Nick Saban was good at being great.
Others can share better than I how great Saban was, what he did for college football as an industry, and what he did for football as a sport. Those who know it better will share his story, and he’ll get to share it himself as well, in whatever way he desires. His retirement is a historic moment, and it has a lot of flavors to it others can and will explore. Did Saban leave because college football has changed and he doesn’t like where it stands? Maybe, though those hitting those notes the hardest are probably assigning a lot of their own views to Saban. Is Saban fully retired, or even fully retired from coaching itself? Who knows. Retirements are hard. I’ve never performed one myself, but I would imagine it comes with complicated emotions. Will there ever be another Nick Saban? No, but there will maybe one day be someone even better at this than he was. Hopefully they’re as good as he was at being good.
Good stories have good heroes, and they have good villains. To different people, Nick Saban was both. Sometimes to the same people, Nick Saban was both.
People love to hate Alabama football, but it’s become more and more in vogue over the last few years to like Nick Saban anyway. There are certainly haters out there, maybe because they think he cheated, maybe because of a personal frustration, maybe because one of mankind’s worse instincts is a wish sometimes to tear the successful down to our grody level. But there are plenty others—more, I would hope—who respect what he did and what he was. It is doubtful that he played such an unholy game in a holy manner, but he was only rarely holier-than-thou. He kept his nose clean, and his players mostly kept their noses clean, and goodness, did he win. He won at Toledo. He won at the end at Michigan State. He won at LSU. He won so damn much at Alabama. He didn’t win in the NFL—he went 15–17 over two years with the Dolphins—and he lied on his way out the door, but he learned his lesson about the losing and he never went back to the pros (not yet), instead resurrecting a giant which had fallen on hard and messy times. Nick Saban was and is no saint, but he stands in rather favorable light relative to his contemporaries. He did some wrongs, but we don’t know of anything beyond the pale. He was cleaner than Tom Brady and Michael Jordan. He was a better man publicly than Urban Meyer.
Tom Brady’s on the mind for different reasons today, with the Bill Belichick era coming to an end in New England. When Brady left the Patriots, I believed like many that his success would wane and Belichick’s would not. The opposite happened, and now Belichick leaving feels more like an epilogue than an end fitting of what was so recently his stature. That’s not the case with Saban. Saban doesn’t go out on top, but he goes out with dignity, if he can keep it.
That’s my own hope for Saban: That this retirement is final, and that he is content, and that if he does consulting or television it’s limited and on his terms. For someone who ruled his craft with such a balanced blend of hateability and earned respect, it would be disappointing to see anything other than a firm, satisfying ending, one full of time on the water with Miss Terry and plenty of Deez Nuts jokes. There is a hole at the top of college football, and it’ll stand empty for a while.
What’s Next for Alabama?
This is very bad news for Alabama. It was going to come eventually, but it was always going to be bad news when it came, barring a masterful succession plan from within. There’s not a slam-dunk coach to hire right now outside of maybe Dan Lanning, and even he hasn’t been under the microscope for very long, and he’s already said no by now anyways. It’s hard to fathom Alabama landing Kirby Smart, and it’s possible Athens is an easier place to win than Tuscaloosa anyway. It’s hard to fathom Texas letting Steve Sarkisian get away, and Sark has some of the same questions of ability that accompany Lane Kiffin, even if his demeanor is different. It’s hard to replace the greatest coach in the sport. It’s easy to forget that Alabama isn’t perfectly equipped to do it.
I don’t think Alabama is a top-four job in college football. Maybe it is, but it’s not my impression that the resources or access to talent are better than they are in Athens, Baton Rouge, Gainesville, or Austin. I don’t think Alabama has the money to outbid Texas or Georgia. I’m not sure any coach out there should want the challenge of following Nick Saban in Tuscaloosa.
