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Though I’ve got a lot of stuff
It never seems to be enough
Tell me why can’t I be satisfied
“Is Nick Saban happy?”
I’ve asked myself (and others) this question an uncomfortable number of times since the man showed up in Tuscaloosa in 2007. The frequency has increased since after the 2012 season, when Saban’s Alabama vanquished Notre Dame and basically stood atop the college football landscape as its unchallenged king.
It was pretty much the only thing rival fans had left to hurt their Bammer friends — “Y’all know he ain’t gonna stay there forever … he can’t be happy with any job forever.”
It’s a strange thing to worry about, of course. I have found myself wondering about his happiness, if only because there is currently a one-to-one correlation between Nick Saban’s happiness and the success of the Crimson Tide. A happy, motivated Nick Saban will contend for championships — conference and national — as long as he remains in Tuscaloosa. A Saban-led team will always be relevant.
The question of Saban’s happiness, though, goes deeper than that, particularly today after his Alabama team came through again on the big stage — against No. 1 Clemson this time — winning the school’s 16th national title. With the win, Saban’s Alabama teams own four national championships, four SEC championships (including back-to-back SEC titles) and hasn’t played a snap when it wasn’t in contention for a title since November 2010.
And yet, despite all his protestations to the contrary, most people perceive Saban as an unhappy person. There’s a story in the middle of Monte Burke’s recent biography, in which assistants say he was despondent after his first national title at LSU, bemoaning the idea that he’d set the bar too high and wouldn’t be able to reach the fans’ expectations. In 2012, he mumbled to a reporter that playing for the BCS championship cost him two weeks of recruiting. And this offseason, he repeatedly wondered if fans were expecting too much of him, since they were openly disappointed that the 2014 team failed to win the national title.
Maybe the most widely viewed picture of Saban has come at the end of his national championship quests in 2009 and 2012, when his players doused him with Gatorade, and Saban briefly looked like someone who’d accidentally said “I don’t know” on Nickelodeon’s “You Can’t Do That on Television.”
So Saban will enter another offseason with another championship, will almost certainly reel in another top-rated recruiting class — Alabama’s 2016 class is rated No. 8 nationally at the moment — and will once again face a summer’s worth of questions about whether he’s happy.
Rinse, lather, repeat.
As for the staff …
We know where Kirby Smart is headed today — in a way, he has to be relieved that the run is finally over, and he can get right to the work of sewing up his own recruiting class in Athens. Incidentally, Georgia’s class is currently ranked fifth in the nation.
Scott Cochran will stay at Alabama after receiving a massive contract to keep him from going with Smart to Athens. He remains the most visible member of the Alabama staff who isn’t Nick Saban.
Smart’s replacement, Jeremy Pruitt, has helped fill some of the gaps that the other coaches have devoted to the finish of this particular season. Pruitt has been a legendarily difficult co-worker; the assumption is that Saban will be his ideal boss, someone who won’t allow some of the shenanigans that have (allegedly) sabotaged his previous stops at Florida State and Georgia.
For the sake of simplicity, let’s assume that everything we’ve already written about Lane Kiffin still stands.
And then there’s Chip Kelly.
(Just kidding.)
Will Heath is a contributing writer for Saturday Down South. He covers SEC football.
