Hate Week: Coachbot

I'm not going to pretend this post is some kind of rational evaluation of Nick Saban. I can't do rational with Saban. There are certain teams and certain figures in college football that every college football fan who takes college football seriously hates is ways they can't fully explain. Saban is that figure for me. Besides, I'm choosing to believe Auburn is going to travel to Tuscaloosa tomorrow and write a capital-S Story. So we need a capital-V Villain.



And for better, for worse, tomorrow Auburn will face down the capitalest of them all. Nick Saban is the walking embodiment of every opposing coach from every big game in every children's sports movie you've ever seen: angry at the world for no reason other than he seems to be mad of anger, willing to win at whatever costs winning seems to ask of him, a man who--if I may be so bold--has probably not seriously considered the possibility his team of colossi could lose to the ragtag bunch they'll face tomorrow.

No, the 2008 Iron Bowl might not be a movie. But is there any doubt that if it was, Nick Saban would be on the sidelines, telling his charges to Sweep the Leg?

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Not long ago, Orspencerson Shwallindle wrote the following:

Nick Saban is Ahab. He is bottomless in his complexity and terrifying in his anger, and capable of speaking whatever language needs to be spoken to get his point across. In another age, he’d be holding onto the harpoon five hundred feet below the surface of the ocean. His ears would bleed in another hundred feet as the whale with the harpoon embedded in its hide dove deeper and deeper; the rope would bloody his already shredded hands. Soon, he’d turn inside out from the pressure. But he’d die with that f***ing rope in his hands.

On some level I agree with Orson: Saban's anger is certainly Ahabesque in its all-consuming intensity, in its perpetual tenacity. But what is Saban's white whale? A crystal football? The unyielding adoration of a fanbase he didn't seem to find at LSU? Cash? Respect?

Really, though, you'd have to think "wins," right? What he wants more than anything, what drives him to his peculiar brand of madness, is wins. And this is where the Ahab comparison breaks down. Ahab wants something he is doomed to never, ever possess and his rage and desire become tragic, hopeless. Saban wants something he receives all the time that doesn't satisfy him anyway. His rage and desire are that of a drug addict, lashing out because his otherwise perfect world can't give him a fix yet. Complex, maybe, but I don't find his anger terrifying. It's first machine-like--angry because his hardwiring programs to be angry--and, frankly, pathetic. Ahab never would have stooped to being angry at the piddling likes of Ian Rapaport.

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When Jimmy Johns got arrested, Will Collier wrote that his "pharmaceutical operation was not exactly a state secret--there has been chatter about it on message boards for quite a while now." If the Internet knew that Johns was dealing, I think it's fair to put the odds on Saban remaining blissfully unaware of Johns's situation at 0.00000000001 percent. He knew.

When the final bits of roster attrition had come to pass and Alabama's scholarship crunch was no longer an immediate issue--and yes, the crunch existed, whatever you think of its actual ramifications the facts are that no other school in the country oversigned the way Alabama did--Tide fans by-and-large took this knowledge as a positive. He knew there were risks on his roster and acted accordingly, went the argument.

I'm not going to claim that had he not chosen to tie his hands with his incoming class, Saban could have done anything to help Jimmy Johns turn his life around; logically, Johns was already past the point of saving and for all we know Saban maybe tried to get Johns's head on straight. I'm not going to claim that Tarence Farmer and the other benchwarmers who scattered from the Tide roster as fall practice approached had their scholarships janked; logically, Saban most likely made it clear Farmer would never see a down for the Tide under his staff and that if he wanted to actually play college football, he'd need to go somewhere else. File Johns under "lost cause." File Farmer and the like under "brutal honesty" and "the cost of doing business."

But also file the entire mess under "gray areas." Because what if Farmer really enjoyed Tuscaloosa and wanted to stay on the team without his coaches thinking of him as a problem to be solved? What if the immediate, full intervention of his head coach and the staff could have convinced Johns that maybe dealing wasn't such a great idea? Again, both of these hypotheticals are exceedingly, extraordinarily unlikely. But they're out there. They're possibilities. They envelop Alabama and its coach in gray.

That the Tide's fans are so blindingly willing to follow their coach out of the light and into the gray should tell you something about this program's desperation, their shared willingness to participate in the blood-lettings if it means the demons of mediocrity can be exorcised. (When even FreeDarko notices from their vantage point a thousand miles away that Saban belongs in T-town, that's saying something.) Alabama has gotten the coachbot they deserve, the gray clouds they begged for.

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The coachbot they deserve is one more reason why they deserve to lose tomorrow. Screw Alabama. Screw Nick Saban. Deny them their fix, Auburn.

Beat them. Win.