I think Saban coming in when he did probably helped form the perfect strom. Lord Saybinz, to his credit, came in and did what he was paid to do, get very aggressive on the recruiting trail. CTT, on the other hand, was not only facing a little criticism with regard to his assistants, but I believe that was the start of some personal problems for him as well, so I don't think he had his mind focused 100% on the job at hand.
Not to go into the whole time for a change thing. I do believe given the chance...or forced to clean some house, CTT would have righted the ship.
Never said it wasn't time for him to leave. I argued for that myself. It had reached the point to where the division between him and Jacobs was corrosive. I think the bridges were burned beyond repair.
I still think that had Tuberville been given the "all in" support from the administration that Chizik has been granted and he could have been fine. But that wasn'tgoing to happen. Tubs and Jacobs were never going to be all in and on the same page. Well was poisoned.
Would we be celebrating a national title today if they'd pulled together? Can't say. Probably not. Too many things had to go exactly right this year for that to happen. If we play the same season with the same players 20 times, we might win it twice out of twenty. This season was like NCAA for PS3. If things weren't going right, I could just turn it off and start the game over. If we play it again, maybe Clemson doesn't get the penalty on the kick. Maybe Kentucky stops a fourth down conversion. Maybe McElroy recoveres his own fumble. So many things had to happen just perfectly (like they do for EVERY NC team). We could play that season again and end up 9-4 or 10-3 or 11-2 or or even 7-6.
Chizik did a great job last year. The ball bounced right. Tuberville did a great job in 2000 and in 2004, in particular. Could he have done a great job in 2010? Maybe. Nobody knows.
It just pisses me off when our bama-acting fans trash him. Maybe they don't remember what shambles the program was in when he got there. We had a wide receiver, all 140 pounds of him as our only running back. We had an outfielder at quarterback. We had no offensive line. Recruiting was a wasteland. We weren't even an afterthought on the national scale. His second season we won the SEC West. By 2003 the cupboard was full. One NFL scout said he'd seen pro teams with a lot less talent than the 2003 team had.
Tuberville kept us from falling off the map and made us nationally relevant. For the most part he kept us there. It's infantile and crass to disregard all that.
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