Early one afternoon in the fall of 2005, 17-year-old Mitch Mustain -- who at the time was a senior at Springdale High School in Arkansas, and widely considered the best high school quarterback in the United States -- decided he was going to take advantage of a free period between classes and pop into the small office occupied by his high school football coach, Gus Malzahn.

Mustain, in the midst of arguably the greatest season in the history of Arkansas prep football, had been going over Malzahn's scouting report for one of Springdale's upcoming opponents. Though he felt as if he had it more or less memorized, it was always fun to pick Coach Malzahn's brain for hidden insights. Malzahn could remember tiny details from plays, and the flaws that were their undoing, even if they had occurred years ago. His mind, his players had learned, was like a digital archive.

Before he entered Malzahn's office, Mustain took a peek through the tiny rectangular window in the door. It's hard to explain why he did it. A part of Mustain wanted to catch a glimpse of his coach hard at work, unaware he was being watched or studied by one of his students. A part of him wanted to witness something he could tease Malzahn about. The coach could be deathly serious on the practice field, and a little levity in a season where pressure and expectations had intensified to unreasonable levels couldn't hurt. Instead, it was a bit like stumbling upon John Nash during the scene in "A Beautiful Mind" when the professor is scribbling on walls, furiously trying to crack codes only he can see or begin to understand.

Malzahn was bent over, his face six inches from his desktop, carefully arranging eight different colored Sharpies until they were perfectly aligned. He then proceeded to diagram his play sheets on manila folders, tracing and retracing (then outlining!) the letters and numbers into the codes that Springdale would use to call plays in its hurry-up, no-huddle offense.

"I think that scene absolutely reflects him perfectly," Mustain said. "Every single bar he drew had to be perfect, then it had to be outlined, or he was starting over. He could have had some graduate assistant do it, but instead he insisted he do it himself. I've said this a million times before, but there is really nothing you can do but keep repeating it: His mind is extraordinary."

Gus Malzahn is not a genius. And no one is more adamant about this than Gus Malzahn.

He cringes, in fact, whenever he hears the word attached to his name. When a reporter brings it up on a recent visit to his current office -- an office with wall-to-floor windows overlooking part of Auburn University's campus -- Malzahn wants to know the names of the foolish people who were uttering it. When informed his own players, current and former, are the guilty parties, he rolls his eyes and breathes deeply out his nose. He's sitting at a table next to his desk, surrounded by dog-eared notebooks, multicolored Sharpies and manila folders. It's the rare compliment that only serves to annoy. Agree, and you label yourself as an egomaniac. Dismiss it, and it feels you're being ungrateful. Eventually, he musters an answer. "I don't see myself that way at all," he said. "It's just silly."

Malzahn is correct, of course. It must be insulting if you're a brilliant professor, scientist or mathematician tirelessly working to cure, say, cancer through the use of formulas, algorithms and theorems, and you turn on your television each weekend and hear a football coach repeatedly described as a genius.

But with Auburn facing Florida State in the VIZIO BCS National Championship on Monday, with the Tigers just one year removed from going 3-9, most of the college football world is still struggling to find the right way to describe how Malzahn, just seven years removed from coaching high school football in Northwest Arkansas, has outsmarted so many of his more experienced peers. "He's a football junkie," said Auburn safety Jermaine Whitehead. "He's always finding a way to outthink people. I don't think he'll ever get bored the way some coaches do, because he's so smart. He sees everything."

Genius as a description is lazy, a quick placeholder compliment when there's no time to dive into the nuances. But there is no doubt every piece of Malzahn's madcap, accelerator-to-the-floor offensive philosophy is a reflection of his personality. Away from the football field, Malzahn is polite and soft-spoken. He answers questions with the cadence and the honey-infused drawl of a Southern Mister Rogers. But there is an intensity always simmering just beneath the surface.

