Ain’t man enough no more.

I joked about this the other day, but apparently Pat Dye really is sick and tired of Auburn playing Alabama.

“I’d rather see Auburn in the East than us to play Alabama every year,” Dye said Tuesday during a taping for his weekly radio show on ESPN 106.7-FM in Auburn, according to Auburn Network producer Zac Blackerby.

Many Auburn fans would probably not like that scenario, but Dye has his reasons for shedding the Iron Bowl from the calendar every year.

“We don’t need to let Alabama dictate what we do at Auburn,” he said. “We can play them on a rotation, just like everybody else.”

I can’t even begin to imagine the shit that would rain down on Auburn fans from ‘Bama folks if the Tigers bailed on the rivalry.

I don’t know if Nick Saban is the greatest coach in SEC history, but I’m pretty sure he’s affected the thinking of more conference coaches and administrators than any other coach in SEC history.

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You mess with the bull, you get the horns.

High school coach removed from his job after banning Alabama from his campus to recruit players still can’t find work.

Nick Saban is “crazy” about something he has control over.

The Sabanator goes all “cats and dogs, living together” over the new recruiting rules.

“I’m at a loss with the direction that we’re moving in relative to the rules that we’re making. I hate to speak in a negative way about colleagues or people that are responsible for passing some of this stuff.

“I don’t see how it helps anything or anybody. Football is a developmental game. To keep trying to push a recruiting calendar, it’s for the benefit of teams in the North because they want guys to visit in the summertime and all that …

“If character and intelligence and things we’re responsible for … how do we evaluate that stuff if we’re offering guys when they’re sophomores, so they can visit in their junior year, so they can decide before their senior year?”

“That means a high school coach is going to be in the same position we are now with [Leonard] Fournette and [Christian] McCaffrey. They don’t play in their bowl games. What’s to say some high school kid says, ‘We’re out of the playoffs, I’m not going to play anymore this year. I’m going to Alabama.’

First of all, spare me the crocodile tears about evaluating character.  Coming from the guy who signed Jonathan Taylor without doing a lick of due diligence, that’s nothing but absurd bullshit.  When it comes to early signing, the evaluation he’s concerned about is playing ability, nothing more, nothing less.

Even more absurd than that, though, is the suggestion of a helpless Nick Saban facing the possibility of a kid saying “screw high school, Roll Tide”.  Assuming for the sake of argument that ever becomes a real thing, if Nick wants to nip that kind of thinking in the bud, all he has to do is say he’ll yank the offer of the first recruit who pulls that stunt.  It’s a completely nonexistent threat to Saban.

The thought that he might lose one late bloomer to a mid-major program via an early signing period is really eating at the man.

Money matters

Once upon a time, I wrote this.

If you manage an SEC football program, there’s a difference between being committed to winning and being financially committed to winning.  Everybody wants to win.  The hard part is figuring out how to allocate resources to make sure that happens.  And, no, that doesn’t mean spending money like a drunken sailor.  (We’re looking at you, Tennessee.)  It simply means that if you think your rightful place is among the Alabamas, Floridas and LSUs of the world, you’d better take a hard look at what they’re doing and make sure you’re giving your coaching staff the opportunity to keep up with them.

I mention that because it immediately came to mind after reading this article about the 25 top revenue producing football programs of the 2015-6 fiscal year.  Compare these two paragraphs, this one for Georgia…

As recently as 2009-10, Georgia made a larger profit on its football program than all but one school in the nation; UGa’s $52.5M take came during the salad days of the Mark Richt era, in the midst of a disappointing 8-5 season but after a 21-5 record the previous two years. Sanford Stadium, 10th-largest in the country at 92,746 seats, is still filled to capacity every home Saturday. But Richt had outworn his welcome by the 2015-16 fiscal year with some underwhelming performances by his Bulldogs in big games and some grumbling preceded his evacuation to Miami. It remains to be seen how Kirby Smart fills the void. But Georgia fans remain resolute in showing up.

… and this one for Alabama.

Here we break through to the 9-figure strata with the closest thing to a dynasty college football has. By the way, who remembers Mike Shula? It only seems like Nick Saban has been around Bama forever but he replaced Shula after a 6-7 season a mere 10 years ago. It’s also mostly forgotten that Saban’s first team in 2007 struggled, lost all four November games and only managed a winning record by edging Colorado in the Independence Bowl. Since then, no college program can touch Alabama’s four national titles and appearances in all three years of the College Football Playoff. And Alabama is reinvesting; not only was Saban just re-upped with an 8-year, $65.2M extension, his football program listed a whopping $56.3 in expenses in fiscal 2015-16, easily the national high.  [Emphasis added.]

Notice the difference in tone there?  Georgia is all about fans showing up and putting money in the coffers; Alabama is reinvesting.

That isn’t how you play catch up.

Junior needed name tags.

So, Laner, how big was Alabama’s staff when you were there?

… Kiffin was asked about some of the differences between FAU and Alabama, and Kiffin claimed that the support staff at Alabama was so large that he had trouble remembering names.

“I was there three years, and I still didn’t learn everybody’s name in that building,” Kiffin said. “There were so many people. There’s somebody for everything. [Alabama coach Nick Saban] has a very large staff of a lot of people. Obviously, he’s done that so he that he’s got all areas covered and everybody for something.”

I’m not sure if that’s more a reflection of Saban or Kiffin there.

I guess we’ll know the Process has really embedded itself in Athens when McGarity can’t remember the names of all the people he let Kirby hire.

Eight more years!

If you think that SEC football is in something of a slump of late and that one of the driving reasons behind that is the relative mediocrity of its coaches — is Dan Mullen the SEC’s second best head coach now? — and you think the driving reason behind that is Nick Saban’s dominant run and the effect that has had on rival programs’ firing and hiring decisions… well, then, you probably don’t want to think too hard about this.

Oh, what might have been…

The idea of Alabama settling for the genius after it whiffed on RichRod (and Saban, the first go) is so delicious, that it almost makes Jeff Schultz’ spectacularly bad take on Saban’s eventual hiring seem like an afterthought.