Following back to back loses to Mississippi State and Louisiana Monroe, head coach Nick Saban turned to catastrophic events like 9/11 and Pearl Harbor as examples to make a point about the Alabama football team uniting heading forward.
Citing the 9-11 terrorist attacks and Pearl Harbor, Saban said Monday his team must rebound like America did from a “catastrophic event.”
“Changes in history usually occur after some kind of catastrophic event,” Saban said. “It may be 9/11, which sort of changed the spirit of America relative to catastrophic events. Pearl Harbor kind of got us ready for World War II, and that was a catastrophic event.”
“What Coach Saban said did not correlate losing a football game with tragedy; everyone needs to understand that. He was not equating losing football games to those catastrophic events,” football spokesman Jeff Purington said in a statement to The Associated Press. “The message was that true spirit and unity become evident in the most difficult of times. Those were two tremendous examples that everyone can identify with.”
I’m sorry, but even if he didn’t intend to compare football to tragedy, he’s still wrong for somewhat linking everything together. Saban’s comments are proof that we (and by we I mean the media, fans, players, coaches, etc) take sports way too seriously. Sports aren’t life, even though we want them to be sometimes. We want coaches and players to feel losses like we feel losses and we want the media to hammer them when they don’t. We love the emotional locker room speeches in movies and want sports to be something more sometimes, but everyone needs to keep things in perspective. Trying to unite a football team after losing to Mississippi State and Louisiana Monroe doesn’t pail in comparison to an entire country uniting after innocent people lost their lives in the tragic events of 9/11 and Pearl Harbor.
