Mike Celizic

Does anyone care to think who’d be playing in the SEC title game on Saturday if Nick Saban hadn’t been on a mission to be football’s answer to Larry Brown and Urban Meyer had fallen for the blandishments of Notre Dame?

It probably wouldn’t be Alabama and Florida. Neither program was going anywhere before Saban ran out on the Miami Dolphins two years ago and Meyer left Utah for Florida in 2005. But even if the same two teams were in the game, without those two coaches, we wouldn’t be talking about the winner being bound for the BCS championship game.

It’s no secret that coaches rule in college football. It’s also no secret that the best of them are making increasingly large piles of money. They’re also not nearly as excited about spending decades at one school. Let’s face it: We’ll never see another Joe Paterno or Bobby Bowden again. And as the money increases, so, too, does the likelihood that in the future we’ll see even less constancy than we see now.

This isn’t good news to either Florida or Alabama, which worked hard to put Meyer and Saban on their sidelines and would like to see them stay there. Both men are among the highest paid coaches in the game. Alabama gave Saban an eight-year deal worth $4 million a year when the school pried him away from the Dolphins two years ago. After Meyer won Florida a national championship in 2006, the school rewarded him with a six-year extension worth $3.2 million a year. Only Saban, Oklahoma’s Bob Stoops, Notre Dame’s Charlie Weis — and perhaps USC's Pete Carroll — make more than Meyer, and you can decide for yourself who’s getting good return for the money.

But regardless of whether Meyer gets to the BCS title game or not, Florida is going to have to start thinking about laying even more money on him. Because if they don’t, someone else will. And Alabama had better have a game plan in hand to keep Saban in Tuscaloosa, regardless of the cost.

If you can get and keep a good coach, your future is secure. We can all whine as much as we want about how much more money these guys make than the presidents of the universities, but the reality is money talks. If you want to keep a coach, you’ve got no choice but to make the job so lucrative he never wants to leave.

A lot of people still get annoyed by this truth. They remember the old days when coaches wanted to set down roots in a college town, become a legend and never leave. But the country was more rural in nature, travel was difficult and expensive and people had more of a sense of place back then. If you lived in Columbus, Ohio, you read the Columbus Dispatch and maybe the Cleveland Plain Dealer. You watched the three major networks on local television. There was no ESPN and you never read The New York Times or Washington Post, because there was no Internet to read them on.

Also, 50 years ago, coaching in the NFL wasn’t a better job than coaching in college and most coaches, whether college or pro, didn’t make more than a department head, let alone a school president. There was a difference in job security. If you were a good college coach, you were pretty much assured a job as long as you wanted it, unlike in the pros. So if you found a job at a college, you were likely to stay there, especially if you had a family. It was more secure.

Today, we’re an urban nation and travel is easy. People have less of a sense of place than ever before, and celebrity is tied more to income than to accomplishment. If something better pops up on the other end of the country, you’re more likely to go for it today than you would have been in 1950 or 1960.

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