Is Nick Saban above criticism from Alabama fans?

Will Nick Saban Get Rid Of Criticism?

Greg McElroy, who sometimes seems to take pains to belittle his alma mater, had these remarks about Nick Saban, criticism, and whether the GOAT is feeling pressure in 2023:

McElroy went on to explain that he feels Saban often avoids bearing most of the pressure that is often placed on Alabama’s various high-profile assistants instead. However, after missing the playoffs and watching conference rivals Georgia win a second straight national title, the former Crimson Tide signal caller thinks the seven-time champion will feel the heat a little more.

“I think there will be pressure, yes. I’d be lying if I didn’t believe that was true, but I also think the pressure is rarely on Nick Saban,” McElroy said. “He sort of has a map to get out of jail — no matter what. All the attention, pressure and blame goes to the coordinators. Looking back over time, he’s been consistently winning forever. But if you look back over time, people keep saying, ‘Bill O’Brien has to go. Pete Golding has to go. Lane Kiffin has to go. Mike Locksley has to go. Jim McElwain has to go. Doug Nussmeier has to go.”

“So I feel like the coordinators are really taking more heat than Nick Saban because he’s kind of in a position where you can’t really criticize anything that he’s accomplished – you just go at it. But yes, there is obviously pressure and Alabama welcomes that pressure annually.”

The general thesis is that we’ve insulated Nick Saban from criticism, even if we blame (wrongly, he thinks) too much the other coaches, especially the coordinators.

My thoughts on this are a bit more complex and go much deeper than “bad coordinator”. (However, I fully admit that I abhor Offensive coordinators on principle.) Just as unhappy families are unhappy in their own way, Alabama’s underperforming seasons were unique for different reasons.

Let’s ignore GMac’s crazy straw men for a moment. Nobody ever said “Lane has to go” or “Locksley has to go”. There was Bitching about McElwain, but not because he was losing games, because it was Paleolithic football in a game that was visibly changing. Instead, let’s look each season at where the “blame” lies and who or what is to blame.

• 2013 was an era of complacency and lack of leadership. You can’t run your hottest player from center over a senior quarterback. Ultimately, reining in AJ and stopping him from freelancing and growing him fell squarely on his OC/QBC — and Nussmeier didn’t return.
• 2010 also lacked leadership, but injuries and some bad luck were the real killers here. You could live another 40 years and not see a ball shoot 30 yards down a rope down the sideline after Your Heisman, winning running back, commits his first-ever losing fumble. And that’s just for starters.
• 2016 was almost entirely about postseason injuries — Alabama winning the national title with Eddie Jackson. If the tide is healthy at the corner, Alabama wins the national title. A sane Scarbrough keeps Sark running and kills the clock with a head start. While he takes his share of the blame, it was far more about bad luck with injuries. No surprise, the DC returned the following season, and the OC was shut down before the playoffs even started.
• You can put 2019 in the same category: A healthy Tua (or a much more experienced Mac Jones) puts ‘Bama in the playoffs and at least a shot at a title even if it was a rematch. Both coordinators returned the following season.
• 2021 – More bad luck with injuries, combined with some horrible misses at key offensive line spots and no more than a little horrible coaching at spots (corner, OL spring to mind). Neither the coaches responsible for bringing in the underperformers nor those assigned to coach them returned for 2022.
• 2018 was a little different: coaching has let this team down, and that starts with Nick Saban bringing in a rock star cast of outstanding recruiters as position coaches and coordinators. But at the end of the day things were maybe to simply. The Crimson Tide was an absolute buzz saw, and nobody’s expectations were lived up to, even as the assistants jostled for their next job, rubbing shoulders with the job’s demands and utterly undermining one another. Nick Saban took his hand off the helm and it showed. And I don’t think anyone does or has denied that. As a result, in the 2019 season, the staff was almost completely rebuilt. And it needed it. Gattis and Enos and Tosh were just as toxic in the cabin as they were superb in the living room.
• Like 2018, the 2022 season was a failure in coaching, some missed recruits, and some bad luck with injuries (when your Heisman-winning QB is injured for 2/3 of the season and you have to face three Top 10 teams on the road, that’s quite a grind). And yes, we can trace the shortcomings here directly to the coaching – not Only the coordinators who orchestrated two horrific failures in Baton Rouge and Knoxville, but also the positional coaches who inked heartless boys, the pandemic that barred in-person recruitment and whose signers have largely proved broke, and yes, the head coach who hired them. But mainly the coordinators.

This season is seriously the only I’ve seen a season’s shortcomings thrown at the feet of the coordinators. And you should were… in no small measure. Yes, Pete and BoB didn’t get the same type of players as other coordinators, but it was obvious that coaching mistakes were all over the map. The program slipped into a funk, even into a malaise where you never knew what the tide would bring from week to week, quarter to quarter. Inconsistency was the only consistency. And that was evident on both offense and defense and is the reason both coordinators leave with a mixed heritage.

It wasn’t “playing by a standard” and it sure as hell wasn’t The Process. You could keep rattling on one hand how many times over the past two seasons Alabama has looked like… Alabama.

That finally Is Nick Saban’s responsibility. And while he would have liked to have welcomed both men back, I don’t think it’s unfair to say that it was probably for the best that everyone went along. Acknowledgment of the multifaceted ways in which Alabama has come up short in no way relieves Saban of deserved criticism. Nor does it give him free rein to point out that there have been exigencies that have derailed promising seasons or even a promising title run.

We certainly never gave him a pass for his shortcomings. Man is mortal, and even the very best that ever did can and will make mistakes — heck, even Einstein got it wrong about black holes and quantum entanglement in particular, and quantum mechanics in general, discoveries made in the last decade have won Nobel Prizes.

If we can try The Man, we sure can do that to a college football coach… no matter what kind of tired duck Greg McElroy pulls out of his ass this week. That doesn’t change the fact that it’s not about the coordinators… until the time comes.

And 2022 was about the coordinators, Greg. There’s also a reason they’re not back. Sometimes the limelight seems too bright—the expectations are too high, the demands are too great, the sacrifices are too great—to continue in your role, even if that role is still available to you.

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