It’s late at night, Doug Nussmeier is at home with his wife and they’re watching television. The Florida Gators’ offensive coordinator hears his phone go off. Malik Zaire is on the other line, the fifth year senior is watching a game from 2016 on SEC Network and he has a question for his new OC and position coach.
“Sometimes I go, wait a second, let me flip channels,” Nussmeier said when asked if he could recall the plays Zaire was referencing from a season ago. “My kids get mad sometimes or my wife because she might be watching a movie, but oh, well.”
Zaire knows he doesn’t have time to waste. He got Wally Pipped at Notre Dame after a broken ankle sidelined him in 2015. He most of last season watching from the sidelines as Notre Dame 4-8. He knew he wanted to find a school where there was an opportunity to play his final college season.
“My first step was to graduate,” he said. “Me going through the whole graduation process was obviously a huge accomplishment for myself and something I’ve always felt proud of.”
Zaire graduated from Notre Dame on time and started looking at potential graduate programs. He was accepted in Harvard’s business school and considered going the Ivy League route. He started narrowing down potential landing spots with Wisconsin, Texas and Florida rounding out the top three. Coming from a prestigious school like Notre Dame, Florida appealed to him for that same reason.
“Notre Dame as a quarterback is like the mecca of quarterbacks. If you can be a quarterback at the University of Notre Dame, you’re at the quarterback top. The same goes for Florida,” He said. “I think Florida is the most perfect place to be. Who doesn’t want to be a Florida quarterback?”
However, the Southeastern Conference had a rule in place preventing Florida from taking a graduate transfer because of two previous graduate transfers not meeting academic standards set forth by the league.
That rule was changed at the SEC spring meetings two months ago, a conference Zaire didn’t even knew existed until this year.
“As soon as the rule changed I knew it was 100 percent. I knew I could make myself available to be able to come down here. It was just exciting. It was like Christmas.”
That’s when Nussmeier’s phone started ringing. Zaire dove deep into the playbook and found a lot of similarities, which shouldn’t come as a surprise considering Zaire’s acceptance into a school like Harvard.
Zaire’s knowledge of the playbook early on impressed the coaching staff and his teammates. He threw passes to Brandon Powell and Josh Hammond his first day on campus. His transition, by all accounts has been seamless. Zaire says he doesn’t feel like the “new guy” anymore. In fact, Nussmeier might be struggling with it more than Zaire himself.
Nussmeier, like Zaire, is left-handed but when you go from player to coach you have to be able to teach and Nussmeier hasn’t had a lot of lefties under his tutelage.
“It’s interesting, being left-handed, playing left-handed, then you reverse everything to teach it right-handed, and now you get a lefty, I think it’s almost more difficult now because now I’ve got to train myself to go backwards,” he said of starting to work with Zaire.
Time continues ticking. Zaire could potentially apply for a hardship waiver to give himself another year at Florida but he isn’t focusing on that now. He’s meshed with his teammates and is confident he can be the missing link to an offense that struggled mightily at times last season.
He looked good in orange (his favorite color) and blue on Wednesday. He’s wearing long sleeves because he says it’s more comfortable. It’s a unique look, one that his teammates got a kick out of.
When Thursday rolls around it won’t matter what his jersey looks like. The whole Gator Nation will be tuning in to see what the football looks like coming out of his left hand and how he runs through his first practice in Orange and Blue.
“I bought into the program, I bought into the guys around me, I believe in what Coach Mac wants to do, I believe in this team and I mean this is an attractive to be,” Zaire said. “I think this is the best place in the country to be and I’m glad that I’m able to be a part of the team.”