Saban.

 Due to the vast amount of readership I got on this obscure page of the site five months after I wrote an article, I decided to update the Nick Saban section of the site. I got a lot of excited responses.

To start off with, take a valium people: nobody is saying that Saban is a shitty coach (a shitty person, yes, coach….he was good at his last college stint). Nobody is saying anything to degrade what he did at LSU or at Michigan state. All we’re saying is that there is a lot more to the college game than coaching; which includes other equally-as-important factors such as strength of schedule, and who you have to share your recruiting base with. Get defensive if you want. Kill me with a post if you want, but there’s a reason why Rich Rodriguez and Pete Carroll are always in the top 15, and a reason why Boston College has taken a dive since they joined the ACC.

Only time will tell if Saban will be Bowden-esque, well worth the $34 Million, but I suspect he will have similar success to Shula. The college football world weighs too much on the recent success Saban, an egomaniacal coach that can’t handle pressure, loses games that should be automatic wins, and wins games that are way too close against teams that he should blow the doors off of. At the same time, Saban grossly overestimated the potential at Alabama, a job where he has to play in an extremely difficult conference, and has to share recruits with Tommy Tubberville (who owns the state by the way).

Karma’s a bitch for Nick Saban, who has been getting killed in all media outside of Tuscaloosa this month. He deserves it.  Looking back on the situation, he really bungled up the situation pretty good. Let’s look at the timeline:

Jan 2004: LSU Wins the national Championship.
Feb 2004: Saban signs a 7 year contract worth at least $16.1m, making him the highest paid football coach in history.
December 2004: Saban prematurely ends the most lucrative contract in college football history, stating he wants the challenge of the NFL.

October 2006: Turns out the challenge is a bitch when you can’t win. Saban contacts Alabama AD Mal Moore through his agent Jimmy Sexton and delcares that he wants the Alabama head coaching job.

November 2006: After a year of rebuilding a football team that still made a bowl game and went 10-2 last year, Mike Shula is fired.

December 2006: Saban denies about 1000 times that he is interested in the Alabama head coaching job. Jimmy Sexton then uses this media circus to get raises for all of his coaches, except Houston Nutt in the greatest business fraud since Enron.

January 2007: Saban is named the head coach of Alabama citing personal reasons, fires all of his Dolphins assistants via speakerphone, and becomes the highest paid coach in College football, about double what the most handsomely paid coaches make.    Then he takes credit for all of LSU’s success since he left.

What type of payload is this karma boomerang packed with you ask?

- Successfully got Mike Shula fired.
- Lied to the public, his team, and his organization about his intentions.
- Fired his 23+ assistants on the Dolphin’s staff.
- Engaged with his agent, Jimmy Sexton, in a fraudulent scheme to get raises for his cleints
- Didn’t honor a contract from the Dolphins, who have given him everything he wanted, and every chance to be successful.  (Why do we even bother with contracts these days?).

A lot of people do bad things and still succeed. What’s the big deal? He’s doing this for his family you say?

What I can’t figure out is with all the coaching vacancies this year, why Alabama?  At Alabama, you have to share your in-state recruits with Auburn. At Alabama, you have to coach against Tommy Tuberville at Auburn, Les Miles at LSU, Urban Meyer at Florida, Darth Visor at South Carolina, and let’s not forget that Houston Nutt has done pretty well, Bobby Johnson isn’t too shabby, and that Rich Brooks was a great coach for many years at Oregon.  Add to that the fact that Nick can’t handle the media very well. Look how he freaked out when the Baton Rouge media criticized him after losing 2 games mid season after he won the national championship, or how he handled the Miami media over the last two years.

Were I in Nick’s shoes, and my heart was truly in college football I would have easily taken North Carolina, Boston College, NC State, or Stanford over Alabama.  Here’s why: North Carolina doesn’t have a dominant football school. Neither does the northeast. Stanford’s got great tradition, and a great part of the world to live, and recruits from the pacific northwest can easily be had. On top of that, all of these places have media that are less critical than SEC schools. With one week to go in recruiting, here’s how I see the 2007 football season shaping up for the Nicktator:

Alabama loses 5 starters on a pretty good defense, and two star running backs on offense. That won’t be easy to replace. Another challenge is hat he’s got a target on his back in the games against LSU, Auburn, Ole Miss, and Florida State, games where Shula could sneak in and possibly upset because these teams wouldn’t have prepared as hard for him. And of course, the surprise loss to a crappy team, due to the Saban theory (he relies too heavily on his defense and is too conservative on offense, never beats teams that are more talented than his, and always loses to one crappy team per year).