Tag: Nick Saban

Nick Saban started his coaching career in 1973 as a graduate assistant at Kent State, and he’s spent all but eight of the subsequent seasons as a college coach. His brief forays into the NFL were generally unremarkable — two seasons as the Houston Oilers’ secondary coach in 1988 and 1989, four years as Bill Belichick’s defensive coordinator in Cleveland from 1991 through 1994, and two seasons as the Dolphins’ head coach in 2005 and 2006. Leaving the Dolphins job for Alabama after only two seasons was a black mark, and it looked increasingly clear that, following unparalleled success with the Crimson Tide from 2007 to the present, the 68-year-old Saban would finish his career in the college ranks.

However, it is also known of Saban that he is rarely content to stick around in a situation where declining results are the norm, or greener pastures prevail — and he tends to be quick about it. He left Michigan State to coach the Dolphins in an abrupt retirement. He left the Dolphins to coach Alabama after repeatedly denying that he would do so. And perhaps the only reason he hasn’t abruptly resigned from the Alabama job is… well, why would he? Through Saturday, Saban had put up an unreal 156-23 regular-season mark, with an 11-5 postseason record, and five national titles, including College Football Playoff championships in 2015 and 2017.

2019 marks the first time since 2014 that Saban has lost more than one game, and Alabama’s 45-48 loss to Auburn on Saturday pushed Saban out of the College Football Playoff this season. After the game, Saban complained about multiple officiating issues, including a penalty Alabama incurred for too many men on the field with 1:06 left in the fourth quarter. This game Auburn the first down it needed to run out the clock and win the game.

“I really feel that it was a pretty unfair play at the end of the game,” Saban said after the fact. “They substituted the punter as a wide receiver, so we put the punt team in. And then when the quarterback was still in there we tried to put the defense back in. I thought they should have given us a little more time to substitute and get [receiver Jaylen] Waddle out as a returner. We get called for 12 guys on the field. So that was very disappointing.

“We’re responsible for that as coaches, but it was a very unusual circumstance to say the least. And I think that sometimes when you have those, it should be viewed that way.”

True or not, it was a bad look from a coach who seemed to be out-schemed. The question is, where does Saban go from here?

The arguments against Saban returning to the NFL come frequently from Saban himself.

“I learned from my experience coming here,” Saban said in 2018 of his return to the college ranks from the Dolphins job. “I learned something about myself. At the time it was a tough consequence to have to deal with. I couldn’t have been in a better situation with better people here in Miami. But I found out maybe I was a little more suited to be a college coach. That was a tough realization because of the obligations I had to the people I worked for, and the players.”

Alabama has re-worked Saban’s contract several times through the years to ensure that he remains the highest-paid college coach and public employee in America. As it stands now, he’s on a contract set to pay him $35.63 million in the 2018 through 2021 seasons.

The 2019 disappointment could easily be written off as a couple of defensive fallbacks (this game, and Alabama’s loss to LSU, to be sure), and the season-ending injury to quarterback Tua Tagovailoa, Saban could work his usual recruiting magic in the offseason and come back stronger than ever — that outcome would surprise nobody.

On the other hand, there is the specter of a job left undone. As much as Saban may truly believe he’s better off coaching at the college level, he’s also a highly competitive person, and it can’t sit well with him that he ended his two-year stint with the Dolphins 15-17, known primarily as the guy who acquired Daunte Culpepper instead of Drew Brees, and ran out of town like a scalded dog.

Saban may look with some envy on the career of Pete Carroll, who — after unsuccessful stints with the Jets and Patriots in the 1990s, spent nine highly successful seasons at USC, reinvented himself, and went back to the NFL for one more shot. Since then, Carroll has put up a 98-56-1 regular-season record, a 9-6 postseason record, won a Super Bowl (XLIII) and come within one horrifically bad play call of winning another (XLIX).

Like Saban, Carroll is 68 seemingly going on 48, so the age factor wouldn’t seem to be major, at least on the surface. And you know those NFL teams, especially high-profile teams, will reach out to see if there’s any interest. Saban has Belichick ties, his Alabama teams have sent 28 first-rounders to the NFL since 2010, and he could easily explain away his former negative personality traits at the NFL level with the understanding that he learned from his return to the college ranks. It certainly worked for Carroll, both in theory and in practice. Were Saban to make himself available, there would be no theoretical limit to the rewards shoved his way from the likes of Jerry Jones.

Not that the news would break in the next week or so, but with extra time on his hands this season, it’s interesting to ponder what and how Nick Saban might be thinking about the NFL as we turn to a new decade.

Especially if he promises that he’s going to stay put.

Touchdown Wire editor Doug Farrar has also covered football for Yahoo! Sports, Sports Illustrated, Bleacher Report, the Washington Post, and Football Outsiders. His first book, “The Genius of Desperation,” a schematic history of professional football, was published by Triumph Books in 2018 and won the Professional Football Researchers Association’s Nelson Ross Award for “Outstanding recent achievement in pro football research and historiography.”