It’s gotten harder to win since Saban took over in the Yellowhammer State. This is a natural phenomenon: At all times, it’s always getting harder to win. That’s how competition works. There are particular challenges now, though, as well. NIL has changed recruiting power dynamics. Changed transfer rules have created the new consistent issue of talent retention. Consistency from the best teams has risen, lowering the margin for error for everyone. A twelve-team playoff will add to that margin, but it will also bring with it more randomness than the four-teamer. Winning national championships is getting more difficult. The pace of Alabama’s national championships was bound to slow even if Saban stayed, and it has slowed, but it’s going to be just as hard for Alabama to win its next national championship as it will be for Florida. Alabama will probably miss some playoffs. That would be unthinkable were Saban sticking around.
It appears Dan Lanning has already said no, possibly because he doesn’t consider Alabama to be that much better of a job than Oregon, possibly because he likes the foundation he’s built at Oregon and doesn’t want to start over again so soon, possibly because he thinks his legacy will look better juxtaposed with the performances of Mario Cristobal and Willie Taggart than with the best to ever do it, possibly because he thinks Oregon gives him better job security than Alabama, possibly because he’s a human being who likes his current life and doesn’t have any desire to move. It’s probably a combination of some or all of those five reasons. The fact there are five says a lot: Alabama cannot just sign anybody.
Were we four years in the past, Dabo Swinney would have been a no-brainer, but doubts around his coaching abilities have swelled over these four seasons since, and it’s not just about his philosophy regarding transfers. Swinney’s won 75% of his games since Trevor Lawrence graduated despite coaching in the worst Power Five conference over that stretch and having all the tail wind in the world. Swinney is struggling to adapt, not just to the NIL and transfer stuff, but to a competitive environment that maybe caught up to him, or to his own ability to win without Lawrence and Brent Venables and the other great resources he once procured.
I understand the attractiveness of Kalen DeBoer. I think James Franklin’s accomplishments are underrated and that regardless, he can steer a good ship. I would put little past Brian Kelly in the arena of carpet bagging. Steve Sarkisian might be the next best coach in college football, a title that currently belongs to Jim Harbaugh (who might be leaving for the NFL soon) and Kirby Smart (who needs to keep keeping up). As it stands, though, Lane Kiffin and Mike Norvell seem to make the most sense. Each is more a known quantity than DeBoer. It will be easier to outbid Mississippi or Florida State than to outbid Texas. There’s more upside to sell than there is with Kelly or Franklin, each of whom plenty of Alabama fans will readily argue should have won a national title by now if they’re really worthy of the throne.
Norvell would be tough to pry from FSU, but FSU’s already wailing about how little money it has because of the ACC, and if you’re looking to convince a guy that the SEC is the only place down south where you can win a national title, the brass in Tallahassee have already done yeoman’s work on that front. Florida State is more similar to Alabama than Oregon is, which might make it less about personal preference and more about ability to win it all. I’m not sure it’s going to be easier to win national championships at Alabama than it will be at FSU (life in the ACC is pretty sweet in some regards), but what I think doesn’t matter. What matters is what Mike Norvell thinks.
Kiffin would be easy to pry from Mississippi, but the question—as it was with Lanning until earlier today—might be whether or not he wants the job. To which I would say this: I don’t know if Kiffin wants the job or not, but I bet he knows his own leaning better than any other candidate knows theirs. He’s been through the USC experience. He’s been through the NFL experience. He’s done what he did at Tennessee. He’s coached at Alabama, and recently. Coaches get plenty of chances at perspective, but Kiffin’s breadth of experience stands apart.
I think it’ll be Norvell. I think Alabama will be a little too scared to hire Kiffin.
What’s Next for College Football?
We’re at a crossroads in a lot of ways. Saban is moving on. Jim Harbaugh might be moving on. Ohio State continues to spin its wheels.
