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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Friday, January 05, 2007

"COLLEGE FOOTBALL IS A MESS"



Rick Telander is the best sports writer in the US, in UD's opinion. When grotesque things like Saban at Alabama happen, he's the definitive source.

Everybody who loves Nick Saban and thinks he's a moral, straight-ahead guy, please stand up.

You Alabama straw-chewers can sit down. (Your lives are so impoverished in the post-Bear Bryant era, you'd hire an al-Qaida operative if he'd guarantee yearly whup-ups of Auburn and LSU.)

So it's nice to see nobody else is standing. (I'm not counting you hedge-fund managers, felons and Halliburton execs.)

But here's the deal: Saban is the new face of college football. Like it or not.

And deep inside, all you college fans -- sitting there shaking your heads in disgust -- you love it. It's part of the show. And you do love the show.

Talk all you want about ethics and graduation rates.

But W's are all you care about.

Colleges don't pay their players. So they pay their coaches. They build massive training facilities. Their football teams travel like royalty -- can you believe Ohio State and its legion of coaches and athletic-department jetsam will spend 11 days in Arizona for the BCS title game? -- and they'll do about anything to win.

Hence, a school like Alabama will guarantee a guy like ''Never-Don't-Mean-Never Nick'' Saban more than $30 million for eight years to breach a signed contract, lie bald-faced to the masses and kick Arkansas' booty. (Hopefully.)

You see, the Tide lost to the Hogs this season, as well as Auburn and LSU.

Indeed, Alabama finished 6-7 after a loss to Oklahoma State in the Independence Bowl. Kenneth Lay wasn't available.

So come on down, Nick!

Saban, with a mouth so rubberized it could bounce, said he hadn't planned on leaving Miami, ''but still, if my heart was somewhere else, it would be wrong for me to stay.''

Like he's moving to Tuscaloosa to consolidate body parts.

Hall of Fame former Dolphins coach Don Shula blasted Saban on the radio Thursday, saying, ''If you don't mean it, don't say it.''

Remember, of course, that Shula is just-fired 'Bama coach Mike Shula's dad.

No matter, the old notions that a man's word means something, that dignity comes from steadfastness, that money doesn't rule all, are long gone.

And the street is two-way.

When Minnesota clown/athletic director Joel Maturi fired veteran and successful coach Glen Mason on Sunday -- because Texas Tech rallied from a deep hole to beat the Gophers in overtime in the Insight Bowl last Friday -- he showed why coaches are encouraged to lie and breach and profiteer whenever needed.

I'm not sure how many times in the last couple weeks I heard Saban say he absolutely was not leaving the Dolphins for the Crimson Tide or anywhere else.

But it may have been more times than I have heard Stuart Scott say, ''Boo-yah!'' in the last decade. And, of course, it was just as meaningful.

College football is a mess, even though the 32 bowl games provide us with such splendid and effortless (for us) entertainment. The fan-based yammering for a fool-proof championship game won't let up.

Yes, Boise State is 13-0. And if Ohio State loses big to Florida in a sloppy title game next Monday, don't the Broncos deserve a shot at, well, something?

But the reason there is no playoff tournament -- whether with four or eight or 16 or all 119 Division I-A teams -- is that the players are supposedly college students, and there's a limit to the expectations and physical burdens you can lay on amateur youth involved in extracurricular activity.

Not so coaches.

Just as you forgot about the sneaky maneuverings of Steve Spurrier, who went from college to the NFL to colllege again, making money all the way, you'll forget about the slipperiness of Never-Never Nick.

You forgot abut Lou Holtz going to the NFL and bolting when it suited him.

You maybe haven't forgotten about Gary Barnett e-mailing his Northwestern players and telling them he was going nowhere, just days before he fled for Colorado.

But that affront lingers because it happened here in Chicagoland, and because it was early in the amorality that is fast becoming the coaching norm.

Everybody loved the high action of the recent Fiesta Bowl, with 22 points scored in the final 86 seconds of regulation and 15 more in overtime and Boise State squeezing past Oklahoma 43-42.

But ask Sooners coach Bob Stoops -- himself a one-time bonus baby -- how much fun it was getting knifed by Boise State coach Chris Peterson.

It's crazy to think a budget-tightening state like Alabama can fund $4 million a year for a football coach at its flagship state university.

But then Greg Schiano, Rutgers' head coach, is the highest-paid employee in the state of New Jersey.

And New Jersey is hurting, too.

The point is, we need our circuses. We will have our circuses, by God.

And the ringmasters, ready and running and phony as sin, can you blame them for taking what they can get?



---Chicago SunTimes---