re: Thinking about the Ray Perkins hire

quote:

---

There were plenty of options for hires

---

Not in the month of May. Not to mention our football program was in a state of turmoil at that particular time. We were in the second year of a two-year bowl ban, we'd been decimated by scholarship reductions, and our third coach in three years had just been let go. The only people who would say "yes" to a situation to that would be people with ties to the program.

Shula was brought into an impossible situation. So much so that he was promised a bonus if he managed to have a winning season in his first year. It also didn't help that most people just assumed he was a stop-gap hire meant only to just stop the bleeding and get the program out of the tailspin dive it was in at the time. I'll give Shula credit for the latter. He restored sanity to the program in his four seasons as coach. When Saban got here in January 2007 he walked into an athletic department that was very stable.