Coaching them up
Remember how Miami Dolphins coach Nick Saban was pilloried for his candid remarks after the team's 22-0 loss at Cleveland on Nov. 20? Think back for a moment to the outcry that followed Saban's comments and how some misguided souls actually wanted the league powers to initiate an investigation into whether the first-year head coach was insinuating his club might tank the rest of the season. For those of you with very poor recall, his remarks, in part, were: "The record doesn't really matter; the result doesn't matter; and the score in the game doesn't really matter."
Guess what? The opinion of no one who honestly felt the Dolphins were going down the tubes, with Saban greasing the skids, matters right now. Since Saban essentially said publicly what a lot of coaches think when they are in a rebuilding situation -- that the rest of the year would be an evaluation period and that any players deemed to have put things in coast mode could be viewed as extraneous come next season -- the Dolphins haven't lost. Beating up on dregs such as Oakland and Buffalo, well, that's nothing to brag about. But going to San Diego and beating a Chargers team everyone fears, and which is fighting for its playoff life, just reinforces what this space has said all along: Saban can coach.
The Dolphins survived some shaky officiating, and a couple of dubious instant replay rulings, to beat the Chargers and move to within a game of .500. There are no delusions in South Florida about going to the playoffs in Saban's debut season in the league. But Saban's six victories equal the total wins of the NFL's other two rookie coaches, Romeo Crennel of Cleveland and San Francisco's Mike Nolan, and the sentiment here is that both those guys have done admirable jobs in 2005.
Dare the Dolphins head into the Christmas season dreaming of a break-even campaign? Why not? The next two games are against the New York Jets and Tennessee, who own just seven wins between them, before a season finale at New England. Since Saban is a lot more careful now with his public utterances, the guess here is that he will never admit to the rest of the world that a .500 season would represent the start of a turnaround. Privately, though, an 8-8 mark probably would be pretty satisfying. And, after the beating he took following his remarks in the wake of the loss at Cleveland last month, pretty gratifying, too.
