You just don't get it, do you, Volume III

I suppose we have no one to blame but ourselves. The sports media has spent so much time over the past few years pushing football as the American sport, and every possible game as event viewing, and every play as war - a few weeks ago, I actually heard a radio host say "Anyone who says football isn't war is lying," which made me want to put him on the next plane to Iraq - that it was inevitable that someone like Nick Saban would say something like Nick Saban said after Alabama's (admittedly embarrassing) home loss to Louisiana-Monroe last week. But I don't know if anyone thought he'd go quite this far.

"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."

I rather enjoy his qualifications there - 9/11 sort of changed the spirit of America, Pearl Harbor kind of got us ready for World War II - but more importantly it's simultaneously hilarious and horrifying that he thought these were valid comparisons. Weren't there any sports metaphors he could have drawn on, or something vague and cliché like "It's always darkest before the dawn"? Football is not a matter of life and death; I'm sorry, it's just not. I like football, but the way this country treats it these days is just worrying. It's encroaching rather heavily on things that actually matter, and that's not a good thing. Losing a football game is not a "catastrophe." Turning a football program around, however impressive, does not rate as a "change in history" on the level of fucking World War II.

Of course, it's not so much Saban's rampant hyperbole that was the problem. It was the refusal to back off those words; usually people realize they've gone too far and quickly backtrack, but the follow-up statement from the program was basically that Saban hadn't said what he obviously had.

"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 Purinton 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."

correlate (v.) To put or bring into causal, complementary, parallel, or reciprocal relation. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that Saban bringing up 9/11 and Pearl Harbor as things that "changed history" and were "catastrophic events" as a way of explaining how a home loss to Louisiana-Monroe was a "catastrophic event" that would "change history" constitutes, at the very least, a parallel relation. As far as whether he was literally equating them, no, I don't think I would argue that, but it doesn't really matter. Simply putting them in the same thought invites the equation on the part of the listener, and that's problematic enough.

On the bright side, if Alabama gets blown out by Auburn in the Iron Bowl we ought to be able to look forward to an inappropriate comparison of mammoth proportions. Maybe something involving slavery, or the Holocaust? That's about the only place left to go.