High Expectations

As an Alabama fan, you hear it every day. You know, yet another old refrain, "Alabama has too high of expectations." Some people go extreme with that assumption, some even saying we'll fire Saban if he loses a few games or doesn't bring us a national championship in a couple of years. At bottom, it's a corollary of a Bryant criticism, that we somehow expect our coach, whomever he may be, to do as well as Bryant, and if he doesn't he's going to be promptly fired.

But is there any underlying validity to all of those "high expectations" statements, or is just a tired, baseless, and overused assertion for those who want to criticize Alabama?

Well, there is only one way to find out. Let's look at past Alabama coaches since Bryant retired in 1982.

Ray Perkins, of course, succeeded Bryant in 1983. Despite leading Alabama to its first losing season in almost 30 years, Perkins returned and had good seasons in 1985 and 1986. The Alabama fan base was generally pleased with him, and he was not on the hot seat. Perkins left Alabama of his own volition, when he was wooed back to the NFL by Alabama business school graduate and financier Hugh Culverhouse, who was the owner of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Had Perkins not left on his own, he would have easily held on to the Alabama job for the foreseeable future.

Bill Curry was chosen to replace Perkins, and despite a less-than-solid track record at Georgia Tech, Curry did well at Alabama. He went 26-10 in three seasons, won the SEC in 1989, and was 6-0 against Tennessee and Penn State. Some people -- either out of ignorance or in a lame attempt to re-write history -- like to claim that we ran Curry off after his third consecutive loss to Auburn in 1989, and that is factually wrong. Granted, no one was happy with Curry's 0-3 record against in-state rival Auburn, nor the fact that they ended our undefeated season in 1989 -- and seriously, what half-way decent fan base would be happy with that? -- but the fact remains that Curry was not ran off by Alabama. He was not fired in the month following the loss to Auburn, and actually led the Tide in a close loss to eventual national champion Miami in the Sugar Bowl. Curry was slated to return to be the Tide coach in 1990, but he left for Kentucky over a contract dispute. At the end of the 1989 season, we offered Curry a new contract that contained clauses that he was not happy with (specifically, no raise and removal of his power to hire and fire assistants), and thus he bolted to Kentucky. Bill Curry himself even admitted as much in the book "The Uncivil War: Alabama v. Auburn 1981-1994." You can read for yourself by purchasing the book and reading chapter eight. At bottom, Curry was not "ran off" or fired from Alabama because he didn't meet our supposedly "high expectations." In reality, Curry left of his own volition, when he could have came back to Alabama in 1990, because of a contract dispute with the university.

Gene Stallings was hired after Curry left for Kentucky, and he was wildly successful. In 1996, though, Stallings chose to retire. Some claim that Stallings was ran off, and his "retirement" was just putting a nice face on the situation. That, too, much like the Curry claims, is incorrect. Stallings left of his own accord due to disputes with university president Andrew Sorensen and athletic director Bob Bockrath. Stallings felt that Sorensen and Bockrath were micro-managing the football program -- and of course the passage of time proved Stallings right in the years that followed -- and Stallings felt with excessive administration meddling in his football program, it would simply make for an untenable situation. Stallings was very much in the Bryant mold -- who contractually demanded that he would report to a laissez faire university president and no one else -- and allowing active and excessive meddling in his program by administrators was simply unconscionable to a man like Stallings. As a result, he left of his own accord. Certainly, there were some disgruntled rumblings about Stallings -- watching his much-superior teams squad about wins by a handful of points due to poor offenses was a very frustrating thing to watch, as you would expect -- but the overwhelming majority of the Alabama fan base knew the magnitude of what all Stallings accomplished in his seven years (a national championship and 70 wins), and the fan base was greatly saddened when he announced after the 1996 Iron Bowl that he would be retiring following the bowl game. "High expectations" didn't get Stallings; far from it, in fact.

Dubose came next, and he got more leniency than you could imagine. After a disastrous 4-7 season in 1997, he had a mediocre year in 1998 (close wins in a couple of games we should have lost, namely LSU) before getting annihilated by Virginia Tech in the Music City Bowl. 1999 saw lightning in a bottle, and 2000 was a disaster. And oh yeah, remember the secretary affair scandal, and the losses to Louisiana Tech, Kentucky, and Central Florida? But Dubose, as terrible as he was, did not get fired. Actually, he submitted his resignation to Mal Moore after the third game of the 2000 season (the 21-0 debacle against Southern Miss), and Mal refused to take it at the time, but that was the end of his tenure. Granted, any decent school would have fired him, but the point remains he was never fired because it never came to that. Dubose saw how the job overwhelmed him, and he resigned.