The story of how he arrived at the summit of college football might be a story of last-second miracle victories, tipped passes, sideline tightrope walks and fortuitous bounces. But it's also the story of an architect who can't put down his pencil, and is driven by a mixture of impatience, the obsessive pursuit of perfection and the desire to prove a man can, if he ignores convention, build a better mousetrap.

To really understand it, you have to see how every piece of the foundation was built.

There is a Southern colloquialism that frequently sneaks its way into Gus Malzahn's sentences, whether he's describing his own emotions or those of one of his players. To be obsessed with something isn't to be consumed by it. In Malzahn's world, you are instead eat up with it. As a young boy growing up in Fort Smith, Ark., Mazlahn wasn't just captivated by sports. He was eat up with 'em.

He would spend hours that bled into full days throwing a baseball against a brick wall. He would plant himself in front of his television and obsessively study Tom Landry and the Dallas Cowboys, then lie in bed at night reconstructing route combinations. His parents divorced when he was 6 years old, but eventually his mother remarried, and his stepfather, a salesman named Ray Ruhman, forged a connection with his stoic stepson on the baseball diamond. "He was fairly tough, big on discipline, but at the same time, he wanted us to play catch and do all the things that fathers and sons are supposed to do," Malzahn said. "It had a big influence on me."

He was a good athlete, but not a great one. It's easy for him to see that now, to understand it and fully digest how it shaped everything in his life that was still to come. A more pragmatic person might have broadened his worldview, prepared for a life outside the painted lines. But Malzahn, whose family was always a few rungs short of middle class, had no dreams outside of sports. He simply couldn't conceive of a future that didn't revolve around them. And when it came to football, he was plum eat up with it. When he wasn't playing the sport, he was coaching it, even as a teenager. When he turned 15, he volunteered to coach a youth football team run by the local Boys Club. He knew, even then, it was what he wanted to do with his life.

"Everybody told me, 'Oh you'll have trouble supporting your family, you'll never be able to get a job.'" Malzahn said. "I didn't care. I really didn't. That's what I wanted to do. I just wouldn't be good at anything else."

He graduated from Fort Smith Christian High School in 1984, but the opportunities to play college football were limited for a lanky wide receiver with soft hands and limited foot speed. He had just one scholarship offer, from Henderson State, but couldn't resist the power the University of Arkansas wielded over him for much of his childhood. He decided to pass on the scholarship and walk on with the Razorbacks. It took only a few practices for him to realize he wasn't ever going to see the field. "I hung in there for a few years," he said, "but the reality was, I wasn't good enough to play."

Eventually, he transferred to Henderson State, a small school in Arkadelphia that sits just west of the Ouachita River, in search of playing time and a degree in physical education. He found both, though his time on the field came primarily as a punter who averaged 37.7 yards per kick his senior year. Still, his head coach, Ralph "Sporty" Carpenter, thought highly of him, and planned to recommend him for jobs, but Carpenter died suddenly after that season. "I didn't have any connections," Malzahn said. "I didn't have anyone who could sort of show me the way and recommend me."

He blindly mailed out dozens of résumés upon graduation, but landed only one interview, at West Memphis High School. He didn't get the position, but the coach who did suddenly meant there was an open spot at a tiny, underfunded Eastern Arkansas school called Hughes in a town of the same name with fewer than 1,500 people. The school's athletic director, Charlie Patrick, called to see if Malzahn was interested in becoming Hughes' defensive coordinator. The school wondered if he'd be willing to sign a contract immediately. "I don't think there was a lot of job interest, so it worked out pretty well for me," Malzahn said. "There wasn't a Wal-Mart within 30 miles. My wife, Kristi, was a real trouper. I wouldn't be where I am without her. She deserves a lot of the credit for everything we've accomplished."

He did a little of everything at Hughes. He taught history, coached basketball and begged the best athletes to come out for the football team. He learned how to drive a tractor so he could cut the grass on the practice field, making sure every pass of the mower left a perfectly straight line. He had a hard time concentrating when he was supposed to be teaching because his mind was always drifting back to football. He'd saved every scouting report from every game in college, and he studied them obsessively, scribbling Xs and Os on the back of napkins and notebooks. "I made a lot of mistakes," he said, "but I realized there was no better way to learn than to make mistakes."

