Nick Saban and Don Shula

I've written earlier about not admiring Alabama head football coach Nick Saban. Perhaps I'm being a bit harsh on this gentleman. But let me first explain myself. When I was in my early years as a kid following professional football, there were two teams that I rooted for: the Miami Dolphins and the Baltimore Colts. The Dolphins, during the late 1960s, were an expansion team that, thanks to their general manager Joe Thomas, was being assembled into a complete team that would eventually go on in the early 1970s to Super Bowl glory. Their coach was George Wilson, a nice enough fellow who stumbled with his words in press conferences and stumbled with his team through four losing seasons. In 1969, the Dolphins' fourth year, there had been great expectations of a winning season, even possibly contention for the playoffs. But they foundered badly, finishing last in their division with a 3-10-1 record. And this was with essentially the same team (minus Paul Warfield and a few others) that would go through 1972 undefeated! So, it was decided that Miami needed a new coach for 1970. The Baltimore Colts, on the other hand, had been experiencing great success under their coach of several years, Don Shula. They made it to the NFL title game against Cleveland in 1964, lost only one regular-season game in 1967 (missing the playoffs nevertheless), and had an incredible run in 1968, only to lose to the upstart New York Jets in Super Bowl III. Shula had coached this veteran, increasingly-aging team well and the Baltimore fans had been rewarded with many successful, exciting seasons. But Shula saw the opening in Miami and decided to switch to the Dolphins. Since that involved breaking a contract with the Colts, the Dolphins had to pay a penalty to them in order to hire Shula. Almost instantly, Miami was transformed from a loser to a winner. Baltimore, without Shula, only went on to win the Super Bowl the very next year! The point is that Shula knew that the Colts would be undergoing rebuilding down the road and he felt that someone else who would be there a while should be in charge of it. And he stuck with Miami, coaching the Dolphins for twenty-six years. During that time, they were always competitive, suffering only two losing seasons in that span!

Now let's move up to recent years. After retiring from coaching the Dolphins, Shula became a figure in Dolphins management. The franchise went through coaches Jimmy Johnson and Dave Wannstadt with generally disappointing results (especially with the 4-12 2004 season). Finally, they had an opportunity to hire LSU coach Nick Saban as the new Dolphins coach. Saban was going to be in charge of rebuilding the Dolphins from the ground up, and he projected confidence and commitment to this task. The first season he was coaching (2005), the lowly Dolphins made a late-season charge and won six games in a row, barely missing out on the playoffs. Last year, in only Saban's second season, Miami's "new" quarterback Dante Culpepper suffered a season-ending injury while franchise running back Rickie Williams was suspended for marijuana use. They had a losing season, but they were also still rebuilding under Saban, who demanded almost complete control over his team. He was so intense and fanatical toward his job that when President Bush visited Miami just before the start of the 2006 season and invited him to dinner, he refused him, stating that he had work to do with his team! I am not a fan of George Bush, but he IS our President, and I thought that Saban's act of shunning him like that was awfully tacky. That should have told me something right there about him. Well, at the close of the 2006 season, the University of Alabama fans were almost in open revolt against their team's coaching staff, and the Crimson Tide set out to find a new head coach. And money would be no object. Their target? Why, Nick Saban, of course! For several days, though, Saban would adamantly declare, sometimes angrily, to the press, that he was committed to coaching the Dolphins and wasn't interested in Alabama. Then, suddenly, out of the blue came the announcement that Nick Saban had signed on to become the new Alabama head football coach, for a scandalously high amount of money. And thus he abruptly left his still relatively weak, rebuilding Dolphins team in the lurch. Don Shula, opening himself up to a charge of hypocrisy for his own switch back in 1970, vehemently criticized Saban in the press for his actions. But to me, when Shula switched back in 1970, he had already provided the Baltimore fans with several great seasons (he had coached them through seven years, a considerable time) and left them as a contender. Saban, on the other hand, had centralized the Dolphins operations to be personally run by himself and then abandoned the project (and the city of Miami) after only his second year. He left a franchise in tatters, struggling to find a leftover coach somewhere to come and try to pick up the pieces.

That is why I don't admire Nick Saban. Others are entitled to their own opinions.