houndstooth
08-14-2008, 03:53 PM
On New Year's Day in 2007 Mal Moore, the athletic director at the University of Alabama, boarded a private plane bound for Miami. A little over a month earlier the university had fired Mike Shula, its fourth football coach in eight mediocre years. The pursuit of a new coach to that point had been bungled badly--the once proud program was reportedly turned down by Steve Spurrier, from South Carolina, and Rich Rodriguez, at the time the coach at West Virginia. Moore was on his way to Miami to try to woo Nick Saban, then the coach of the NFL's Dolphins. It was all-or-nothing, with no real backup plan. "I told the pilots when they dropped me off in Miami that if I didn't come back to this plane with Nick Saban, they should just go on and take me to Cuba," Moore says. Saban, a onetime head coach at Louisiana State, fretted over the decision to leave Miami for two restless days, then took the job and flew with Moore back to Tuscaloosa--and into a national media outcry in which he was called a "weasel," a "loser" and "Nick Satan" for leaving Miami after publicly denying interest in the Alabama job. But in Tuscaloosa, which was desperate to return to national football prominence, Saban, 56, was a savior, welcomed with an open wallet. Saban, with his agent, James E. Sexton II, negotiated an eight-year, $32 million contract that was, at the time, the highest salary ever paid to a college coach. It remains among the highest and is bigger than all but a handful of NFL coaching salaries. His deal includes, among other perks, 25 hours of private use of a university airplane, two cars and a country club membership, extras that make his annual compensation closer to $5 million a year, estimates Smith College economics professor Andrew Zimbalist. – Forbes.com (http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2008/0901/092.html)