Georgia will be at or near the top, but it is hard to stay good. LSU will either succeed or burn the house down and build another that might succeed. Texas does appear to be ascendant, and it seems right now that Arch Manning will stay and back up Quinn Ewers, creating as ideal a situation as a quarterback-minded coach like Sark can get. It would seem from afar that if Harbaugh does move on at Michigan, the option would be there to maintain a lot of continuity by promoting Sherrone Moore, but personnel turnover is a big immediate question for a team that thrived so much on experience this past year.
After years, then, of so many matchups between Alabama, Georgia, Clemson, Ohio State, and Oklahoma in the College Football Playoff, change is accelerating. We might be entering a more exclusively Georgia-ruled era. Michigan’s mandate might last more than a moment. With that twelve-team playoff and its probable chaos, though, and with the Big Ten and SEC consolidating so much power (the Big Ten signed Washington and Oregon at a really good time), it’s a transitional moment. One way to think of it? There’s a power vacuum left by Nick Saban’s departure. Maybe Alabama holds onto their share, but more likely, they leave space for others to move in. Whether those others are a varied crew or simply Georgia is the question for these next five years.
January Bracketology Is Messy
We updated our bracketologies yesterday, and it reminded me of a little Twitter spat I saw recently involving my namesake, Joe Lunardi. I don’t want to pull up the details, because it was a little dumb and I don’t want those details to bog us down, but the exchange went something like this:
Fan: Why does Joe Lunardi have Indiana as the Big Ten’s automatic bid? Indiana’s not going to win the Big Ten.
Joe Lunardi: Indiana’s currently leading the Big Ten. That’s how we do it.
Fan: Why don’t you pick some other way to do it?
Joe Lunardi: Look. There are going to be bid thieves at the end of the year anyway. This helps account for that.
Fan: But by March you’ll have stopped accounting for that!
What’s going on here is that ESPN’s approach, and therefore the industry standard (because Lunardi pioneered this thing for the masses) is to use bracketology as a scoreboard at the end of the year. It shows where each team would be in the bracket (according to the bracketologist) “if the season ended today.” In March, this works rather well. Fans want to see where their team is heading into that day’s games. In January (the Indiana exchange actually happened in December), it’s flawed. Because while it’s hard to show where teams stand when the season’s 95% complete, it’s impossible to show where they stand when it’s 25% or 50% complete. Especially given the composition of that 25% or 50% involves a lot more buy games. A “where they stand” bracketology can’t go off of any precedent at this point in the season, because the committee has never formed a full bracket eleven days into the new year. It’s like saying how a cake tastes when you’re just putting it into the oven.
What ESPN does to solve this is to do a predictive version of bracketology and then slowly transition it to being reflective. At the beginning of the year, they aren’t showing where teams stand. They’re showing where they think teams will end up. At some point, it becomes more plausible to base the bracket off of real criteria the real committee will use, and they slowly pivot. Quirks like the Indiana thing are part of how they navigate the process.
Our approach at The Barking Crow has always been to try to predict where teams will land the whole way through. Our logic goes: Why base a bracket off of even 95% of a season when the remaining 5% is decently predictable? It makes more sense to us to aim the initial bracketology at the final bracket and to keep it aimed there, moving teams only as their expected final résumés change, whether due to accrued real results or changes in future expectations. This, we believe, should result in brackets that are more accurate the whole way through than anything that says “where teams stand.”
Fans like the running scoreboard, though, and objectivity is helpful, so we sympathize with both the industry standard (reflective bracketology rather than predictive) and with how Lunardi and ESPN handle automatic bids. Nobody is doing this in a perfect fashion, and those making the best efforts (like Bart Torvik, whose TourneyCast forecasts each team’s probability of making the field) don’t always end up being very accurate on Selection Sunday (Torvik, like us, ranks near the bottom of the Bracket Matrix in final bracket accuracy).
The best way to do this? Do both. Have a running predictive bracketology that stays aimed on what’s going to happen, and whenever it becomes reasonably possible—whenever the sample of completed games becomes large enough to bear some resemblance to final team sheets—add a reflective bracketology as well. This is what we’ve been trying to do for five years now, and we have yet to come anywhere close to pulling it off. But that’s the vision.
