🏈 Saban vs. Shula

Under these circumstances, this is some of the best tasting crow I've ever had to eat!:hyper:

I would say Saban has the program back to where it was when Bear Bryant retired.

I thought this was a thread that was fatuous when it was first posted and I'm probably asinine for even replying to it. (Hell, I should de-bump it back several weeks so you guys would have to go find it)

However, saying "Saban has the program back to where it was when Bear Bryant retired?" Ray Perkins had the program where it was when Coach Bryant retired. Bill Curry maintained that level.

In the last three years of Coach Bryant's tenure he lost twice as many games as we have over the same period. No SECC. No NC's.

An accurate comparison, based on the teams' success, would probably be the early 70's. Say '71-'74. About the same number of wins, rings, etc.

We were on top of college football then, like we are now.
 
Well, a friend and I were having a discussion about how many fans, 2 months ago, were throwing McElwain under the bus after the loss to LSU. My contention was that McElwain had done a great job at Alabama especially when you compared his offense to the 30 or so years before. One had to go back to the early 70's to find a Bama team as consistently good on offense. I thought he was a great play caller and that Nov 5th game came down to execution, not play calling.

In the course of this conversation, I remembered this timeline:
Bama goes 14-0 and wins national champ
Bama loses 3 games the next year
Person comes on the forum and asks "are we getting our money's worth from Saban" and compares his record to SHULA.

To me, this was even worse than the way some fans threw McElwain under the bus after the Nov5 game and were talking about how it was time for him to go. So I went back and found the thread and read it to make sure I remember it correctly. DABAXTER assures us he was serious in questioning Saban vs. Shula and he may well be, seeing how fans were questioning McElwain of late. Even when this thread was started, it was silly beyond words to compare Saban (who had already won 2 NC's at 2 schools) to Shula. Now, it would be tough to find ANY active coach to compare Saban to. The entire College Football world is wondering "when" not "if" Saban will win his 4th NC.

This was truly one of the dumbest arguments ever started and was probably done so while swimming in the sorrow of that infamous Iron Bowl meltdown. I thought it would be interesting to go back and see what some fans were saying back when Bama <gasp> lost 3 games after just going 14-0. Hopefully, after Saban loses another game or three(it will happen), fans wont be so quick to throw him, or any of his assistants, to the sharks. It's one thing to question their decisions or gameplan, it's another thing to question if they are worth their pay and if its time for them to go. I can hope right?

Plus, I don't get to serve people crow often and dabaxter deserves a heaping helping of it for starting this thread.</gasp> Kudos to him/her for eating it gracefully :icon_salut: I'm not the only one who resurrected an old thread to serve some crow this week.

Oh, and TerryP is right, the program isn't back to where it was when Bear retired, its back to where it was when he was DOMINATING all of college football. ROLL TIDE!
 
I'm all for bringing back Shula :cool:
There you go
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