Mike Celizic

If I’m Nick Saban, I take the Alabama job. It’s not a tough call, either, not for someone like Saban who is confident of his ability to produce a winner. He can either deal with the ebb and flow of fortune in the salary-capped NFL, or he can be the man who restored a great football program to the glory it last knew under the legend that was Bear Bryant.

The only downside — with the alumni and boosters promising to come up with as much as $40 million to insure the prosperity of the Saban clan — is that with Saban taking the job, he’ll always be known as a lying weasel, a condition that will pass nationally in a couple of weeks but will endure for as long as he lives in Miami.

The charge will be true, and there’s no sense trying to sugar-coat it. Saban spent the last two months of the NFL season telling Miami and the world that coaching the Dolphins was the only job he wanted and he intended to be there for as long as the team kept sending him paychecks.

This is what coaches always say just before they take another job somewhere else. It’s stupid of them, especially as there’s no need for it. No one really cares that much any more whether they break contracts that they said fulfilled all of their dreams when they negotiated and signed them. In sports, contracts, like records, are made to be broken. I don’t like that, but I’m not going to fight it; I may as well try to bail water with a pitchfork.

What drives fans nuts, though, is when a coach says he’s never going anywhere and then leaves on the next flight out of town. A coach’s promise to stay has so little value, no one believes it when he says it, so why bother saying it at all?

You’d think people as intelligent as coaches are held to be would recognize that just because someone with a spiral notebook asks them a question, they’ve no obligation to answer it. If they know the answer could come back to bite them, they should treat the question like one fired at them by a prosecutor in court. Just say you can’t answer it and move on.

All Saban had to do when people asked him about the possibility of taking the Alabama job was say, “I’m not going to talk about anything other than the Miami Dolphins and our next game.” No matter how many times and in how many ways the question came up, that answer would have taken care of everything. This is good advice, and all coaches should write it down and look at it daily.

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But regardless of whether Saban was lying, the Alabama job is still as good as it gets -– at least it would be to me. This is one of the premier football school’s in the country, the alma mater of Joe Namath and Forrest Gump, a school that’s been waiting with growing impatience to return to the glory days that began to fade with the departure of Bear Bryant 24 years ago.

You don’t want to have to follow Bryant, but Saban’s not doing that. He’s already showed when he was at LSU that he can recruit and he can coach the college game, and he’s got the national championship to prove it.

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