None of us can, and that includes Lane Kiffin, who for all his creative thinking and past mistakes has understood limitations. Nick Saban may be as close to a Superman as a mortal, but even he can’t see in the shadows. Alabama Football, Nick Saban and Mortality Eliot’s genius, we call football’s future championship prospects in Alabama the “Idea.” In this case, reversing Eliot’s order, between reality and idea “the shadow falls”. Let’s call the second tweet the “reality.” In a nod to Mr. No sane football mind can help but believe that Nick intends for the Alabama Crimson Tide to win another national championship in 2022.Īnother recent tweet defined the Alabama Crimson Tide dominance. But the humor only applies to Nick “doubling” his championships. No doubt Nick Saban got a hearty laugh at Lane’s words. Lane Kiffin, known almost as much for clever phrases as for football coaching, pretty much exactly recently said the same thing. Maybe we think that because we believe Saban is more than the GOAT – he’s Superman!

Most of us Alabama fans think a powerless Nick Saban walking away is bullshit. The often quoted conclusion is that Nick Saban knows all this and since losing is so unbearable for him, he will just walk away. The subtext is that an aging 70-year-old man is powerless to stop it. The premise is NIL and the CFB-free agency will see Crimson Tide’s dominance lapse in its current loosely constrained iterations. Immediately not so much threatened, but at a later date, some suspect, it is soon.

Why would one use such an imprecise phrase when discussing football in Alabama? Because in an offseason when all of college football is changing from what it was to what’s next, Alabama Football, and Nick Saban in particular, have been identified as threatened. For the Alabama football fans who have noticed and whose answer is what… yes, the title of this article quotes TS Eliot.īreathe a sigh of relief, an English literature lesson will not follow.

Between idea reality falls shadow