Nah, he just has the highest winning percentage of any coach in the country. I know the SEC, blah blah but a good coach is a good coach. What people were waiting for was a hire like Ray perkins after Bryant and a DuBose hire after Stallings and that didn't happen. What people also. ...conveniently... forget is that when DuBose and Fran/Shula were hired Bama was either under investigation or on severe sanctions which limited the pool of coaches that would take the job and could win. In 2001 Fran wasn't gonna be the coach. Butch Davis was until he got wind of how severe the penalties would be and he said himself he wasn't dealing with that again like he did at Miami. This was back when the NCAA meant business and would cripple a program with schollie reductions. Had sanctions not been looming Mike Shula isn't on a list of 200 candidates for that job and everybody knows it. Mike was chosen over sylvester Croom and Richard Williamson. That shows you how much the sanctions limited the pool. Those days are gone. Nick will always be one of the greatest ever ( I still rank Bryant ahead but that's just me) but he had lost a step. His team weren't the precision machine they had been. I thought he should have retired after the 2020 title but he had that one great game left in him that he delivered against Kirby and the Dawgs this past season. Bottom line, Unless the NCAA becomes the NCAA again and hammers Bama twice like they did in 95 and 2002 and forces Bama to hire a nobody, Bama football will be a force nationally.

This post was edited on 5/12/24 at 7:20 pm