Not just college football.  All sports.  We’ll see if such lofty accolades can be converted into on the field achievements.

[I]n Tuscaloosa, which was desperate to return to national football prominence, Saban, 56, was a savior, welcomed with an open wallet. Saban, with his agent, James E. Sexton II, negotiated an eight-year, $32 million contract that was, at the time, the highest salary ever paid to a college coach. It remains among the highest and is bigger than all but a handful of NFL coaching salaries. His deal includes, among other perks, 25 hours of private use of a university airplane, two cars and a country club membership, extras that make his annual compensation closer to $5 million a year, estimates Smith College economics professor Andrew Zimbalist. He can leave the school at any time without financial penalty, a rarity in big-time college coaching contracts.

What’s more, he was given total control of the football program: recruiting, coaching, business administration and public relations. There are coaches at other universities who have similar salaries, like Charlie Weis at Notre Dame and Pete Carroll at the University of Southern California. But no coach, including those in the professional leagues, can match Saban’s combination of money, control and influence. Saban, now entering his second year as the coach of the Alabama Crimson Tide, is the most powerful coach in sports.

Saban was indeed welcomed as a savior at UAT - one of the reasons that I deemed him “Barack Obama for rednecks” back in January of 2007.

Not really, but we might need to start thinking about it.

Earlier this month former Tide great Kenny Stabler was arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol - for the third time. Bama coach Nick Saban responded to the news by saying that Stabler is “a great ambassador for this university.” Indeed. If only every institution could have such a distinguished ambassador.

Today we were greeted with the story about their senior linebacker (and former running back) Jimmy Johns being arrested for selling cocaine. The enterprising young scholar “allegedly sold powdered cocaine to undercover officers five times.” Johns did not receive the same treatment from Coach Saban as The Snake, however. Saban promptly dismissed Johns from the team.

The recent news follows a tumultuous off season. In February freshman Jeremy Elder was kicked off the team after his arrest for two counts of first degree robbery. Less than a week after Elder’s arrest senior - and team captain - Rashad Johnson was arrested for disorderly conduct. At least nine UAT players have been arrested since Saban came to Tuscaloosa. And that doesn’t include Prince Hall, who has been suspended indefinitely for the ubiquitous violation of team rules.

These are some proud times down in T-Town.

Some Florida Gator fans are trying to get an official Gators license plate in Georgia.  This doesn’t site well with Georgia Senate President pro tem Eric Johnson, who penned this playful letter to the state’s Revenue Commissioner:

Dear Commissioner Graham:

This is absolutely unacceptable for our state!

A Gator tag will cause accidents. Gator fans cannot drive or read traffic signs. A car up on blocks cannot move. And it will lower our quality of life. In fact, my children used to have nightmares because we lived dangerously close to the state of Florida.

If state law allows this to occur then we need to change the law. Please delay any approval until the next session when we can amend the law to ban any tag for a university with more national championships than the average IQ of their alumni. A delay in processing their application should not require much of an effort since they cannot write either.

If it takes a 1,000 signatures to create a tag, can we have a regulation that 1,000 e-mails AGAINST a proposed tag kills it? If you agree, please count this as e-mail # 1…..

Please keep me informed as to the progress of this outrage. I am counting on the GEORGIA Department of Revenue to handle it appropriately. (wink-wink)

Sen. Eric Johnson

Cars on blocks.  Lowering the standard of living.  Causing accidents.  All good - and probably true - stuff.  Just think how he would react if fans tried to get a Crimson Tide plate in Georgia!

The so called “progressives” in Alabama are yearning for a Bear Bryant figure in their party.  No, they aren’t fielding a football team; they want a winner on a grand scale.  I would advise them that this isn’t necessarily such a desirable goal.  Just ask current Republicans and Alabama fans.

Bama fans have suffered from an acute complex ever since the Bear left their sidelines.  No coach can measure up.  Coaches have come and gone.  Some went faster than others.  Some won SEC championships.  One won a national championship.  But the Bama fans were never happy.  They threw a brick through Bill Curry’s window for his efforts.  They greeted the hiring of Nick Saban, a proven collegiate winner (and NFL loser), with an orgasmic euphoria.  Saban just finished his first year without a winning record in the regular season.  Let’s just say the honeymoon is over.  The aura of the Bear still hangs heavy at UAT and it tends to stifle any coach who takes the reins.

The Republicans are also coping with their own Bear: Ronald Wilson Reagan.  His name is evoked at nearly every Republican function.  He has been elevated – deified – to a level that is unattainable for any who follow.  For many, his sins have been not just forgiven, but forgotten.  What is left is a litany of measuring sticks and every Republican has their own unique set tailored to their own beliefs about what conservatism is.  In the end, no candidate can measure up to the mythic Reagan standard just as no coach at UAT can fill the Bear’s shoes.

As I alluded to earlier, Reagan had his faults.  He made decisions that would cause him to be castigated as a candidate today and probably labeled a flip flopper.  As governor he signed the biggest tax increase in the history of his state and legalized abortion.  As president he granted amnesty to 3 million illegal aliens and brought us the Iran-Contra Affair.  Yet despite these sundry blemishes on his record he remains, rightfully, a renowned figure - the GOP’s Bear Bryant.

One doesn’t need to follow much of the discourse of conservative pundits and opinion makers these days to realize that every candidate is bludgeoned with some element of the mythic Reagan mantle.  Is the Reagan visage casting a shadow over the GOP so broad that good, possibly great, candidates cannot escape it much like the Bryant shadow has left Tuscaloosa’s football program in periodic disarray for the last two and a half decades?  I think that it may be doing just that.

