The media, particularly the college football media, loves Nick Saban. Buck Reising says it is a love that has been earned through seven career national championships.
Fans are a little more polarized. If they love the Alabama Crimson Tide, chances are they love Nick Saban. If they aren’t Bama fans, they probably don’t like the guy as much.
Wednesday on 104.5 The Zone, Reising said he thinks that is part of what drove the reaction to Saban’s recent appearance on Joel Klatt’s podcast. The coach was complaining about not truly understanding the criteria for selection by the College Football Playoff committee and said that if everyone agrees his team would have been favored against 3 of the 4 teams that made the field, it seems like they should have been in.
“A lot of people are rolling their eyes when they hear Nick Saban, because what a lot of people are going to latch on to out of that audio is what sounds somewhat like Nick Saban still making the case for last year’s Alabama team making the College Football Playoff after going around and campaigning on every platform available to him, and all platforms were available to him. Because why? He’s Nick Saban,” Reising said.
Saban’s influence with the media cannot be rivaled by many in the college football world. Reising compared the Alabama using the media to get his message out to Trent Dilfer trying to do the same thing.
Dilfer spent many years at ESPN and is now the coach at UAB. He told The Rick & Bubba Show in Birmingham that if other coaches try to steal his players, he can call old colleagues and get that information on ESPN’s College GameDay in no time.
“Dilfer has plenty of access to plenty of people in this world, no question,” Reising said. “But it does feel a bit different when you’re holding those two up against one another and the things that they’re trying to accomplish in kind of the same way.”
Reising said that all you need to do is look at where each one was. Dilfer was on a country radio station’s morning show saying that he could have a platform if he wanted it. Saban went much bigger by sitting down with Joel Klatt.
“Now, Nick Saban is going straight to the source, right? The lead analyst for college football on FOX and his platform on Fox Sports being blasted out everywhere.”
