College coaches and power: How much is too much?

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Alabama is where Joe Namath is said to have used the school president's parking spot as his own, where it's less a joke than honest truth that the governor toils in the shadow of the flagship university's football coach.

Current University of Alabama President Robert Witt tore at that football-foremost notion almost as soon as he took the job nearly nine years ago, ousting misbehaving Mike Price before the newly named coach ever worked a game. As engineering professor Clark Midkiff remembers, "It was rumored that a member of the board of trustees did not want him to fire Coach Price, and Bob Witt said, 'It's either me or him.'

"Were that to be a situation between him and Nick Saban, who would win?" Midkiff says of the man who has coached today's Crimson Tide within reach of a second national championship in three years.

Who among the Bama Nation would lead the torch and pitchfork parade to the Mal Moore Athletic Facility to lynch Nick Saban if the Penn State scandal happened at Tuscaloosa?


You'd have to beat us out...