Fran came next, and of course Fran left of his own volition for Texas A&M.

Then it was Shula, who stayed at Alabama for four seasons. In those four years, Shula had one winning season, a combined 1-12 record against Tennessee, Auburn, LSU, and Georgia, and never finished higher than third in the SEC West. In three of his four seasons, his teams finished forth or worse in the SEC West. Shula was fired by athletic director Mal Moore approximately nine days after the 2006 Iron Bowl loss. In four seasons, his record was just barely .500.

So... that is it? All of these supposed "high expectations" have resulted in one coach fired? Basically, that is what that entire argument -- often repeated as it is -- reduces down to once you actually analyze it.

But what about the firing of Shula? Was that "high expectations," or have other schools done essentially the same thing in similar situations?

Let's look at that, too.

Once you delve into recent SEC football history, you see that many SEC schools have fired coaches within the past decade despite those coaches having won considerably more than what Shula won at Alabama. Let's go through some examples.

Auburn fired Terry Bowden mid-way through the 1998 season, Bowden's sixth on the Plains, after a 1-5 start. In his first five seasons at Auburn, Bowden went 45-12-1, and won 18 consecutive games to start his tenure. In 1997, the year before he was fired, Bowden's Tigers went 10-3 -- including wins over Alabama, Georgia, and LSU -- won the SEC West, came within one point (30-29) of beating Peyton Manning-led Tennessee in the SEC Championship Game, and wrapped up the season with a win in the Peach Bowl over Clemson. Moreover, Bowden led Auburn to -- at the point -- only its second undefeated season, and had a winning record over their two major rivals: Alabama and Georgia.

Georgia fired Jim Donnan at the end of the 2000 season. After inheriting Ray Goff's disaster, Donnan went 5-6 in his first year in Athens. The next four seasons, however, were much more successful, to say the least. From 1997-2000, the year he was fired, Donnan went 35-13, never having fewer than eight wins in a season, and he also racked up four bowl wins in those four years. Donnan was fired in 2000 following back-to-back 8-4 seasons.

LSU fired Gerry Dinardo in 1999 after back-to-back losing seasons. Dinardo took over the Archer / Hallman disaster that saw six consecutive losing seasons at LSU, and did quite well in his first three years. During that span, Dinardo went 26-9-1 and won three consecutive bowl games, quite a feat considering that LSU had only won three bowl games in the twenty-five years prior to Dinardo's arrival. And, his three bowl victories in three seasons is the only time that has ever happened in the history of LSU football. Nevertheless, he was fired.

Florida fired Ron Zook in 2004 after three consecutive winning seasons. All told, in his three seasons, he went 23-15, and made three bowl appearances. Even so, after a 4-3 start to the 2004 season, Zook was fired.

So, as you see, Alabama really didn't do anything out of ordinary when we fired Shula. All told, Shula had a sub-par record in his four years at Alabama, and many other SEC schools the past few years have fired coached who have won considerably more than Shula did. But did we hear about how Auburn, Georgia, LSU, and Florida have supposedly ill-fated "high expectations"? Of course not. So why do you constantly hear that with Alabama? Dear Mr. Casual Reader, meet Mr. Double Standard.

Moreover, I should make another point. When Auburn, Georgia, LSU, and Florida fired their coaches, their successors all did much better, and that group of replacement hires is comprised of Tommy Tuberville, Mark Richt, Nick Saban, and Urban Meyer. No coach not in that group has won the SEC since Steve Spurrier did it in 2000. Obviously, having high expectations is nowhere near the disaster-guaranteed attribute that most "experts" and fans believe it to be.

Putting it all together, it seems that the argument of "high expectations" has no validity whatsoever. Though it may be repeated ad nauseum, it is nevertheless wholly untrue. Just because people swore for centuries that the world was flat did make it flat, and the same reasoning structure applies here. Certainly you must win and win big in order to remain the head coach at Alabama, but with the massive amount of resources poured into college football these days, that is true at any top Division 1-A program. The old Bryant saying, "Be good or be gone" certainly applies big-time modern day college football. However, there is not even one tiny scintilla of evidence that would even remotely suggest that we have unduly high expectations that are far out of line of what is expected with other top programs.

At bottom, as is the same with the "Bear Is Dead" argument, the whole "high expectations" argument is patently absurd, and really only reflects upon the idiocy of whomever is making the argument.