CECIL HURT: Alabama must be looking for a coach who’s already arrived

For four years, everyone connected with the University of Alabama watched and waited, and hoped, that Mike Shula would grow into a big-time head football coach.

At some point over the past couple of weeks, Alabama decided it couldn’t wait any longer. Shula had grown in the role into which he was thrust by strange circumstances in May 2003, but he hadn’t grown quickly enough, or filled out to the larger-than-life size that the Alabama job dictates. Or, to echo a word that Mal Moore used in his Monday press conference, he was no longer growing in the right “direction."

Many people, including a steadily increasing number of Alabama fans, felt that way over the course of the season. Some others felt that Shula was in fact continuing to grow, and that one more season would see him emerge as a steady, consistent winner in charge of a stable football program both on and off the field.

Dr. Robert Witt, the UA president, and Moore, the UA director of athletics, finally reached the former conclusion and decided that Shula was not going to grow large enough to fit the bill.

That leaves only one option: If you aren’t going to wait on a coach to grow into what the role demands, then you have to find a coach who has already attained that stature. If waiting for Shula wasn’t the best option, and the events of the 2006 season suggested that might be the case, there is no longer time to waste on any other experiment.

The coach that Alabama hires to lead its football team this time has to be full-grown.

That can mean a big-time, big-name coach. It doesn’t necessarily have to mean a Steve Spurrier or a Nick Saban, although it could. But it does mean that the absolute right choice has to be made.

That sounds simple, almost to the point of irrelevance. Of course that is the sort of coach Alabama needs. It’s the sort of coach every football program needs. But Alabama’s situation in this case is different. The consequences of another misstep would be disastrous.

A number of opinions have already been aired about Alabama’s decision to replace Shula. Nationally, the move hasn’t been popular, and there has been a tendency to criticize Alabama’s coaching turnover in the past 25 years -- and most particularly in the six years since 2000 -- as symptomatic of an unreasonable fan base that is grasping desperately to regain unattainable past glory.

A closer examination, though, would show that Alabama -- its alumni, its fans and its administration -- might not be quite as capricious and short-fused as they appear to be at first blush. In fact, of the four post-Gene Stallings coaches who came and went so quickly -- Mike DuBose, Dennis Franchione, Mike Price and now Shula -- only one was fired for the sole reason that he wasn’t winning enough football games.

That was part of the equation with DuBose, of course, but his record was just one aspect of a complete program meltdown. Franchione won an ample number of games. Alabama fans were distraught when he left, and even if one buys into the argument that he jumped ship for Texas A&M in “anticipation" of unreasonable fan demands, that still says as much about Franchione as it does about Alabama. Price’s dismissal, of course, had nothing to do with football.

Indisputably, though, Shula’s did. It wasn’t exactly that he wasn’t winning enough, although 6-6 didn’t thrill anyone. It was about the expectation that he wouldn’t win enough in the future.

There are reasons to believe that would have been the case. Regardless, by saying that it couldn’t stand the uncertainty of waiting to see what Shula would do, the Alabama administration has also given itself the challenge of embracing certainty -- or as near as one can come to it in the world of college football -- with the next hire.

Alabama is in the best position it has been in to hire a coach since at least 1990, and, perhaps, is positioned as well as it ever has been. The cloud of NCAA probation has dissipated. The facilities are first-class. A head coach will be given nearly complete autonomy to run his own program. (One could argue that Shula was, if anything, given too much autonomy and didn’t get enough of the sort of help that a young coach needs.) Money, according to all sources, is no object.

All that remains is to put the right piece of the puzzle into place.

The people who made the call on Mike Shula held him to a high standard. The job demands that. But so does the task of replacing Shula with a new coach, and the people who will spend the next few days, or weeks, in doing that should be held to a lofty standard as well.

Cecil Hurt is sports editor of The Tuscaloosa News. Reach him at cecil.hurt@tuscaloosanews.com or 205-722-0225.