Nick Saban Reconsidered

Nick Saban is the head football coach at the University of Alabama and has been since 2007.  I am keenly aware of this fact since, in December of 2006 at the close of the Miami Dolphins regular season, a team he said he was committed to coaching to success, he was coaxed into walking away from them and taking the offered Alabama job.  Along with masses of other Dolphins fans, I felt betrayed by Saban.  As it turned out, he had insisted on so much control over Miami that, when he left there was a great void that needed to be filled.  The next year, they went a dismal 1-15, almost going winless until a late season victory over Baltimore.  This hurt was compounded by Saban taking a job with a school that was a conference rival to my hometown Florida Gators.  And then, at the close of the 2009 season, his Crimson Tide beat my Gators in the SEC championship game on the way to the first of his four national championships with Alabama.  Ouch!

Forgiveness is divine, but I'm only human and I've held this grudge against Nick Saban for too long.  Look, any ambitious football coach will have certain dream jobs in his sights, and the opportunities have to be taken when they arise...which are usually rare.  Coaching at Alabama, a venerable football school with Bear Bryant's tradition of winning championships, was clearly an offer that Saban felt he couldn't refuse.  And he didn't actually renege on his contract with Miami to join them: the Dolphins owner acquiesced with Saban's departure and wished him the best.  Now he has been with Alabama for nine years and has settled well into the position that he had been striving for during his professional life.  As for the Dolphins, in 2008 they actually did make the playoffs, making one of the greatest one-season turnarounds in NFL history.  But for the past seven years they've neither made the playoffs nor had a winning season...I can hardly hang that dismal performance over time on Nick Saban.

Nick Saban is quite a control freak, and coaching college recruits in Tuscaloosa gives him more power over individual lives than he had coaching grown-up professionals in Miami.  He coached two years for the Dolphins in 2005 and 2006 and suffered through both seasons with untimely key injuries and poor decisions about who he wanted playing for his team.  College football suits Saban's temperament, and he was wise to recognize this and act on it.  Since leaving Miami he has won four NCAA national championships.  Does anyone seriously propose that he could have accomplished anything similar in the same time span with the Dolphins?  And had he stayed with the pros...well, I only need to look at happened to former New York Giants coach Tom Coughlin...

Tom Coughlin, a certainty to be ushered into the NFL Hall of Fame, during the same 2007-15 period that Nick Saban has been coaching Alabama, coached his Giants to two Super Bowl victories, a feat that almost any other league team would envy...I know my Dolphins would, not having won a league title going on 42 years running.  But because, lately, his team has had two or three off-seasons, the Giants owner decided to ditch him...only he had him "resign" to make himself look better.  But that's the way it is in the NFL with coaches: they come and go more quickly and the job security is often hard to come by...it often has more to do with whether the owner personally likes you or not than how well your team performs.  So I'm finally reconciling myself to Saban leaving Miami to coach Alabama.  I just wish they hadn't put up that very creepy statue of him outside their stadium...