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PHOENIX, Ariz. — Coaching for the Alabama Crimson Tide involves “special pressure.”
That’s what agent Jimmy Sexton said in an email uncovered by the Associated Press following the courting of Nick Saban by the Texas Longhorns.
It’s inescapable. Not even vacationing at Lake Burton last summer, conversing with “the nicest older couple that you’ve ever met.” Turns out, that’s as likely a place as any to get passively derided — by the wife, no less — for what she portrayed as a failure in 2014: An SEC championship and 12 wins.
It turns out that there’s pressure elsewhere also.
Alabama may have 12, or 16, or however many national titles you feel comfortable ascribing to that behemoth. Saban may be the only college football coach getting paid upward of $7 million per year.
But even coaches at Ole Miss now can reach the $5 million mark.
Guide a team to a 9-3 regular season at Georgia? Not good enough. Next!
Finish 8-3 with a guaranteed win canceled due to weather? You’ll have to survive a failed $15 million-plus coup attempt at LSU.
Even in the ACC, there’s pressure, Clemson coach Dabo Swinney insists.
But surely that pressure comes with more gravity in Tuscaloosa than any other college town in these United States. Right?
“No,” Swinney said Saturday.
“People don’t like to hear that because Alabama is the mecca. But I promise you they don’t like to lose in Clemson, South Carolina. They don’t like to lose anywhere.
“They fire coaches now after one year, two years. Some of these places out there in la-la land. You’ve got to be kidding me. It’s like, what? It just doesn’t work that way. There’s no smoke and mirrors.
“Coach Saban talks about The Process all the time. And he’s right. There is a process that you have to go through to build a program. Some of these places have a job for two years and they fire them, it’s crazy.”
Preach.
For his part, Saban agrees with Swinney’s theme, openly questioning Georgia’s decision to jettison Mark Richt.
Clemson’s coach may have a point.
Thanks to Monopoly type money — the SEC distributed about $31 million to each of its member institutions in 2015 — it’s no longer the football schools and then everyone else who care about outcomes. Hell, some anticipated that Vanderbilt coach Derek Mason was in real trouble prior to the 2015 season. Which was his second season in Nashville. He’d been a head coach at the FBS level for a single season.
“That comes with the territory and you know that when you get into this business,” Swinney said. “I don’t think it’s right, but that’s just the way it is. It’s a very judgmental business and a very judgmental society that we all live in.”
An itinerant journalist, Christopher has moved between states 11 times in seven years. Formally an injury-prone Division I 800-meter specialist, he now wanders the Rockies in search of high peaks.
