Jumbo Package: Nick Saban hires former Houston Texans, Bill O’Brien assistant

Happy Friday, everyone. The Gym Tide are in Athens tonight to face off against 19th-ranked Georgia. The meet will be televised on SEC Network at 6pm CT. The softball team managed to hang on for a 5-4 win over Duke yesterday as Montana Fouts nearly ran out of gas late in the game. The lack of pitching depth is probably going to keep this team from doing much of anything, and you don’t even want to think about how the season would unfold if something happened to Fouts. Baseball opens up this afternoon against Richmond at 3pm CT, and will be available streaming on SEC Network+.

Kristy Curry’s squad just keeps on making history this season.

The win notched the 20th of the regular season which is the first time that the women’s program has accomplished that since the 1997-98 season. The win also gave the Tide nine regular season SEC wins which is the first time that has been accomplished since the 1997-98 season.

Congratulations to them. ESPN currently has the Tide as an 8 seed owing to a weak non-conference slate, but that’s still rough considering that they currently sit 22nd in the NET. Even worse, Alabama didn’t get a single AP vote last week. Talk about being disrespected and flying under the radar. Just keep winning and it will all work itself out.

Nick Saban added longtime NFL coach Ken Whisenhunt to his staff along with a couple of other folks.

The Massachusetts native played quarterback for Division II’s St. Anselm College in New Hampshire. His father, Brian, played college football at Brown University in the early 1990s with Bill O’Brien, who later hired John Aylward as an intern to his Houston Texans staff in 2018. Aylward became an offensive assistant working with the Texans’ wide receivers in 2019 and 2020.

O’Brien served as Alabama’s offensive coordinator the past two seasons. He went to the same Massachusetts high school (St. John’s Prep) as former Notre Dame coach Brian Kelly, who hired Aylward in 2021.

I bet Nick just wanted to have someone around with Bill O’Brien ties to piss a bunch of people off.

Traeshon Holden got himself kicked off the team at Oregon.

Former Alabama wide receiver Traeshon Holden was dismissed Wednesday by Oregon after being arrested earlier in the day.

Holden appears in Lane County, Oregon online jail records with three charges after a Wednesday morning arrest by Eugene police: menacing, unlawful use of a weapon and coercion. The menacing charge is a misdemeanor, while the other two charges are felonies.

There have been a very few who transferred out of Saban’s program and went on to succeed elsewhere, but many have also washed out.

We’ll see what the latest men’s basketball rankings look like after the weekend, but Purdue got smoked at Maryland last night.

Had Purdue lost at Maryland, at Northwestern and at Indiana and those three road games weren’t within a span of 12 days - all resulting in a court storming by the home team’s students - this perhaps doesn’t look so bad. Maybe fans don’t think the sky is falling.

But Purdue was 22-1 and the unanimous No. 1 team in the country and now the Boilermakers have lost three times in their last four games.

It’s frustrating.

And in a moment of irritability, Gillis briefly lost control of his emotions.

Gee, a top ranked team losing three on the road and frustrated by the officiating, in a sport that has built is audience off of upsets in the early rounds of the tournament? Imagine that.

Last, Ben Flanagan asks why Alabama charges so much for concessions.

AL.com’s Michael Casagrande reports, after reviewing financial documents filed to the NCAA from 11 of the 13 public SEC schools, Alabama’s total income topped the league. It reported $214.4 million in revenue for the fiscal year that covered July 2021-June 2022.

So why charge a fan $16 for a cheeseburger? Or $14 for a pretzel ($20 with the side of cheese and tax)? Or $10 for a soda? What about fans buying tickets to individual games and then paying these exorbitant concession prices to create a memory for themselves and their families who love the Tide? Or what about students paying for tuition and the $4 side of beer cheese as they pack their section to the top of Coleman and attempt create one of the best home atmospheres in the SEC?

As he notes, the cheeseburger in Auburn is a mere $7. Of course, he fails to account for the easy access to cattle over there. No telling what parts of the cow you’re getting in that one either.

That’s about it for today. Have a great weekend.

Roll Tide.