about myself and I learned about college football," Malzahn said last week. "It helped me along the way."

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Gus Malzahn, then Tulsa's offensive coordinator, gestures as the team practices at Ladd-Peebles Stadium in Mobile, Ala., on Wednesday, Jan. 2, 2008. (Mobile Press-Register file photo)

More than six years have passed since the dramatic season in Arkansas. Nutt was forced out at Arkansas after the 2007 season.

Players have since moved on to other ventures, of course, and so has Malzahn, who is now the head coach at Auburn.

Nutt is no longer coaching, and is living in New Mexico waiting for an opportunity to jump back into the game after a four-year stint at Ole Miss ended with a 14-game losing streak in the SEC.

Williams went on to star at USC and is in a contract year with the Tennessee Titans.

Mustain, 25, plays for the San Jose Sabercats of the Arena Football League after spending most of his college career as a backup at USC. The former all-star pitcher in high school even played in the Chicago White Sox' minor league system in 2012 before going back to football.

"I came back to this and never had a crack at the NFL," Mustain said. "I'd love to get there. Certainly the odds are stacked against me with my history and my age now. Every year that goes by, my chances get less. I'm going to give this a crack, see if I can make something happen there and get some film."

Malzahn's offenses at Tulsa ranked No. 1 in the country in 2007 and 2008 before he was hired at Auburn, where his Cam Newton-led offense led the Tigers to the BCS National Championship during the 2010 season. He returned to his home state to lead Arkansas State in 2012 and was hired as the Tigers' coach in December.

It's been a whirlwind few years for the core group of Springdale High's monster run in 2005.

Mustain and Malzahn lost contact for a few years, but communicate via text messages from time to time. They met and spent some time together in Arizona within the past two years, Mustain said.

Their discussions usually involve football, but that year at Arkansas never comes up.

"I've never asked him about it and probably never will because I do think there was some guilt on his part for being in on that and certainly he had to sell the dream to us as well," Mustain said, referring to his recruitment to Arkansas. "I'm sure he felt bad about that and the way things had gone. I think he honestly believed we could make that happen, and I certainly do not fault him for that. He wanted to believe, he had to believe in that and we were looking for a reason to.

The two have even discussed the possibility of Mustain jumping into the coaching ranks, but Mustain isn't so sure that is in the cards.

"That's his passion, that's his love," Mustain said. "He's always excited when his guys start to get into that and express interest in it."