When Steve Spurrier speaks, people laugh with him.
When other SEC football coaches speak, people more often laugh at them.
Such has been the case over the past week. Missouri’s Gary Pinkel made some well-intentioned but ultimately absurd comments about Notre Dame the other day. Last week, Nick Saban of Alabama — in public remarks — flatly stated that he and his Crimson Tide had no excuses for losing to Ohio State in the Sugar Bowl. Yet, in a session with reporters that did not have nearly as many cameras in the room, Saban was just as pointed in saying that he felt his players were running out of bounds to avoid contact and protect their NFL draft statuses. Saban might have been the portrait of accountability in his more public appearances at SEC Media Days, but when the lights of cameras weren’t as bright, he plainly hedged his bet.
The people of the state of Ohio laughed Saban out of the room.
The good folks in Salt Lake City — whose Utah team ran Bama out of the Superdome in the 2009 Sugar Bowl — and the people of Norman, Oklahoma (whose Sooners ripped the Tide in the 2014 Sugar Bowl), roared with justified amusement. They watched and heard Saban make excuses for each of those two losses. A four-time national champion coach couldn’t plainly own up to the fact that his team was inferior and got its butt beat on those occasions. He just HAD to make at least one excuse if not more.
Well, it seems that the coach of the state of Alabama’s other major national power is also hedging. All these hedges, and we’re not even talking about University of Georgia home games.
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Last week, at SEC Media Days, Auburn head coach Gus Malzahn was combative in the most admirable ways: He touted the merits of how he likes his teams to play, indirectly throwing some shade at Nick Saban and the Tide. He brushed off the notion that Michigan and other Big Ten programs would be able to recruit particularly well (well enough to matter, at least) in the South. This is how fans — within a program, or watching from a great distance, even with no emotional attachment to Auburn — should want a coach to act.
Bring on all challenges. Bring on our rival.
We can handle them. We’re good enough, and we’re going to be ready.
That was the attitude Malzahn brought to SEC Media Days.
For this week’s ESPN Car Wash (always held this week while other conferences begin their media-day events), Malzahn was combative in the worst possible way: He came across as whiny and defensive.
Auburn's Malzahn told me he thinks SEC at disadvantage in CFP because of strength of the league. Others fresher for playoff as result.
— Travis Haney (@travhaney) July 21, 2015
Coaches are not politicians, no, but they do have to be political. (They shouldn’t be asked questions about the confederate flag unless there’s a specific issue pertaining to recruiting or some other tension point affecting the state of the program. That’s another story for another day.) Coaches do have to schmooze to some degree. They do need to build relationships and perform both wholesale and retail politics enough to make the fan base (wholesale) and important individuals (retail) happy.
Because of this need to display people skills — something which does need to translate into media fluency — coaches sometimes think they can say one thing in one forum and another thing in another forum and get away with it.
To an extent, this is not necessarily misguided. What you tell players and perhaps some highly-placed people in your own university is not what you’d tell the public. Saying different things in different situations is part of the art of leading an SEC football program.
Yet, we can be adults here and realize that there are some situations in which splitting one’s words and creating two different impressions in different media apperances is just not prudent. Such has been the case with Saban, whose remarks in a more intimate setting effectively cancelled out his more public remarks on the 2015 Sugar Bowl against Ohio State.
Such is now the case with Malzahn, too.
Sure, Gus might have been bold and up front in his most public statements before a packed Wynfrey Hotel in Hoover, Ala., last week, but by saying what he said above at the ESPN Car Wash in Bristol, Conn., he created a very different impression. Malzahn played the bold card in one context, but complaining a week later certainly diminishes what he said at SEC Media Days.
Fans of teams and conferences outside the SEC have a very simple reaction to all of this: Is being in the SEC a thing to be proud of, or a thing to curse? Being the leader of a major SEC program is what the likes of Gus Malzahn have aspired to all their lives as football men. Are they REALLY going to complain about their situation and lament the fact that they play tough teams?
The SEC slipped last year — it clearly declined relative to 2013. All Mississippi State had to do was beat Ole Miss and finish at 11-1. That wouldn’t have guaranteed the Bulldogs a playoff spot, but it would have kept them in the conversation the whole way through. No other conference had as good a shot at placing two teams in the four-team playoff as the SEC did.
Yes, it is true that the SEC is in a tougher spot under the College Football Playoff than it was under the BCS. Alabama would not have had to play Ohio State last year in the BCS, because it would have gone straight into the BCS title game against Florida State had the BCS still existed. The BCS, by restricting the championship chase to one game instead of three (due to a semifinal-and-final structure), consistently elevated the best SEC team into a top-two spot.
With fewer postseason games against teams outside the region, the SEC — which, as an instructive example, never had to play any of Pete Carroll’s USC teams in a bowl game during the Carroll era — always hit the sweet spot if USC wasn’t unbeaten (as was the case in 2004 and 2005, two years when the SEC did not make the title game). Under a four-team playoff structure, we would have had multiple SEC-versus-USC meetings.
Damn straight the SEC had it better under the BCS, so if Malzahn was making that point, he really wasn’t whining so much as pointing out a plain reality.
However, Malzahn did not seem to be doing that at all. He appeared to lament playing in a tough SEC, and little more. He talked about the inability of SEC teams to stay fresh — that’s not really a comparison with the BCS in any meaningful or particularly recognizable way.
Let’s put it this way: If Malzahn was indeed comparing life in the SEC under the College Football Playoff to life under the BCS, he sure had an odd and roundabout way of making that comparison. In the absence of clear evidence he was making a BCS-versus-CFBP comparison, his remarks have to be seen as a “Woe is me, I’m in the SEC” lamentation.
That’s pretty rich if you’re not in the SEC.
Folks laughed at Nick Saban last week. They laughed at Gary Pinkel’s comments on Notre Dame. They’re laughing at Gus Malzahn now.
Maybe the SEC’s best coaches the past two years (those three men are, in fact, the top three over a two-year span…) will get the last laugh later this year. Being really good at coaching football players will give them the chance to do so.
Yet, that’s what irritates so many residents of non-SEC locales in this country: If you’re that good and that skilled at your profession, why do you need to complain and make excuses? It might seem to serve an immediate political purpose, but it’s never a good look.