So, is having a Bryant worth it?  Does the legacy create an effective barrier to comparable success in the following years?  Does the legacy - the dusty trophies and fading memories - help dull the pain of modern day mediocrity?  Or does it only sharpen the agony?

Last year it was Florida.  This year it was LSU with a not-as-close-as-the-score-indicates 38-24 whipping.  I have a radical idea: how about we give Ohio State a few years to collect themselves before we let them embarrass themselves in the championship game again.

I wasn’t sure if it was a title game or a contest of which band looked the dumbest.  Ohio State’s looked like a Central American revolutionary militia with their black outfits and little berets.  LSU’s uniforms look like what I see on the band when I go see a cash strapped rural high school football team play.  Cheap.

Congrats to the Tigers.  Maybe next year we should just let the SEC championship substitute for the national championship.

University of South Alabama trustees have approved a football program.

Read Steve’s post to get a flavor of how I feel about the Tigers and Tide doling out free Iron Bowl (and other) tickets and parking passes to legislators and other government officials throughout the state.

I was half joking when the story first broke about auditing the tax returns of recipients of the tickets, but I’m thinking that may be just what the public needs to call for.  I would bet a Tide-y amount of money that a large portion of the various politicians and bureaucrats didn’t list the tickets or parking passes as income, which they are since they have value.  I also wonder how the federal and state income tax auditors would value the tickets since they can’t be purchased by us common folk without first contributing hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars to the school’s athletic fundraising group.

For the record, the chairman of the utterly useless Alabama Ethics Commission says the ticket give aways don’t violate ethics laws.

Ethics Commission Director Jim Sumner said under the law universities and other organizations may give away tickets to sporting and other entertainment events without penalty and without reporting it.

“As long as it’s not of continuous nature such as giving season passes, they’re at liberty to invite members of the State Legislature to these events,” he said.

Maybe Sumner and I have differing definitions of “continuous nature.”  If the universities give all those tickets and parking passes away every year it seems quite continuous in nature to me.  I wonder if Sumner gets tickets?

Sumner was quoted in the Birmingham News sounding a little more critical of the gifts.

The Ethics Commission says there’s nothing illegal about the free tickets. “I’m not saying it’s the right thing,” said Jim Sumner, the commission’s director and a former lobbyist for the University of Alabama. “But it’s the way it’s always been done.”

Seriously.  Sumner justifies the bribes by saying that “it’s always been done” that way.  He admits it’s not the “right thing,” which I presume means it’s the “wrong thing.”  So Sumner is saying that doing the wrong thing is OK because that is how we’ve always done it.  And he’s leading our ethics commission.

From AL.com:

The longest serving member of the Alabama Legislature said today he will take the president of Auburn University to court because he didn’t receive his customary pair of tickets to the Auburn-Alabama football game.

Rep. Alvin Holmes, D-Montgomery, also suggested politics may have played a role.
Holmes said he would file court papers to compel Auburn President Jay Gogue to testify in Montgomery Circuit Court.

Holmes said Gogue and his staff have been unresponsive to his questions about why he did not receive his tickets before Saturday’s game at Auburn.

“I think it’s very unprofessional that a president of a state-supported university would not respond to an inquiry made by the senior member of the House of Representatives or any member of the House of Representatives,” said Holmes. “In light of that fact, I plan to put him under oath and let him testify.”

In a long-standing custom, each legislator receives two tickets to the Auburn-Alabama game each year, along with parking passes. When the game is played in Tuscaloosa, the University of Alabama provides the tickets and parking passes.

“I did a survey with other members of Legislature to determine whether they got their tickets, and they did,” said Holmes.

First of all, just why do legislators get free tickets and parking to the Iron Bowl, the most coveted sporting event ticket in the state?  I wonder how many of them list this form of income on their tax returns (hint, hint Mr. IRS auditor).

War Eagle!

(AP Photo/Rob Carr)

I’m sorry, but I can’t help but take a large degree of joy seeing the vaunted (and expensive) Nick Saban utterly fail in his first year in T-town.  He came in walking on water and the hapless, hungry Alabama fan base set him on a pedestal.  A few months later the season is over and Bama doesn’t even have a winning record.  Six wins.  Six losses.  Six straight to AU.

There’s really no way to pardon the team’s performance.  You can’t say, “Well, he was playing with Shula’s boys.”  Shula coached with most of the same players last year and also won six games - and didn’t lose to the Louisiana Monroe WarHawks.  Saban has bought the Tide absolutely no improvement.  It looks like the long term investment is going to be slow to mature.

And I gotta say I’m glad Saban wasn’t president during 9/11 or Pearl Harbor.  His foolish evocation of those events in a press conference after the ULM loss may have been intended to fire up his troops, but it didn’t seem to work.

Enough of that…

One item of note from the game itself.  Just why the hell are there police with attack dogs on the field during the game?  Is that really what the school plans on using if some overly excited kids rush the field?  They’re going to sic friggin’ dogs on students?!?!  I only ask because in the fourth quarter of the game Auburn DB Jerraud Powers made a play in the back of the end zone and as he was walking away a police dog lunged at him and bit his hand.  Powers wasn’t threatening the dog in any way and the handler had the dog positioned just a couple of feet out of bounds.  According to Powers in an interview after the game, the bite drew blood.

I think it is time for the university to review their policy and get those animals off the field.  What if a player dove out of the end zone to make a play and landed on or near the dog and the animal started to maul the player?  There is absolutely no reason to have dogs trained to attack sitting on the field of a sporting event.

In honor of the upcoming Iron Bowl…