Nick Saban is the new head football coach at UAT.

The Tide lured Saban from the Miami Dolphins on Wednesday, ending five weeks of denials and two days of deliberation. Saban, who two weeks ago declared “I’m not going to be the Alabama coach,” accepted the Tide’s job offer job and abandoned his attempt to rebuild the Dolphins after only two seasons.

His agreement with Alabama is for eight years and a guaranteed $32 million, according to ESPN.com’s Len Pasquarelli. Saban can earn an additional $700,000 to $800,000 annually in bowl-game bonuses.

Saban arrived in Tuscaloosa by private plane today and proceeded to walk on water before greeting the assembled Tide faithful.

OK, I made up the walking on water part, but one wouldn’t know it by the response of some Tide fans.

When Saban approached the crowd and began shaking hands, a Crimson-clad woman yelled: “Thank you, Jesus! Thank you, Nick Saban!”

A local TV station interviewed a woman who said she had been “praying to God” for weeks for this outcome.  There are starving kids in remote lands, incurable diseases, and other unfortunate situations worthy of divine intervention, but some people think the head coach at UAT is God’s most pressing concern.

In all seriousness this is noting short of the perfect result for Tide fans.  With Saban they get a known quantity. He is a first rate recruiter, hard worker, and skilled X’s and O’s guy.  If they can avoid running him off after his first tough season (and if he chooses to stay) he has a longer shelf life than Spurrier.

After years of botched hires Mal Moore has finally gotten one right.  I didn’t think he could do it.  The secret to his success was to dramatically change his tactics.  First he realized that coaches will not come to Alabama just because they put up the vacancy sign.  Their tumultuous history with coaches effectively required Moore to pony up money to account for the uncertain long term employment prospects.  The second change (this is my educated guess) is that Moore agreed to give Saban the reins.  Alabama has suffered from having too many chefs in the kitchen.  If Saban is in fact allowed to clean house and run things his way he has a great chance of success.  Miami gave him a great deal of control to lure him there and I doubt he would leave without similar guarantees from Bama.

The big loser in this situation?  It’s not Auburn.  In Saban’s five seasons in Baton Rouge he only managed to defeat the AU Tigers twice.  No, the big losers will likely be the Tigers from Louisiana.  Saban built up a great recruiting foundation in that region during his brief stay there and we can expect him to rekindle his relationships with all those high school coaches that continued to feed top notch athletes to LSU after his departure.

Oh, don’t give Saban a hard time for denying interest (vehemently) in the Bama job in the preceding weeks.  What do you expect him to say?  Jim Mora was nearly crucified in Atlanta for saying that the head job at the University of Washington was his dream job.  By the way, Jim Mora no longer works for the Falcons.  Saban said what he had to in that situation.

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This entry was posted by Brian on Wednesday, January 3rd, 2007 at 8:01 pm and is filed under College Football. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Please note the copyright policy.