Alabama Football: Why Nick Saban's Annoying Secrecy Is Worth the Aggravation

If you are an Alabama fan, it might surprise you to hear that Nick Saban is afraid of you.

He does not want you to know which quarterback outperformed the others at Alabama’s scrimmage on Saturday or any of the others before it.

Just what he fears you will do with this information is anybody’s guess.

Does he fear the fan base will pick a favorite between sophomore A.J. McCarron and redshirt freshman Phillip Sims and then be a divided nation once a starter is named? 

Probably not. That ship sailed when they put Alabama’s spring game on national television. Saban tends to focus on more important things anyway.

Maybe Saban has a different motivation. Maybe he does not want to have to justify his eventual decision to the fan base, especially should he decide that one quarterback’s overall fall performance elevates him above the one with better scrimmage numbers.

But that would make for a simple explanation that Saban could easily provide. Saban has said the scrimmage numbers have been almost identical, so this is probably not his motivation. 

Perhaps he fears that if Alabama’s opponents hear which quarterback is leading the race, they can start game-planning accordingly. That explanation sounds good, until one considers that Sims and McCarron have a similar skill set, and Alabama’s plan of attack is not going to change no matter which quarterback is named the starter.  

Truth is, it’s hard to fathom exactly what Saban hopes to accomplish by keeping fans in the dark, and no local media member wants to endure his infamous wrath by asking him to explain himself. It seems that Saban just does not want the fans to know what is happening.   

From a distance, one might expect one of the nation’s most passionate fan bases to revolt over being kept in the dark about the team’s most important position, but Alabama fans have not actually complained to any significant degree. 

Saban may sometimes be a control freak beyond what is necessary to accomplish the task at hand, and that trait works to the fans’ detriment. But being chronically under-informed is a small price to pay to have Nick Saban on your sideline. 

Mike Shula probably could not have survived long operating under the cloak of darkness that Saban has created without losing the patience of the fan base. 

But the obsessive need to operate in secrecy is just part of who Saban is. It is as much a part of his routine as his daily Little Debbie snack cake. Alabama’s decision-makers and fan base knew that before Saban was hired, but decided that, like one’s smoking-hot girlfriend with daddy issues, the baggage was worth the reward.

Alabama fans will put up with Saban’s eccentric secrecy addiction for the privilege of having him around, and rightly so. They have endured too much hardship brought on by inept coaching in the last fifteen years to risk going messing up a good thing. 

Fans have learned to trust that, even when the rationale for some of Saban’s secrecy does not seem obvious, the results at the end of the season will justify the means of getting there. 

Nick Saban may work in mysterious ways, but those ways bring victories. 

And Alabama fans are smart enough to realize that missing out on a few summer scrimmage stats is a small price to pay for the success Saban brings each fall.