This article was good. It does a decent job of explaining why Coach Nick Saban might really be considering taking the Alabama job.

Not to say that he will.

In fact, I don't feel like he will.

The later it gets...

I think he would have given a "yes" today, and the longer he thinks about it, the less likely he is to take the job.

Sadly, it will all depend on what the media says in the next 8.5 hours.

Thats what happened with Rodriguez. The press got ahold of it, and he spent an evening with his wife, seeing how the decision played in the media before he "made" it.

It didn't play well in WV. That is for sure. And CRR is still the WVU coach as a result.

I think that may have had as much to do with how frenzied the Alabama fans got. I think it scared him a little.

Nick Saban knows damned well what he is getting into. He coached at LSU for god's sake, and while LSU doesn't have shit on Alabama in meaningful way, their fans are classless enough to scare any coach.

And you thought the frightened look on Les Miles face was because he was overwhelmed with SEC football...

It was the fans burning out the cars in the parking lot.

Anyways, enough rambling...here is the article.

Celizic: Saban's decision is a no-brainer

Coach bungling process, but can't reject rich offer with marquee school
OPINION
By Mike Celizic
Updated: 6:03 p.m. CT Jan 2, 2007
If I’m Nick Saban, I take the Alabama job. It’s not a tough call, either, not for someone like Saban who is confident of his ability to produce a winner. He can either deal with the ebb and flow of fortune in the salary-capped NFL, or he can be the man who restored a great football program to the glory it last knew under the legend that was Bear Bryant.

The only real downside, now that the loyal alumni and faithful boosters have promised to come up with as much as $40 million to insure the prosperity of the Saban clan for now and the foreseeable future, is that if Saban takes the job, he’ll have to endure being known as a lying weasel, a condition that will pass nationally in a couple of weeks but will endure for as long as he lives in Miami.

The charge will be true, and there’s no sense trying to sugar-coat it. Saban spent the last two months of the NFL season telling Miami and the world that coaching the Dolphins was the only job he wanted and he intended to be there for as long as the team kept sending him paychecks.

This is what coaches always say just before they take another job somewhere else. It’s stupid of them, especially as there’s no need for it. No one really cares that much any more whether they break contracts that they said fulfilled all of their dreams when they negotiated and signed them. In sports, contracts, like records, are made to be broken. I don’t like that, but I’m not going to fight it; I may as well try to bail water with a pitchfork.

What drives fans nuts, though, is when a coach says he’s never going anywhere and then leaves on the next flight out of town. A coach’s promise to stay has so little value, no one believes it when he says it, so why bother saying it at all?

You’d think people as intelligent as coaches are held to be would recognize that just because someone with a spiral notebook asks them a question, they’ve no obligation to answer it. If they know the answer could come back to bite them, they should treat the question like one fired at them by a prosecutor in court. Just say you can’t answer it and move on.

All Saban had to do when people asked him about the possibility of taking the Alabama job was say, “I’m not going to talk about anything other than the Miami Dolphins and our next game.” No matter how many times and in how many ways the question came up, that answer would have taken care of everything. This is good advice, and all coaches should write it down and look at it daily.

But regardless of whether Saban was lying, the Alabama job is still as good as it gets -– at least it would be to me. This is one of the premier football school’s in the country, the alma mater of Joe Namath and Forrest Gump, a school that’s been waiting with growing impatience to return to the glory days that began to fade with the departure of Bear Bryant 24 years ago.

You don’t want to have to follow Bryant, but Saban’s not doing that. He’s already showed when he was at LSU that he can recruit and he can coach the college game, and he’s got the national championship to prove it.

He decided to go to the pros because that’s supposedly a higher level of coaching. I’m not sure that’s true. The level of play may be higher, but coaching is coaching no matter where you do it. The real difference is that in the pros, the job never ends and a coach’s hands are tied by the draft and the salary cap, while in college, there’s plenty of time for golf outings and vacations and the family.

The guys who should stay in the pros are those who don’t like schmoozing the alumni and boosters, and have no stomach for recruiting. Can you picture Bill Belichick making nice to the parents of a hotshot quarterback prospect? Sucking up to the president and athletic director? I can’t, either.

But guys like Saban who are outgoing and personable and people-oriented are made for college. When they succeed in the pros, they’re heroes and can even become legends. When they succeed in college, they’re gods.

That’s why I’ve never understood why any great college coach in either football or basketball would want to go to a pro league, especially the NFL. Assemble a great team in the NFL and within a couple of years big and important pieces of it go floating off into free-agency, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. If the personnel guys draft a quarterback who doesn’t work out, you can’t run out and recruit another one; you’re stuck with the bum and whatever retread you can pick off another team’s scrap heap.

In college, if one guy doesn’t work, you go out and recruit another. Sure, there’s constant turnover, with players staying four years and moving on, but the kids coming in are as good as your salesmanship skills. Get a good program going, and it becomes self-sustaining.

That’s what can happen in Alabama under Saban. It would be great for the school, great for college football, which needs its historically great programs to thrive, and great for him.

As for Miami, given the offensive deficiencies, I’m sure the Dolphins can find somebody else who can finish third in the AFC East just as well as Saban can.

© 2006 MSNBC Interactive

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16440949/page/2/

By 10:00 am tomorrow, everything will shake out.

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