Bielema buckles up, chides Tide’s Saban
FAYETTEVILLE — Arkansas football Coach Bret Bielema has been confident, sometimes brash and humorous in his four months on the job.
Bielema has shown a little of all those qualities in the last week since his appearance at the Saline County Razorback Club meeting last Wednesday.
At the meeting, Bielema reiterated one of the key reasons he took the Arkansas job — to win an SEC championship — then he discussed Nick Saban and the Alabama football program, the conference’s current standard setter with three BCS national championships in four seasons.
According to Hootens.com, Bielema said, “The reason the SEC is talked about all the time is one team, because of their dominance. But I didn’t come here to play Alabama. I came here to beat Alabama.
“You can take Saban’s record when he was at Michigan State and when he was a coach in the Big Ten and put it against mine, and he can’t compare.”
The remarks prompted some backlash on social media from Alabama fans.
Bielema, writing on his Twitter account on April Fool’s Day on Monday, responded to the critics, while also making a reference to the infamous Bobby Petrino motorcycle wreck that occurred last April Fool’s Day.
“Things to chill out about today: 1 - I’m only driving my car today 2 - Alabama quotes were a joke to a question from a fan at pep rally. #wow,” Bielema wrote. Welcome to the SEC, Bret. And on the subject of his Big Ten record, Bielema was 68-24 overall, for a .739 winning percentage, and 37-19 (.661) in the Big Ten, with three conference titles in seven seasons.
Saban’s tenure at Michigan State produced a 34-24-1 overall record (.585), a 23-16-1 mark in the Big Ten (.588) and no conference championships. Saban parlayed his best Big Ten season, a second-place finish with a 6-2 record and an invitation to the Citrus Bowl in 1999, into the LSU head coaching job, where he won the first of his four BCS national titles.
When asked for a response from Alabama media members, Saban said:
“I really don’t have any reaction to it. … I’m really concerned about what we do here with our players, how we try to get the people in our organization to play at a high standard. I really don’t defend anything I ever did any place we’ve ever been. Everybody has different situations they’re in, everybody inherits different situations that they’re in, you do the best you can to try to build a good program in those situations.
“That certainly is what we’ve always tried to do and continue to do and focus on the process of what we need to do to continue to be successful here.”