LSU My Preference Over 'Bama in Today's Big Game

At the risk of this starting to look like just a sports blog, here comes another article about...sports! Namely, the sport of football. More specifically, the season-defining college football game between the two top-ranked schools in the country: LSU and Alabama, to take place later today in Tuscaloosa.

At first glance, it might not seem to be important to me as to which team I want to root for in this game: after all, both of them are rivals of my hometown Florida Gators and beat up on them pretty badly last month. So I don't particularly like either team. But against each other? Well, I didn't have to give it much thought: I want LSU to beat Alabama, no doubt about it. And there's one dominant reason for this: Alabama's head coach is Nick Saban.

You see, although I follow college football and want the University of Florida to win, there is one team that I have fervently pulled for since childhood: pro football's Miami Dolphins. In 2005, Nick Saban, after coaching LSU to a national championship, went to try to rebuild a struggling Miami team. I thought he was a great coach and, like so many other Dolphins fans, was willing to give him several seasons to turn the team around. He was a hard worker who insisted on a great amount of control over the team. But at the close of the 2006 season, after angrily denying that he would leave Miami to coach for Alabama, Saban suddenly changed his mind and left anyway, leaving my team in shambles, to go 1-15 the next year.

Now LSU fans don't like Saban because he took on a job as the coach of their big divisional rival. But there are three points to consider here with Saban's treatment of LSU: One, he didn't leave directly to coach at Alabama; he initially left LSU to coach in the NFL. Two, unlike the case with Miami, Saban didn't leave LSU until he had rebuilt their program, even leading them to a national championship. And three, after he left, LSU had a strong enough program to win another national championship with his successor. But Saban left the Dolphins in worse shape than when he found them. Sure, I suppose that, had Nick Saban left Miami to coach for a divisional rival like the Bills or Jets instead of the University of Alabama, it would have irked me more. But the dude, after talking so much about how important character and commitments are, decided that talking is one thing and "walking" is another.

So I doubt that I will ever again support any team with which Nick Saban is affiliated. Not that he cares at all about what I think (or apparently what anyone else thinks, either)...