Marshall Malchow used to sit in the stands at Bryant-Denny Stadium with a feeling of emptiness that gnawed at him. Once a three-sport athlete at his high school in Augusta, Ga., Malchow missed the action and wanted to be part of a team again. He especially yearned to be around football, which stoked his passions. But as a former 5-foot-10, 170-pound receiver and defensive back, Malchow understood there was no chance he would compete for a roster spot at the University of Alabama and that was hard to accept. For a brief time, he attempted to fill the void in his life by joining a fraternity and embracing the college lifestyle.

But Malchow turned restless. He fired off emails to people within Alabama’s football office. He contacted strength and conditioning coach Scott Cochran, whose wife is from his hometown. He got in touch with others inside Nick Saban’s fiefdom. Eventually he was introduced to Ed Marynowitz, the director of player personnel who had just been hired in late 2008 to transform Saban’s recruiting department into a division that resembled the sophisticated scouting wings inside NFL organizations.

For the next six months, Malchow did drudge work including logging DVD video. Little did he know he was at the forefront of a movement that almost ten years later would carry him to the top of the college football world, where on Saturday at Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium in the SEC Championship game he will bear witness to the fruits of his labor.

The roster of talented athletes scheduled to take the field for Georgia on Saturday has Malchow’s fingerprints all over it, although as director of player personnel he is forbidden from speaking about his contributions. Bulldogs coach Kirby Smart doesn’t allow his staff members to talk to the media, so AL.com chatted with college football sources familiar with Malchow.

They praised him for his instrumental role in Georgia’s relentless campaign to challenge the Crimson Tide for football supremacy in the South. Last February — a month after Smart’s bunch dragged Alabama into overtime of the national title game before losing on 2nd-and-26 — the Bulldogs won the offseason when they finished with the No. 1 signing class and removed the Tide from the top spot for the first time in eight years. It was the clearest sign yet that Georgia would have staying power and pose a serious threat to Alabama in the future.

It was also a major coup for the 29-year-old Malchow, who was honored as FootballScoop’s Player Personnel Director of the Year before being named to 247Sports’ 30-under-30 list. Almost overnight, Malchow’s profile as backroom staffer was raised and pushed to the fore, which proved uncomfortable for someone who has spent his professional life operating behind the scenes in relative anonymity.

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Malchow has had to become accustomed to the new-found attention, especially when he visited Nashville this past summer for college football’s inaugural Personnel Symposium. Malchow was one of the featured panelists at a two-day convention organized by his old boss, Marynowitz, to promote a segment of the industry that is relatively new and often overlooked.

As Malchow riffed on the various issues and challenges he has encountered in his job, he took in the scene inside the Omni Hotel conference room. There were more than 180 people here, many of whom were just like him. There was Drew Hughes from Tennessee and Matt Lindsey from South Carolina, who both hold the same title he does.

Not long ago all three were crammed into the same office at Alabama, where they were part of an incubator for support staff that was revolutionary in the world of college football. While interning for Marynowitz as undergrads, they were given an advanced education in recruiting. Marynowitz harnessed the talents of student workers, assigning them to different divisions within a department that included arms for marketing, graphic design and scouting. Malchow did a little bit of everything, helping show prospects around on their visits, typing up handwritten evaluations, building files on recruits and converting DVD footage to VHS so the old-school Saban could watch with one of those clunky cowboy remotes. It was an eye-opening experience as Malchow came to understand the players Saban coveted and the ones he rejected.

The driving force of this recruiting enterprise was a desire to land the fastest and biggest players who fit Saban’s schemes. The commodity most valued in this effort was information. With Saban’s nine assistants bogged down with coaching, Marynowitz and his underlings were tasked with fact-finding, initiating a process that sometimes took years to complete before National Signing Day. Malchow witnessed an intricate system in which both in-person assessments and highlight-reel appraisals circulate between multiple people, ensuring that a consensus opinion is formed about an individual prospect.

As time went by, Malchow began to gravitate toward Smart and appointed himself as the Alabama’s defensive coordinator right-hand man for recruiting. According to those inside the program at the time, Malchow liked Smart and held him in high regard. It also helped that Smart had gone to Georgia — the school where his parents attended and his father once played as a walk-on. At one point, Malchow imagined he’d go to Georgia, too. But when he was denied early acceptance, he built up a bit of resentment. That prompted him to look elsewhere before he eventually decided to head west to Tuscaloosa, where he had been admitted to Alabama’s honors college. Once there, he elected to major in communications/advertising, hoping to achieve a high enough GPA to take advantage of the 503 program that allowed entry to Alabama’s law school without taking the LSAT. But that was always seen as a backup plan.

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People inside Alabama’s football offices at the time knew Malchow was destined to continue in football, showing a natural eye for talent and a perspicacity that allowed him to apply the knowledge he had gleaned while working under Marynowitz.

Still, Malchow faced some uncertainty, worried he could make a career out of his undergrad vocation. Personnel jobs in college football were few and far between at a time when support staffs in the sport were still relatively lean and programs didn’t see the need to devote people exclusively to recruiting.

But with a span of six months in late 2011 and early 2012, UCF hired Hughes as a personnel director and Boise State’s Chris Petersen came calling for Malchow to assist in the building of the Broncos’ roster.

That started a whirlwind journey that sent Malchow to Louisville, the University of Washington and eventually Georgia, where he started working at the dawn of Smart’s tenure.

In Athens, Malchow coordinates an operation that aims to provide all the tools and data available to Smart’s coaching staff so that they can make the best decisions on the recruiting trail. Under Malchow’s direction, marketing, customer service, evaluation and even graphic design intersect in this large-scale effort to construct the best roster possible.

As Malchow has risen to a point where he is earning a six-figure salary, he watched his chosen profession grow before his eyes. Interns who once worked under him — just as he did for Marynowitz — started landing jobs of their own. They were realizing a dream he never could have conjured back when he was sitting in the stands at Bryant-Denny, wondering how he could find his way back to football.

It was then that Malchow was inspired enough to seek an opportunity that would change his fortunes. And as luck would have it, he was at the right place, at the right time -— at Alabama, at the dawn of Saban’s tenure, at the cutting edge of something big.

Come Saturday, at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, Malchow will once again see the Tide in action. But he won’t do so as an idle spectator. Instead, he’ll look on with intense interest as a Georgia staff member, watching the team he played a part in shaping go against the program that made his unique career path possible. For those that know him, it’s what he always wanted.

Rainer Sabin is an Alabama beat writer for the Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @RainerSabin

Matt Zenitz is an Alabama and Auburn reporter for the Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @mzenitz.