When Nick Saban speaks, people hear the elephant in the room

“There’s no such thing as being in the wrong place at the wrong time.” – Nick Saban

When Nick Saban speaks, people listen … and decipher. Sometimes they hear the elephant in the room. Was Saban throwing shade at Nate Oats with his ‘wrong place, wrong time’ quote, or was he just applying simple wisdom in a teaching moment?

I don’t know if Saban was aiming a verbal stink-eye at Oats with his comment. You’ll have to ask the coach about that. But here’s what we do know about the GOAT: Every time he opens his mouth at a press conference, he’s speaking directly to his players – present and future.

Excepts from Joseph Goodman’s column:

Leave it to Nick Saban to set the record straight on the consequences of making poor decisions.

It needed to be done whether Saban fully understood how it would all be perceived or not. It needed to be said no matter how inconvenient the timing, too. Here’s why. It was just a legendary football coach doing his job when one of his players messed up.

Usually this column is about speaking truth to power, but this time it’s about the powerful speaking unfiltered truths that everyone needs to hear. For Alabama, even Saban-speak is tricky stuff these days.

A young Alabama football player was arrested last week with large amounts of marijuana and a loaded gun in his car. Tony Mitchell was a celebrated recruit from Thompson High in Alabaster. Now the former five-star prospect, Saban said on Monday, is suspended from the football team indefinitely. Saban said he needs to understand the situation a little better before making any more decisions.

For a coach, that’s pretty typical stuff.

“Everybody’s got an opportunity to make choices and decisions,” Saban said during a news conference to kickoff the beginning of spring football. “There’s no such thing as being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“You’ve got to be responsible for who you’re with, who you’re around and what you do — who you associate yourself with and the situations that you put yourself in,” Saban said. “It is what it is, but there is cause and effect when you make choices and decisions that put you in bad situations.”

Those are powerful words even if Saban uttered them without considering, or even understanding, how they would be perceived. We’re not going to avoid the obvious here. Nate Oats is the Alabama basketball coach who set off a firestorm a few weeks ago when he described basketball player Brandon Miller as being in the “wrong spot at the wrong time” of the shooting that took the life of Jamea Harris.

Read all of Goodman’s column here

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JD Crowe is the cartoonist for Alabama Media Group and AL.com. He won the RFK Human Rights Award for Editorial Cartoons in 2020. In 2018, he was awarded the Rex Babin Memorial Award for local and state cartoons by the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. Follow JD on Facebook, Twitter @Crowejam and Instagram @JDCrowepix.