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Miami Herald article: Saban loses truth in noise
Posted on Fri, Jan. 05, 2007
Saban loses truth in noise
BY DAN LE BATARD
dlebatard@MiamiHerald.com
There is no gentle way to say this: The man who was
coaching the Dolphins the past couple of years, the
CEO at the top of a violent game, has been exposed the
past couple of days as kind of a wimp.
Nick Saban does nothing better than talk, and he kept
yammering like the evangelist/politician/fraud that he
is Thursday to place blame on everyone but himself.
The decision to go pro? It was Wayne Huizenga's fault
for sweet-talking him out of the college game. The
lack of improvement? It was the fault of Dave
Wannstedt for leaving him a salary-cap mess. The
losing? It was the fault of Ricky Williams for failing
a drug test, and Ronnie Brown and Daunte Culpepper for
getting hurt, and the personnel people for picking the
wrong players. The decision to leave? His wife missed
the atmosphere of the college game.
The amazing thing isn't that Saban told his assistant
coaches he was leaving by phone. The amazing thing is
that he didn't ask his wife to place the call for him.
As a parting gift, can someone please buy the CEO with
the nice hair a mirror?
So there goes another one of Saban's bedrocks. After
smashing to bits ''honesty'' and ''integrity'' and
''loyalty'' and ''mental toughness'' the past few
days, ''accountability'' came crumbling to the ground
at the fraud evangelist's feet Thursday.
Here's the truth: Saban found he couldn't impact the
pro game with all his genius and all his arrogance and
all his condescension and all his coaches and all his
self-help-infomercial yammering and all of Huizenga's
money. So he fled.
EASY WAY OUT
That's it. He wouldn't be gone if this had been
easier, if the Dolphins were better. It wasn't about
lifestyle or big-city life or family.
Keep in mind, this is a man whose wife had to
barricade the house to keep him from leaving to go
watch film during an approaching hurricane. His wife
has admitted to calling his receptionist to get her
the gifts she wants on holidays. Saban can't dislike
South Florida because all he knows of it is the path
from his mansion to the cave at headquarters where he
watches film. But now it's about environment? That
would be true only if the environment we are talking
about is last place.
Fact is, Saban's greatest power is charming recruits.
That's not helping you at all in the pros. So what
little winning he did in the NFL was by renting
players others had discovered. He won with the oldest
defense in the NFL, with players borrowed from other
teams or previous Miami regimes. It says plenty that
his first-round pick this season couldn't get on the
field even in a weak secondary without playmakers.
There's no salary cap legislating equity at Alabama
like there is the NFL.
Saban spun it Thursday to make it about wanting to
impact kids again. Um, yeah. You could do that by
coaching high school or Florida International. You
could do that by not forgetting the birthdays of your
own children. You could do that a lot of other ways
than at the place where you are being paid more than
any college coach in the land. Saban doesn't want to
impact kids unless they're the ones who are going to
win him 10 games a year.
The outrage and noise and hostility and volume is a
bit selfish on our part, of course. We feel betrayed,
emotional, duped. If he missed the college game and
decided to replace Larry Coker at the University of Miami, we would probably be more understanding, for
selfish reasons. Pat Riley essentially did to the
Knicks once what Saban just did, faxing in his
resignation, and we welcomed him here with worship.
That part is on us.
But we love our hypocrisy. Nothing will get the volume
turned up like a politician falling from grace or an
evangelist dabbling in what he preaches against, and
Saban is the politician/evangelist equivalent in the
religion of sports. It was gross and amazing to see
him tell the same stories he told for two years here
at his introductory news conference in Alabama, still
yammering about toughness even while showing zero
here. He didn't even have the courtesy of bringing
original material. He sounded like a vacuum-cleaner
salesman, giving his pitch door-to-door. And his
worshipping audience lapped it up like thirsty dogs at
a bowl.
LAND OF INDECISION
But now that he has finally talked, we know why Saban
had so much trouble throwing that little red challenge
flag. He was no good with decisions, big or small. At
the end, according to ESPN's Chris Mortensen, Saban
actually whimpered to Huizenga that he would stay if
the owner really, really wanted him to -- somehow
putting this in the boss' lap.
Saban came here because he wanted to be The Man.
At the end, he wasn't much of one.
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1/6/2007, 3:48 pm
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