The Hex Worked!

The University of Alabama football team, demoralized by my post about why I dislike head coach Nick Saban, lost to the University of Georgia 26-23 in overtime on Saturday. Seriously, the press about what a coaching genius Saban is (and I suppose that he may be, despite the fact that he's a worm) notwithstanding, the most that you can say about the Alabama football team is that their defense is pretty good. Their offense is, um, uninspiring. They're simply not good enough to beat good teams (like Georgia) thoroughly, which means that the best they can hope for is to stay close and win at the end. That's what happened last week against Arkansas. They were outplayed this week against Georgia, and Georgia was able to pull it out in the end. I would expect to see the same story repeated as Alabama plays the rest of its SEC schedule -- they might be able to beat Tennessee and Auburn, but it won't be by much. And I don't see how they can possibly stay close with LSU, absent a miracle.

Bad Coaches, the College Edition

During the offseason, Nick Saban signed an eight-year, $32 million contract with the University of Alabama to become Alabama's head football coach. The fact that that contract made him the most highly-paid college football coach in the country is not what makes him a bad coach. The fact that he's a lying bastard who has repeatedly shown that he cares not one whit for anyone other than himself is what makes him a bad coach. Let's consider his career over the past seventeen years:

In 1990, he became a head coach for the first time, leading the University of Toledo to a 9-2 season. He celebrated his success by dumping Toledo for a job as the Cleveland Browns' defensive coordinator the next year. When that job didn't turn out so well, resulting in him getting fired after the 1994 season. He managed to get the head coaching job at Michigan State in 1995. The next four seasons were the very picture of mediocrity, with the Spartans never finishing better than 7-5 or worse than 6-6. Then in 1999, he got lucky: Michigan State went 9-2 during the regular season and were invited to the Citrus Bowl to play Florida. Saban didn't coach that game because he jumped ship to Louisiana State University after the last regular season game. He spent five years at LSU, four of which were good and one of which was excellent -- LSU shared the national championship after the 2003 season. In 2005, he decided to try his hand at coaching the NFL's Miami Dolphins. That wasn't exactly a success, so he jumped ship to Alabama in January 2007 after repeatedly claiming that he had no interest whatsoever in doing so and that he would come back and fulfill his 5-year contract with the Dolphins.

You see, contracts apparently don't mean much to Nick Saban. Neither do the commitments that he has made over the years to the high school players that he has convinced to accept scholarships at the schools he was coaching at the time. Whenever the prospect of a more desirable job has come up, Saban has been after it like a dog after a bone. He's the epitome of the modern mercenary football coach, and I don't think that the world of sport is better for it. And I'm upset that I can no longer root for Alabama, about whom I had been moderately enthusiastic for years. Go Auburn and LSU!

Bad Coaches

You might have seen (or, more likely, given my readership, you might not have seen) that Bill Belichick, the head coach of the NFL's New England Patriots, was embroiled in a cheating controversy this week. During the Patriots' game with the New York Jets last Sunday, a Patriots assistant coach was caught videotaping Jets coaches making defensive signals. This is a violation of NFL rules, which limit the locations from which teams can videotape games: it is legal to tape games from the pressbox but illegal to tape from the sidelines, which is what the Patriots coach did. This is not an obscure rule, nor is it a matter of interpretation as to whether the Patriots violated it. As punishment for this incident, Belichick was fined $500,000, the Patriots were fined $250,000, and they will forfeit either their first round or their second and third round draft choices in 2008, depending on whether they make the playoffs this year.

There are a lot of Patriots apologists out there, both among the general public and in the sports punditariat, who say that this was a dumb rule and that violation of it really didn't upset the competitive balance in the game. They're all missing the point. The rule is explicit, and Belichick new very well that videotaping from the sideline was illegal. Nobody has presented any evidence that this kind of miscreance has been perpetrated by any other team. In fact, the reason for the league's warning in 2006 were repeated complaints that the Patriots were doing this. Not only that, but other complaints of systematic, intentional violations of the rules have been buzzing around the league for years. See Paul Zimmerman's Sports Illustrated column for more details. Bill Bellichick intentionally violated league rules that were meant to ensure a fair game, and he did it right in front of everybody's face. The man is a cheater, and he's arrogant. He deserved a much more severe punishment than he got, and he has solidified his position as the most offensive coach in the NFL today.