Anyway, if you’re wondering how much stock to put in Bracket Matrix and how much to put elsewhere right now, I’d suggest doing the following:
- Treat Bracket Matrix as 50% of the story and kenpom as the other 50%, unless…
- Your team is at risk of finishing three games above .500 or worse, in which case kenpom isn’t going to save you and you need to win more games.
- Adjust that Bracket Matrix/kenpom ratio as the season progresses. Or just look at ours.
As for us, we’re going to keep working on bringing back a more fleshed-out version of our model, but we’ll update the bracketology more frequently than we’ve been updating it. As it stands, we’re doing what we did last year, and that ultimately worked well enough to not ruin anybody’s NIT experience. That’s what we owe you guys: To not ruin your NIT experience.
The Cubs!
For as pissed as we’ve been at the melodramatic Cubs blogosphere (and people wonder why Bears media is always such a mess…), we were excited about today’s moves. If you missed them, the club made the Shōta Imanaga signing official, and they’re reportedly trading two low-level prospects for Dodgers reliever Yency Almonte and Dodgers top-50 prospect Michael Busch.
Imanaga’s a signing we hoped on. He’s not an ace, but he has the 9th-best projected 2024 WAR of any free agent, per FanGraphs. At 30 years old, he should start declining immediately, but he’s likely to be a solid arm in the middle of the rotation, and he has some upside. Also, there’s probably benefit to successfully transitioning players from Japan to MLB life. If Seiya Suzuki and Imanaga both become viewed as success stories, the Cubs’ credibility with import free agents should improve (and I think it’s already pretty good). Imanaga does not solve the Cubs’ pitching problem—the team needs an ace—but he’s a good pickup. He will probably be better than Marcus Stroman over these next four years.
Busch is a big prospect who used to be bigger. FanGraphs had him 29th in baseball at the midseason update, but he then got an 81-plate appearance sample with the Dodgers’ big-league club, and it didn’t go well. His wRC+ was a terrible 49 (51 percentage points worse than the MLB average at any position), his xwOBA was only 19 points better than his wOBA (he wasn’t getting all that bad of luck on balls in play), and he mostly plays corner infield (positions where you want above-average offensive production because the defense is navigable for big, strong dudes). He is, though, ready to potentially contribute, he has a ton of upside, and he raked throughout the minors, with one exception. That exception is hopeful: When he first moved up to AAA, in 2022, he struggled for a while. After an offseason, he pounded the ball on the second AAA campaign. Cubs fans can hope in a similar phenomenon in his second try against MLB pitching.
Almonte is a fine reliever—a bit of a reclamation project but serviceable as he comes. The low-level prospects are high-upside, but the Cubs have tons of those, and now is a fine time to convert them to something whose payout comes sooner. This shores up offensive depth and starts figuring out the bullpen, and it’s possible because the Dodgers wanted to clear up some space on the 40-man roster. Generally, if you’re making a move because another team wants to clear roster space, you’re getting a good deal, and the Cubs have the added benefit of having traded from a strength.
Plenty more needs to happen for the Cubs to contend in the Central this year, but the moves they’re making are—as is so often the case with Hoyer, who continues to err on the cautious side—good ones. The Cubs would be better if they’d landed Shohei Ohtani, but not many teams have done more than the Cubs.
Tonight, last night:
- The Bulls won again, in overtime again, with Coby White leading the way again. Zach LaVine played well again as well. Things are going well for the Bulls at the moment. They’ve won 13 of their last 20, White has been blooming, and yes this is probably bad for the Bulls because it will probably convince them to trade no one but 1) it’s more fun to cheer for wins than losses and 2) it’s hard to see them making a good trade anyway.
- The Blackhawks are in Winnipeg tonight against the Jets (best record in the league), and it’s been announced that Connor Bedard will miss six to eight weeks with his broken jaw.
#HireTommy