Basically, this is a fair assessment. It has its problems, but it is a fair assessment.

I knew Ron Gaspar personally. Ron was an ex-football coach who had suffered an accident that left him paralyzed and in a wheelchair. He wrote about football from his home in Chalmette and would come on WWL Radio with Hap Glaudi and provide football expertise for Hap's show. Ron was known around New Orleans as "Mr. Football."

When Bear Bryant visited the Chalmette area late in his career, he came to see Ron Gaspar. Ron made the obvious statement to Bryant that once Bryant retired, Alabama would have a difficult time replacing him. In this prediction Ron Gaspar proved to be prophetic, as obvious as his prophecy was.

The question, as I see it, is whether Alabama will learn from that experience. Or maybe it is rather that a Bryant or a Saban only comes along about once every fifty years, and the question then becomes, is Alabama going to be fortunate enough to get him when he does come along.

When Steve Spurrier had thrashed around in the pros and then at Duke University, Florida was able to pluck him off the coaching tree, probably for a number of reasons. Spurrier was a Florida alumnus, for one, and then he was, and is, a sort of maverick. He would reject an offer from Alabama right before Saban accepted his Alabama offer, and I don't think Spurrier would have accepted an Alabama offer back when he was at Duke. Spurrier is all about doing something that no one else has ever done, and it may be that he thought he could never top Bear Bryant anyhow.

It's not hard to see where LSU people are coming from. Your immediate concern is this bumper-crop recruiting class that is sitting out there in your state right now. You just came away from another concern, whether you could beat Alabama and Saban at this point in Les Miles' career. That didn't go so well, and so now you are rightfully concerned to keep Fournette and company -- what's left of it -- in state.

In spite of ourselves, we really can't predict the future. We don't KNOW how long Nick Saban is going to be at Alabama. You can come on here and SAY you know, probably in hopes of persuading Fournette and company, but the truth is, you can't predict what Nick Saban is going to do, and neither can I.

Aside from the fact that Saban is "poised on the your border" with his recruiting lieutenants, you probably don't feel much different than people in Georgia or Tennessee do about Saban and Alabama. He raids those two states for players too. Then again, you had him, and you lost him, and that's an experience they haven't had. But I wish you might, for example, just get on the Volquest or AJC Football Forums, and you would see that your feelings about Alabama and Nick Saban aren't that unique.

I will say this about Saban, and I think it needs to be said. He is recruiting as hard right now, as far as I can see, as he ever has. He spoke to and met with the recruits this past weekend after laying the LSU game plan aside.

Saban right now is two behind Bear Bryant (four to six) in number of national championships won. He said when he came to Bama that he intended to do better than ANYone else had ever done there. As has been pointed out on ESPN, Saban can more or less snap his fingers at Alabama, and the powers that be provide him with whatever he calls for, so far as the football program is concerned.

I recall something said on WWL by a member of the Sugar Bowl Committee about thirty years ago. He said that nothing ever gets done about a football program until the people supporting it get tired of the situation and do something about it. That happened at Alabama in the mid-nineteen-fifties and in the first decade of the 21st century. Who knows what the future holds? As Wayne Huizenga said, "It is what it is."