Keeping up foreign relations. You know, giving him the bird.

The Bobby Petrino news obviously reminded me of the Nick Saban situation of a couple years ago. I always though Saban got hit a bit too hard in the media for leaving the Dolphins. He did two years there, and when he decided his heart wasn't in it anymore, he left. I understand he wasn't entirely forthcoming/honest with his answers to the media about whether or not he was gonna take the Alabama job, but what exactly was he supposed to say? If he said he was gonna leave, his players wouldn't be willing to fight for him the same way on the field; if he deflected the questions as the media said he should ("Right now I'm the coach of the Dolphins, when the time comes I'll talk about Alabama"), he would have been sending basically the same message.

I know people get the panties all in a bunch when people compare sports to war, but football is the one sport where this analogy works. Football, at its core, is violence, and at its highest level, it demands trust above all else. The coaches are sending the players out there to get beaten up for 60 straight minutes, and this requires that the players are willing to take that pounding for their teammates and their coach. I remember a Dr. Z piece from a couple months ago, talking about a British guy he talked to about American football; the guy said what amazed him the most was the chess game going back and forth between the coaches; how every move set up the next. People talk about quarterbacks being field generals, but in the end, the coaches are the commanders, training camp is like boot camp, and Kellen Winslow is a soldier. You can talk about game-planning all you want, but there's a reason Mike Martz and Norv Turner aren't winning any Super Bowls as head coaches. A truly great team is one on which the players are willing to make any sacrifice for their coach, because they know they're coach has their back.

Now, Nick Saban's was paid by the Dolphins, and as long as he was collecting that check, his number one priority had to be winning, which required having the trust of his players. Being forthcoming with sensitive reporters couldn't even enter into that equation. If his players didn't think he was in it for them, they couldn't be in it for him, not at the level required in the NFL.

What Petrino did, to my mind at least, is blatantly worse. He refused to adjust to coaching in the NFL, treated his players like shit, and then when things got bad enough he didn't just decide that it wasn't for him and that he would move on after the season--he just quit on his team right there (and to make matters worse, took a college job on the same day). He basically condemned his team to losing the final few games; I know there's the possibility that the team might rally in a 'fuck you' to Petrino, but it seems that he did so much damage to the moral of the team and the psyche of his quarterbacks that it won't even matter at this point. The only other argument one can make in defending him is that he was just so awful as a head coach that they'll be immediately better without him; this may be true, but his refusal to adjust as the job demanded (and as everyone knew beforehand he would have to) is just as damning.



And yet somehow, the media coverage so far has been more of the Bobby-being-Bobby flavor--he hates staying in one place for very long, and he wasn't really that good anyways, so oh well--not the he-is-the-worst-rat-scum-piece-of-shit-the-NFL-has-ever-seen treatment of Saban that everyone was beaten over the head with from all angles (admittedly, the story is relatively new, so maybe they just haven't had time to get these stories out; but the Sean Taylor coverage proved once again that the media doesn't need a lot of time to start ripping people).

In other news, Davy Crockett's 5-year-old 10th-great-grandson killed a 400 lb. bear. Now, I realize descending from the King of the Wild Frontier makes you pretty B.A. I loved that movie as a kid. And I know some people love hunting. But seriously, now we're letting five-year-old kids shoot a rifle? AT A GODDAMN 445-POUND FUCKING BEAR? Who the hell are this kid's parents (other than Crocket''s 9th-great-grandson)? I can't wait to move back north.

(By the way, my favorite part of the story? The following quote: "Mike Merritt said tears rolled down his cheeks when he found out his grandson killed the enormous bear." Really, you can't make stuff like that up.)