Forbes gives Alabama football coach Nick Saban too much power
Friday, August 15, 2008
Nick Saban is the most powerful coach in sports ... who's lost four of his last five games.
Saban is the most powerful coach in sports ... who's one game over .500 at his current job.
Saban is the most powerful coach in sports ... who hasn't had a winning regular season in three years.
That must be what Forbes magazine meant to say when it put Saban on the cover of its September issue and called him "sports' most powerful coach."
Period.
The more fitting headlines just wouldn't fit.
Surely, Forbes didn't mean to suggest that Saban is more powerful than Mike Krzyzewski. Coach K has won three national titles and didn't have to share any of them with Pete Carroll.
The Duke basketball coach is the absolute monarch of his program, but it's a title he earned rather than having it bestowed upon him, and his pull goes beyond his state, his conference and even his country.
USA basketball put him in charge of no less a task than restoring order to the universe by bringing back the gold medal with our Olympic team in Beijing .
Krzyzewski's so powerful, the NCAA has looked the other way at his national TV spots for the likes of American Express, which are nothing more than Duke recruiting commercials.
They wouldn't dare pass a Krzyzewski Rule.
And few people outside the IRS know exactly how much money Krzyzewski pulls down each year because Duke, as a private school, doesn't have to release his salary information.
But forget college sports. Saban may not even be the most powerful coach in his own coaching family.
His mentor, Bill Belichick, while leading the New England Patriots to four Super Bowls and winning three of them, has been above the law in the law-and-order NFL. He's thumbed his nose at the league's dress code, with those threadbare, thrift-store hoodies, and at the anti-spying regulations.
Roger Goodell did hit him with the largest fine of a coach in NFL history at $500,000, but the get-tough commish didn't bench him for a single game.
Even DJ Hall got suspended for a half.
Belichick's so big, literary heavyweight David Halberstam wrote his autobiography. Power is having your life story penned by an author who also profiled Robert Kennedy.
This is not to say that Saban isn't powerful. Alabama did give him the keys to the kingdom, but Alabama is the British Empire of college football.
It ain't what it used to be. Territories it once ruled, like Auburn and Mississippi State , have declared their independence with a vengeance.
As much sway as Saban has over his school's administrators, alums, boosters and fans, there's one group among his constituents that has yet to completely bow at his feet and kiss his LSU-BCS ring.
His players.
If Saban truly were the most powerful coach in all of sports, would he have to hire the Pacific Institute to brainwash, I mean, mentally condition his players with daily affirmations like, "I am a bad man"?
Wouldn't it be cheaper to bus down and watch Auburn practice? You know, to fully grasp the concept by the face mask.
That's power where it counts. Right in the mouth
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