Although Alabama coach
Nick Saban touts SEC parity, the Tide again appear poised to dominate, Mike Bianchi writes.
HOOVER, Ala. — The Big Dog showed up at SEC Media Days Wednesday and tried to throw a bone to his litter of little puppies.
“I am trying to think of a program in our league that I don’t have a tremendous amount of respect for,” Saban said when I asked him about Alabama’s total and complete Southeastern Conference sovereignty and superiority. “I think there’s a lot of parity in our league. … We have one of the youngest teams that we've ever had. So it's going to be a real challenge for us to maintain the standard.”
The only thing missing from Saban’s address to hundreds of college football reporters was a laugh track. His claim of conference parity seemed more like a conference parody. His contention that his team’s youth may finally allow one of the league’s perennial pack of pretenders to challenge King Crimson for the SEC championship seemed more benevolent than believable.
This was clearly a case of Alabama’s dominant, dynastic coach dangling a shred of hope in front of his SEC underlings before methodically mashing them into a bloody pulp this fall.
Saban pointed out that the Crimson Tide are the youngest
they’ve been since 2012, but what he fails to mention is the 2012 team won the national championship by dismantling Notre Dame 42-14 in the BCS title game.
Translation: Saban’s 19-year-olds are 10 times better than the 21-year-olds at other programs.
There’s been talk of the SEC realigning its divisions and perhaps moving Auburn to the SEC East and Missouri to the SEC West. I’ve got a better idea: How about moving the Crimson Tide to the NFC East and replacing them with Texas or some other new member so that the SEC can become competitive again?
Let’s face it, the SEC has disintegrated into ’Bama and its 13 little bubbas and it doesn’t look like anybody in the league is even close to closing the gap. Saban’s Cyborgs destroyed the league last year, leveling every conference opponent by an average score of 40-14.
In all, the Tide have terminated 17 consecutive SEC opponents dating back 2015 and have done so by an average of 20 points per game. The last team to beat Alabama was Ole Miss — and the Rebels had to break NCAA rules to do it.
Here’s all you need to know about Saban’s excellence. Bear Bryant was at Alabama for 25 years and had nine teams ranked No. 1 in the nation at some point during the season. Saban’s Alabama teams have been ranked No. 1 at some point for the last nine years … and counting.
Saban has won four of the past eight national titles and has been so dominant that he’s actually running other coaches out of the league — or the profession. Let’s face it, Saban’s superiority is the reason LSU fired Les Miles and Georgia fired Mark Richt — two of the most successful coaches in the history of those schools. Saban beat Urban Meyer so badly in the SEC Championship Game in 2009 that Meyer quit a few weeks later, and the Gators haven’t been quite the same since.
Jim McElwain should be commended for taking the Gators to the SEC Championship Game in his first two years as head coach, but all that really means is Florida is the best of the rest. The Gators went to Atlanta last year and got trounced 54-16 by the Crimson Tide, proving once again that the gap between Alabama and the rest of the league is more expansive than Saban’s recruiting budget.
“They’ve got a well-oiled machine up there,” McElwain says of ’Bama. “They're right now at the top, and it's up to the rest of us to go get them.”
Added Georgia coach Kirby Smart: “The biggest thing [at Alabama] is recruiting and development. A lot of people say it's one or the other — do you recruit great players or do you develop great players? When you do both, that's when you have something special. And I think every team in this conference is trying to play catch-up in regards to that.”
Smart and McElwain both coached under Saban at Alabama — McElwain as an offensive coordinator, Smart as a defensive coordinator. It has become all the rage for programs to pluck coaches from the Saban tree in order to try and mimic his magic. Florida State has been the most successful in this regard. Jimbo Fisher coached under Saban at LSU and admits he built his program in Saban’s image.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens when Fisher’s Seminoles take on Saban’s Cyborgs in the season opener Sept 2 — just eight months after Clemson beat Alabama for the national title at the end of last season.
Hey, if the SEC can’t stop the Sabanator, then maybe the ACC can.