Riley Recuperates, Saban Prevaricates

I'm tempted to lump Nick Saban and Pat Riley together, given that they both left their Miami teams Wednesday. Though they coach different sports, the two are similar on many levels. Saban has won a championship, at Louisiana State. Riley has won five, in Los Angeles and Miami. Both are stylish to the point of being dashing. No matter who outranks them on the premises, they are the public face of their operations; they're in command and not at all shy about letting everybody know it. They're impressive to the point that everybody wants them, even to the point where people will do anything to have them on board.

A little more than a year ago, in what to me still smacks of a somewhat unsavory raid, Riley shoved aside Stan Van Gundy, a perfectly capable coach and one of his unfailingly loyal lieutenants, to take back a Miami Heat team he had quit on once before. The Heat had the smell of a champion, so Riley wanted in. High-handed as it seemed, Riley did a fabulous job coaching last season and the Heat won. So the end justified the means, which really is all that's important in professional sports anyway. Now, reportedly unhappy with a team in free fall the season after, Riley is taking a leave for what appears to be the very legitimate reason of hip and knee replacement surgeries. It's hard to do more than raise an eyebrow.

This is where Riley and Saban become less similar. Nobody really expected Riley to be on the sideline for the long haul. It would have surprised nobody had Riley, after winning in June, called it quits. Publicly, he said he had to evaluate whether he had the stomach for another grind. What Riley has done, if you're a Heat fan, is disappointing and perhaps annoying. Couldn't Riley have had these procedures done in the offseason, as Phil Jackson did, and come back strong for the season? Would Riley be leaving now if his team were 18-13 instead of 13-18 and looking like a non-contender even in the NBA's sorry Eastern Conference?

No matter what the answers are, what Riley is doing now is in no way despicable, which is one of many such descriptions that accurately and fairly describe Saban at this point.

I'd start with liar and fraud. Saban surely has been proven to be both.

For weeks after reports surfaced that the University of Alabama was interested in him and he in them, he denied it. Actually, he rebutted the reports, saying he had no plans to leave the Miami Dolphins. An elaborate no-comment would have been perfectly understandable. Coaches consider their professional options all the time. And they should.

But Saban chose not to do the dance; he seems to consider himself above the truth if it suits him. So he lied, repeatedly and arrogantly at that. One day after another when it was obvious the flirtation with Alabama was serious, Saban would look at the questioners as if they were vermin who should take him at his word.

Problem was, Saban lied like a dog about staying at LSU in 2004 while Dolphins owner Wayne Huizenga was courting him. Once a liar . . .

On Dec. 11 he said: "I'm not talking about that, guys. I have no intentions of going anywhere." On Dec. 21 he said, "I guess I have to say it: I'm not going to be the Alabama coach." On Dec. 27 he said: "I'm just making a rule to never comment on something like that again because every time you comment on it, it just makes for another story. So, I'm not going to comment on it five years from now, and I'm not going to comment on it next week."

We know Saban didn't make a New Year's resolution against lying because he said on Monday: "My focus is on the Miami Dolphins. That's the job I have and that's the job I'm committed to doing well."

He was lying through his teeth. And it wasn't just some little white lie coaches have to tell about practice or their strategy for the next game. Saban was perpetrating a fraud. He wasn't in any way committed to the Miami Dolphins on New Year's Day; he was preoccupied with finalizing the details to leave for Alabama. Saban has a rule that nobody within the Dolphins organization can talk to reporters, so maybe he was naive enough to think Alabama boosters weren't gleefully calling reporters all over the place with tidbits about the last conversation with Saban.

Look, the Dolphins haven't lost much of anything. Saban was 15-17 in his two years there. I loved hearing former Dolphins coach Don Shula say that it wasn't any big deal to lose Saban. Like a lot of coaches who win big in college, Saban was nothing special in the pros. In fact, it's become pretty clear this week that Saban's telling friends he wasn't in love with the pro football lifestyle was code for Saban's feeling that he couldn't cut it in the NFL.

And that's fine. Saban is entitled to make that move. He's entitled to make it for more money. Just don't lie so blatantly that you wind up looking like a fool and a fraud when you fly off to the new gig.

The question now for Alabama is: How quickly will somebody else turn his head? Clearly, he likes being courted as much, if not more, than he likes coaching. I'd love to be one of the good Southeastern Conference schools -- say, Florida, Auburn, Georgia, LSU -- recruiting against Alabama now. I'd make up a big board with all of Saban's lies over the last two years and I'd show the quotes to all those boys' mamas and daddies. I'd hammer at Saban's credibility in every living room across the South. If Saban had simply said, "I'm considering some options and I'm not ready to talk about this until the end of the season," there would be no issue with him. But his handling of the situation will and should dog him indefinitely.

And there's a question of Alabama's sanity, too. Days after the state told the University of Alabama-Birmingham that it couldn't pay its coach nearly a million bucks, the folks who run the Tuscaloosa campus only 55 miles up the road, the one with the state's crown jewel of a football team, were allowed to pay up to $40 million to this fraud?

For half the money, I'd have offered the job to Boise State Coach Chris Petersen, who with the resources of a school the size of Alabama might be able to coach circles around Saban, the same way he took players of lesser athletic abilities and outcoached Oklahoma's Bob Stoops the other night in the Fiesta Bowl.

Chances are, the Dolphins will have zero problem finding a coach at least as good as Saban. The NFL assistant ranks are full of men such as Eric Mangini, who took the Jets to the playoffs his first season. The Miami Heat will have, in all probability, a much more difficult time finding a coach who can lead a team the way the iconic Riley has when he's been at his best. Riley, if he never coaches another game in the NBA, would leave with one last championship. Saban had better find ends that justify the means. Otherwise he will have departed a loser and a liar, and the combination is a hard one to live down.