Within a year, Hughes' head coach left for another job and Malzahn was promoted. He was left with one assistant, plus a volunteer from the local junior high who would occasionally help out with practice. They didn't even have matching coaching gear, but it was the first time Malzahn had a team to call his own. "As a coach you think you know what you're doing, but when I got out there, I realized I didn't have a clue," he said. On a whim, he reached out to Barry Lunney Sr., a legendary high school football coach in the state who had also grown up in Fort Smith, and asked for some advice.

"How many plays do you have?" Lunney asked.

"Coach, we've got at least 200," Malzahn boasted. "We're going to be able to run every single one of them."

"Pick out four or five of them," Lunney said. "Then run 'em no matter what the defense gives you. Do that and you'll be just fine."

To this day, Malzahn considers it the best advice he's ever received. You can still see echoes of the strategy, in fact, in Auburn's offense. That year, Mazlahn's squad -- primarily a wing-T running offense -- stunned the region by making a surprise run to the state final. "We were such a ragtag bunch," Malzahn says. "But we had talent and our guys believed." In the final minute, Hughes had the ball with first-and-goal from the 10-yard line, trailing 17-13. The Blue Devils tried a trick play, had issues with clock management, dropped a touchdown pass, didn't get in the end zone and lost. Malzahn, for all his success, is still haunted by it.

"It's a game I think about probably once a week," he said. "I don't ever think about the wins. I think about the ones where I didn't do the best job. I still feel bad for those kids because we could have won that game. We could have won had I done a better job."

Auburn's first-year coach, Gus Malzahn, was named AP national coach of the year for orchestrating the Tigers' turnaround from 3-9 in 2012. AP Photo/Danny Johnston

Building a better mousetrap, he learned, would take time.

It would take resources, too, and Hughes didn't have them. Malzahn wasn't even sure what he was searching for at first, just that he wanted to do something radical, something that would force people to look at the game differently. In 1996, he left Hughes to take a job as the head coach at Shiloh Christian, a private school in Springdale with a rich football tradition. Malzahn, who grew up in the First Baptist Church of Fort Smith and was saved when he was 13, felt at home at Shiloh. He and Kristi felt embraced by the community. It was the ideal place to raise their two daughters, Kylie and Kenzie. He was too competitive for most family fun nights, so he tried to bring them around the football team as much as possible. It wasn't perfect, but he was too driven to be a regular dad. If they went bowling, he had to win at bowling. If they played board games, he plotted strategy to dominate.

"We could tell right away he was such a driven guy," said Josh Floyd, who was Malzahn's first quarterback at Shiloh. "He doesn't mess around much. He wants to get things done and get it done quick. He'd see you in the hallway and he'd chase you down to quiz you about a play. You could tell he just never stopped thinking about football."

He fell in love with routine. Most days he'd get up around 6 a.m., but he'd be in the office until midnight. He felt like he didn't need a lot of sleep once he had a schedule mapped out. He wanted to know exactly what he was supposed to be doing at 9 a.m. on Monday, at 10 on Monday, etc. He knew it drove his staff crazy sometimes, and that it was hard on his family, but as long as he stayed in a routine, he wouldn't feel like he'd missed something.

It was at Shiloh, over the course of several years, that the quirky architect began to emerge. Malzahn realized he was almost too impatient for traditional football. He wanted the strategy of football with the speed of basketball. At times, the 40 seconds allotted between plays felt like an eternity. He and his coaching staff experimented with running a script of hurry-up no-huddle plays at the start of every game, and the team seemed to feed off the adrenaline rush, but as soon as he reverted back to a more traditional offense, his teams regressed. His first year, Shiloh started the year 0-4 and finished 6-6.