Why Nick Saban is My Favorite College Football CoachJuly 13, 2012
Nick Saban has recently become my favorite College Football coach and it has nothing to do with his three national championships.
Yes, Saban has won three titles in nine seasons. Winning all three titles coaching SEC teams only makes the feat that much more impressive. But Saban has become my favorite coach because of what he recently did for Phillip Sims.
Sims was the #2 ranked QB coming out of Oscar Smith High School in Chesapeake, VA in 2009. He signed with Alabama and was supposed to be the next great QB for the Crimson Tide. Last season, as a redshirt freshman, Sims couldn’t beat out A.J. McCarron for the starting spot. McCarron played okay last season. He’s not a star, which means he’s not leaving school early for the NFL. Add in the fact that McCarron is only one year older than Sims and that means Sims needed to transfer or accept his role as a backup and hopefully start his senior year. Sims chose to transfer.
This is normal for a highly touted player out of high school, that like an competitor just wants to play. In college athletics, most coaches put wild stipulations on kids who transfer. Some of these stipulations include, that a player can’t transfer within the conference they just played for, and some coaches go as far as not letting a player transfer to specific schools outside their conference.
Nick Saban granted Phillip Sims’ release, which is not out of the ordinary. The cool thing Saban did was that he not stand in the way of Sims playing football this year. NCAA transfer rules require the student-athlete to sit out a year. There are few instances when a player can transfer to another school and begin playing the following season.
I’m not sure why, but Rich Morgan, Sims high school coach told the Virginian Pilot that Sims would not have transferred had he been the starter at Alabama.
Sims enrolled at the University of Virginia in June and he and Virginia head coach, Mike London have not said why they needed a waiver the NCAA to play immediately. Nick Saban told reporters in May that Sims chose to transfer because of “health issues in his family.”
We all know Nick Saban can lie with the best of him as he’s done before when he told NFL reporters that he wasn’t going to coach the Alabama Crimson Tide while he was coaching the Miami Dolphins. Days later, Saban was announced as the head coach of the Crimson Tide.
Saban didn’t have to do this for Sims, and most of the times college coaches don’t. Football coaches can be as petty as six-year old kids and the fact that Saban not only signed off on Sims’ release but essentially helped Sims get the waiver he needed to be able to play this year is pretty damn cool to me.
That’s all I got,
Ricky Writer
