Nick Saban is correct. Once the leak about his agent telling regents of the Texas Longhorns football program that Texas was the only place Saban would leave Alabama for, "there wasn't a hell of a lot I could do about it."
That's what Saban told ESPN.com, one day after agreeing to a contract extension worth between $7 million and $7.5 million per year, according to TideSports.com. Saban currently is making about $5.5 million.
Saban was "powerless" over the rumors because he lied almost seven years ago when he said he wasn't interested in the Alabama job when he was coaching the Miami Dolphins.
The leak about Saban's agent, Jimmy Sexton, and the Texas regent Wallace Hall and former regent Tom Hicks reportedly occurred in January but wasn't made public until September. Whether the nine-month delay between the meeting and the reporting is coincidental is unknown.
But Saban reportedly will have gotten about a 30 percent pay raise.
"The way this sort of got spun, it was a little bit more like, 'OK, he got a new contract at Alabama, so he's going to stay at Alabama instead of going to Texas,'" Saban told ESPN.com on Saturday. "I never considered going to Texas. That wasn't even a conversation.
"I knew that if Mack stepped down, there would probably be an opportunity, but it wasn't something I was interested in doing, not at this stage in my career."
There wasn't a lot Saban could do about the situation, but that was Saban's own doing. He might recall once upon a time when he was coaching the Dolphins that he swore up and down that he was not leaving the Dolphins to coach Alabama.
Then in January of 2007, he accepted the head coaching position with the Crimson Tide.
Saban did say he was "too damn old" to coach somewhere else when the rumors linking him to Texas first came to light in September. But to infer that he did everything he could to squash those rumors is probably stretching the truth.
Again.
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