By Leonard Shapiro
Special to washingtonpost.com
Tuesday, January 9, 2007 12:31 PM

FORT LAUDERDALE -- If ever a NFL head coach was seeking a blueprint on how not to alienate a team's fan base and the media covering the local football franchise, he need only review the final few weeks of Nick Saban's recently self-terminated tenure as head coach of the Miami Dolphins.

It has not been a pretty picture here in South Florida over the last five months, what with the Dolphins falling out of the playoff race within the first six weeks of the schedule, accompanied by a dramatic season-long fall from grace by Saban, hailed only two years ago as the potential savior of this once-proud franchise.

Over the past seven days it has been about as ugly as it gets in the papers and on the local airwaves after the slippery, slimy Saban slithered off to Tuscaloosa last Wednesday to accept an eight-year, $32 million deal to coach Alabama. The announcement came two weeks after he emphatically told South Florida reporters in a news conference that, "I'm not going to be the Alabama coach." It became as bold-faced a lie as any football coach has ever uttered with videotape rolling and pens poised to record his every word. It has since earned him the moniker in these parts as Nick Satan, liar and loser.

Among the most appalled was Don Shula, who's son Mike was fired as Alabama's head coach after the 2006 season, just a year after his 2005 team finished 10-2, followed by 6-6 in '06. Shula, a man who always did his best to take the high road and duck public controversy in 26 honorable seasons as the Dolphins Hall of Fame head coach, couldn't hide his utter contempt for Saban, willingly offering his opinion to every available camera in town.

He publicly called Saban a "quitter" and "a failure" and said, "my reaction is that Saban in two years was 15-17. I don't think that will be any great loss."

Ouch.

Still, you could certainly understand Shula's revulsion with the man who may well have been trying to replace his son at Alabama all along. And while Shula was a guy who almost always made himself available for comment as one of the game's more accessible head coaches, there's also no question Nick (The Not So Slick) Saban's media relations were mostly a disaster from Day One on the job.

Among his first imperious edicts was insisting that reporters covering his team be banned from the team's Davie, Fla., practice facility press room during the offseason. This made it easier for him to conduct business -- signing free agents, hiring assistants, preparing for the draft -- away from any prying media eyes. Never mind that no other team in the league had ever imposed such ridiculous restrictions on a media corps merely trying to keep readers and viewers, as in season ticket-holders, informed about the offseason workings of their favorite football team.

Saban, of course, was a graduate of the Bill Belichick School of non-journalism, having worked as a Belichick assistant with the Cleveland Browns. Belichick, known to many Browns executives back then as "The Mumbler," never was allowed to get away with such shenanigans by then-Browns owner Art Modell, a firm believer in a mostly open door media policy, if only because he knew the news of pro football could only be good for the business of pro football, as in ticket sales and TV ratings.

In recent years, Belichick also has refused to allow his assistant coaches to be interviewed, a nasty trend that's sadly alive and sick in other NFL outposts, usually where a former Belichick or Bill Parcells aide is the head coach (Eric Mangini of the Jets and Tom Coughlin of the Giants come immediately to mind).

Maybe when you win two (Parcells) or three (Belichick) Super Bowls, you can get away with that sort of egomaniacal policy. But Saban instituted the same rule in Miami from the get go, and he'd never won squadoosh at the professional level. In a perfect world, he'll also never get another chance to erase the label as just another big-time college coach who couldn't cut it at the highest level of the game.

What a difference a few decades make in the NFL. Back when Vince Lombardi was the head coach of the Washington Redskins in 1969, every day in training camp the legendary coach and his assistants hosted what was known as the "Five O'Clock Club." Reporters covering the team would gather over beers or cocktails with Lombardi and his staff to talk football, politics or anything else on anyone's mind. It was always off the record, but it certainly was beneficial for all concerned.

I once asked Bill Cowher what he thought about some of his head coaching colleagues declaring their assistants off limits to the media. He laughed out loud and said half the head coaches in the league probably would still be toiling as anonymous assistants, including himself, if their bosses had muzzled their staffs. He also thought it would be downright insulting to his own coaches to adapt any such policy, as if they didn't have the good sense to know how to temper their own public comments about the team or the opposition.

Saban was able to get away with such foolishness during his days as a head coach at Michigan State and LSU, where the home town press surely was a tad friendlier to the local college football team and far more compliant in going with the program set forth by the martinet in charge. Saban likely will use the same Neanderthal policies at Alabama, where he was greeted like a conquering hero when he showed up to take the job last week. Videotape of hugs and kisses planted on Saban's smiling face from adoring fans aired that night on all the South Florida television stations, accompanied by some rather savage commentary from local TV broadcasters who have been raging at Saban for days.

Over the last week, I've heard Saban lambasted on the air and in print as a loser, a liar, a bum, a cheat, a wimp, a fraud, a failure, an egomaniac, a hypocrite -- and that was the good stuff. ESPN radio and television talker Dan Le Betard, also a sports columnist for the Miami Herald, wrote that the bottom line on Saban's departure was that he "couldn't impact the pro game with all his genius and all his arrogance and all his condescension and all his coaches and all his self-help infomercial yammering and all of Wayne Huizenga's money. So he fled."

For two years here, Saban also had babbled incessantly and rather condescendingly about the importance of honor, integrity, loyalty, mental toughness and accountability. How's this for honesty, loyalty and integrity?

Saban didn't even have the stones to tell his own Dolphins assistants face to face that he was leaving. Instead, he gave them the news by speaker phone.

How's this for integrity and accountability? In his opening remarks in Tuscaloosa, he savaged the Dolphins personnel department (many hand-picked by him), saying "the personnel people in the building, that's how you gain an advantage. When you look at the teams that have really good personnel people in the building that are doing what the coaches want them to do, finding the kind of players the coaches want them to find, they have success ... Everybody has to be loyal and obedient to do what you want done."

So what's wrong with this picture? Excuse me, but Saban had total authority over the entire football operation, personnel included. He had more assistant coaches than any team in the league other than the Redskins, had a huge player acquisition budget and, oh yes, had the final say on every player drafted and signed in free agency. But nooooo, it wasn't his fault the Fins floundered. It was all the other incompetents in the building.

Oh please.

The good news is that no one in South Florida was buying any of it, especially the lies, and more lies.

Alex Marvez, who covered the team for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and is a regular on a popular local radio sports talk show, probably said it best in talking about Saban's Pinnochio personality.

"It's thinking the way George Costanza used to think on Seinfeld,"

Marvez said on the air. "Costanza would say it's not a lie if you believe it."

But that's not how anyone in these tropical parts looks at Nick Saban these days.

Liar and loser seem to be the operative and most appropriate media phrases, save for the Tuscaloosa crowd. Still, a couple of losses to Auburn down the road, and it may apply there, as well. We can only hope.

Leonard Shapiro can be reached at Badgerlen@hotmail.com or Badgerlen@aol.com.