On the surface, Rhett Lashlee’s decision to leave his post as Gus Malzahn’s offensive coordinator at Auburn to become Randy Edsall’s offensive coordinator at UConn may have had some folks scratching their heads.
But decisions made by coaches often have unseen layers of motivation behind them.
Lashlee recently explained his choice to join Edsall at UConn, and peeled back the curtain to what enticed him about the opportunity to start fresh somewhere.
“The challenge to be able to come and do something, and do something that maybe people don’t think can be done, that’s what excites me,” Lashlee explained to the media.
“You can go somewhere where something has already been done – and I’m not saying that anybody can do that – but then it’s ‘Okay, so you just did what was expected.’ But people aren’t expecting a lot of us, I don’t think, and that’s okay. We expect a lot out of us, and it’s not going to happen overnight. I tell our guys every day that there is no shortcut to success, cause if there was, I’d give it to you. It’s going to be a process, and we’re going to have to try and get there day in and day out.”
“That’s the part that excites me. Because once you get it done, a certain amount of time of working that process, and then you see the end result, it was worth it.”
At Auburn, there’s no arguing that the Tigers ran Gus Malzahn’s system, and there’s no debate that at UConn, the reigns of the offense now lie solely in the hands of Lashlee, and the opportunity to put his own stamp on things is clearly something that weighed greatly in his decision to help the Huskies turn the tables.
“Hopefully, after a while, football isn’t something that people are just doing to get to basketball season. Hopefully they’re saying ‘Let’s wait until the basketball conference season starts in January, because we’ve got games to play in December.”
