NEW ORLEANS – It probably shouldn’t matter what the rest of the country thinks about Nick Saban. It isn’t as if Bear Bryant was ever all that beloved in New Jersey or Michigan or New Mexico, after all, and it never seemed to matter to the Bear that outside his Dixie fiefdom he was just a guy with a deep voice and a funny hat who won an awful lot of football games.
Maybe we should just stop obsessing about how he left Michigan State, how he left LSU, how he left the Miami Dolphins, none of those departures falling under the umbrella of “amicable.” Hell, coaches move. The great Bear moved around, from Kentucky to Texas A&M and finally to Tuscaloosa.
Coaches have always been mercenaries. Saban didn’t invent that.
The best of them have always chased victories and championships as hard as they pursued paychecks. Bryant was that way; he didn’t work for free. And in his day he had plenty of people who rooted against him the way people root against Saban now. You build a monster, folks want to see the monster humbled.
“What we have here is special,” Saban said last night. “Coaches, players, fans. All of that. And a night like tonight makes it all so sweet.”
He had just turned in his career masterpiece, his team throwing a 21-0 shutout at an LSU that was No. 1 in the country on merit, after a season spent taking on all comers – including Alabama on the first Saturday of November – and licking them all. By all appearances, they were the toughest cats in the room.
And the Tide made the Tigers looked like a scout team.
Much of that is talent, yes. A.J. McCarron, a sophomore quarterback who’d been almost an afterthought after sharing a backfield all year with the brilliant Trent Richardson, won the offensive MVP by attacking LSU’s defense in a way that LSU couldn’t – or wouldn’t attack Alabama’s. Alabama’s defense, superb all year, was frightening in its ferocity and its focus.
All true. And so is this: Given 44 days to prepare for one game, Nick Saban wasn’t going to lose. Not to Les Miles, the goofy oddball who would certainly be a better dinner companion than Saban but as a chess player isn’t in Saban’s league. Not to LSU, where the locals still harbor resentments not so much that Saban left, but that when he returned to college he landed at the devil’s den of Tuscaloosa.
There was a day in this very building 35 years ago when it was going to be Joe Paterno’s time to finally win a national title, when top-ranked Penn State challenged Alabama in the Sugar Bowl, the whole country eager to see Bryant handed his hat. Bama made an historic goal-line stand that day and when it was over, Paterno was forced to make a hard concession.
“It isn’t easy to beat the best,” Paterno said. “And it shouldn’t be.”
Bryant was the best of his day, Saban the best of his. He is the first coach to win three of those glass-egg BCS trophies, and unless he decides to pursue a life of leisure soon that collection is going to grow. You don’t have to like that, certainly don’t have to like him. He isn’t easy to root for. And so what?
“We fought like hell,” Miles said. “But it hurts to finish second. It’s supposed to be painful.”
It was painful to watch LSU last night, painful to watch Miles stubbornly refuse to make a quarterback switch when an entire state was begging him to. Maybe that would have mattered. Probably it wouldn’t. You watched one team last night and you saw a team that hoped to win. You looked across the field, you saw a team that knew it would win.
That stuff doesn’t happen by accident.
“We have a team of guys who won’t be denied,” Nick Saban said.
And a coach who won’t, either. You don’t have to like it, or him. Back in the day, one of the most fruitless of all sporting pastimes was rooting against Bear Bryant, too.