The Marks Post: “And (Saban) is an honorable man”

As I was getting ready to leave my house Thursday morning, I was listening to sports radio out of Baton Rouge. The announcer was comparing a sports figure to Julius Caesar, and the comparisons were very apt.
As the morning went on, I began to think of a line from William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar where Marc Antony utters, “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.”
The Caesar-esque figure I am writing of is Nick Saban.
In case you have missed the news that broke Wednesday afternoon, the head football coach of the Alabama Crimson Tide announced his retirement.
Look, I know many people around here (myself included) have strong feelings about Saban revolving around the fact he, in an all about way, left LSU for Alabama.
This column, though, will not be a hatchet job. Unlike Marc Antony, I will praise today’s Caesar for what he accomplished in Baton Rouge.
First of all, let me take us back to 1999. Gerry Dinardo, who promised to bring the magic back to LSU, is the head coach of the Tigers. The team that year goes 3-8. I can still remember sitting in the south endzone as a high school senior with my dad and a few friends during the game where LSU lost to Houston 20-7.
Dinardo was fired after that Houston game, and an interim coach led LSU to a win against Arkansas to end the season.
During the offseason, a new chancellor, Mark Emmert, was hired at LSU. Thankfully, the new chancellor persuaded Joe Dean, the athletic director, to hire a fairly unknown coach from Michigan State and pay him a $1 million a year, which was an unheard of amount of money at the time. This coach was Nick Saban, whose Spartans lost to LSU in the 1995 Poulan/Weed Eater Independence Bowl.
Saban takes over the team going into the 2000 season, which was my first football season as a student at LSU. I honestly had to look up who LSU played in the first game of that season. It was Western Carolina, and I was in the student section.
I was in the student section for the other home games that season, including wins against Tennessee, Mississippi State, and Alabama. The win against the Crimson Tide was LSU’s first at home in 30-something years. The goal posts stood no chance after each of those games as the students swarmed the field.
LSU finished that season going 8-4 and defeating Georgia Tech in the Peach Bowl. Just going to any bowl game not in Shreveport was just peachy at the time.
Fast forward a season later, in 2001, and LSU’s success under Saban takes off. The team goes 10-3, beats Auburn at home in the last game of the season, beats Tennessee to win the SEC Championship, and beats Illinois to win the Sugar Bowl. Oh what a time it was!
For the record, one of the Tigers’ losses that year was to an Ole Miss team with Eli Manning at quarterback. I was working in the Tiger Den Suites at the time and remember hearing Britney Spears was there because she and Eli were supposedly dating at the time.
LSU went 8-5 the following season in 2002 and lost to Texas in the Cotton Bowl. The highlight of that season, though, was The Blugrass Miracle where the Tigers spoiled the Kentucky celebration with a last second touchdown pass from Marcus Randall to Jack Hunt. Oh, wait. Jim Hawthorne was wrong. It was actually to Opelousas’ Devery Henderson.
The apex of Saban’s time in Baton Rouge came in 2003, which was my senior season as a student. I could go on-and-on about that season, but one of the highlights was the game against Georgia. Campus was nuts that day, and adding to the electricity was having ESPN’s College GameDay on campus at the Pete Maravich Assembly Center. The Tigers got the win that September day and beat Georgia again in December to win the SEC Championship. From there, LSU went back to the Sugar Bowl and beat Oklahoma to win the first national championship since 1958. Again, what a time it was!
The following May, I graduated from LSU. During the ceremony in the PMAC, Saban walked in to a rousing standing ovation. I think he got more of an ovation than President George W. Bush, who was the keynote speaker. Everybody was cheering “four more years” for Saban too.
After the 2004 season where LSU went 9-3 and lost to Iowa in the Orange Bowl, Saban announced he was leaving for the NFL to coach the Miami Dolphins. Even though his time in Baton Rouge was over, his legacy continued as LSU added a pair of national championships since then.
Say what you want about Saban, but he took a mediocre at best football program at LSU that was content on going to the Independence Bowl and turned it into what it is today, which is a national powerhouse. For that, we owe him a debt of gratitude.
One final thought on the matter is this. I can say I was at Saban’s first game at LSU and his last. His last, of course, ended up being the game in 2022 where LSU won in overtime on a two-point conversion. So, Nick Saban, thanks for the memories.
To continue the Caesar comparison, I will paraphrase Marc Anthony where he was speaking about the assassin Brutus and say, “Ambition should be made of sterner stuff: Yet (Saban) says he was ambitious; And (Saban) is an honourable man.”