Alabama’s Joyless Champion

Source: www.slate.com --- Friday, January 01, 2016
Nick Saban efforted a smile on national television on Thursday night. As with the majority of the Alabama Football coach’s public displays of emotion that vaguely resemble joy, it was brief and pointed and wracked with awkwardness, which was also how Saban’s brief celebratory “ dance ” with the Alabama marching band came across a short time later. Other than perhaps his mentor Bill Belichick, there may no more joyless and perpetually dissatisfied man in sports than Saban. It’s this grim determinedness, though, that has him on the verge of becoming perhaps the greatest college Football coach in the history of the sport. Saban’s team demolished Michigan State 38-0 in the Cotton Bowl on New Year’s Eve to advance to the College Football Playoff final. If his Crimson Tide defeat Clemson in the national championship game with the same kind of overbearing defensive performance, Saban will have claimed his fifth national championship as a head coach (one at LSU, and four with Alabama). That would edge him ever closer to Bear Bryant, the grandfatherly hound’s-tooth-hatted icon who led the Crimson Tide to six undisputed national titles in the 1960s and 1970s. One could argue that, given college Football’s increasing parity over the past 20 years, Saban’s accomplishments eclipse even that of Bryant. And yet even if Saban wins, say, five more titles at Alabama after this season, he will never be as beloved as Bryant, simply because his appro ...

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