If The Hat Fits, Wear It

Early this year, Much Traveled Lou Saban—his real name is Louis H. Saban, but Much Traveled Lou, as he was long ago rechristened in newsprint, has pretty well taken over for that—strode to the front of a big, barren lecture room at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. He grabbed the front of the podium with his meaty left hand, stared at the assemblage of expectant young men before him and began speaking to them for the first time as their football coach. Suddenly, as if stricken, he asked, "Are these all the football players we got?" There were mumbles that indicated, well, yeah, Coach, this is pretty much it. And for a fleeting moment, the possibility loomed: Would Much Traveled Lou throw up his hands and hit the road? Again?

It was a genuine possibility. After all, Saban has had 18 jobs in 33 years, an average of 1.83333 years per position. Among the résumé entries, a fairly recent one at that, is the title of athletic director at the University of Cincinnati. For 19 days. Saban left that institution at halftime of an early-season game against Ohio University. Several days passed before anyone realized that Saban had left more than the game. He had left, period.

Last year Saban's title was president, New York Yankees. Sure, the Yankees are a baseball team, and Saban is all football. Still, is there any more prestigious title, save President, U.S. of A.? And Saban treats it as just another blip on his resume screen. In a switcheroo dazzling even for Much Traveled Lou, he left the Yankees to go to Central Florida, a struggling young school where nearly 13,000 of the 14,000 students are commuters.

Now obviously Saban's good buddy, George Steinbrenner, calls the shots for the Yankees, not the club's president, but there's no denying the Yanks are major league. Central Florida is something else again. It played football last year in the NCAA's Division II, where its record was 0-10. Says Saban gamely, "The relationship of talent to victories is deceiving." Well, that could be true. The Fighting Knights probably weren't as good as their record indicates. They were outscored 356-109. In four years of playing football, Central Florida has had one winning season, its first, when it was 6-2. That was with a volunteer coach. The nadir may have come last Nov. 6, when only 3,818 spectators showed up for a game against Carson-Newman. In the 50,000-seat Tangerine Bowl, they looked like the clean-up crew on a cigarette break.

Nevertheless, Central Florida aspires to big-time football: appearances in the Orange Bowl, foam fingers waving No. 1. Says Athletic Director Bill Peterson, "Florida State is already penciled in on our 1989 schedule." Thank heaven pencils have erasers. But what the heck, what better place for fantasy than in Mickey Mouse's shadow?

In fact, one of the first things Saban did after checking in at Central Florida on Jan. I was to take a gander at Walt Disney World, with Bob Allen, vice-president of the theme park, as his tour guide. Allen expressed the hope that Saban would return sometime for a more leisurely visit. Said Saban, "I will. I'm here to stay, my friend." And his fingers weren't crossed. But then, they never are. Saban has sworn at every stop on his itinerary that this is it, this is where he wants to stay. We're not talking about a guy who has had too many zip codes; we're talking about one who has had way too many. He knows it. "All these different jobs I've had do bother me," he says. "They bother the heck out of me. But everybody can't have the great resources of an Ohio State, a Penn State, an Oklahoma. The rest of us do the best we can at the job we can get."

Saban repeatedly paints himself as a victim. Steinbrenner, a man who knows something about hiring and firing and has been Saban's boss at both Tampa Downs and the Yankees (see chart, page 38, for Saban's itinerary), says the reason Saban leaves places is simple and understandable: People don't keep their word to him. If that's true, few men in history have been lied to more than Much Traveled Lou. But Steinbrenner insists, "The main point with Saban is, he has taken all this crap and kept his mouth shut. He's a man's man. If he were less of a man, he'd have gone public and said, 'These s.o.b.'s lied to me.' "

Steinbrenner's view is seconded by Bill Trout, an assistant coach at the University of Miami, who was at that school during Saban's touch-and-go tenure in 1977-78. "He's very idealistic," says Trout, "a man of high integrity who has felt, at times, that he's been betrayed. Whatever commitments they made to him at Central Florida, they'd better keep." And Allan Phipps, president of the Denver Broncos when Saban was with them, says, "It looks to me as if he's always striving for excellence and can't ever seem to find it where he is."

Maybe. Yet anyone who has taken the trouble to bring Saban's résumé home to read over a long weekend sees a mix of bad choices, bad luck, bad timing. His is a mediocre record, all in all, with two flashes of brilliance—oddly enough, with the same team. As head coach of the Buffalo Bills from 1962 to 1965, Saban built an outstanding football machine that won the old AFL championship in '64 and '65. He quit because Owner Ralph Wilson offered him only a one-year verbal contract for the '66 season and cut back his responsibilities. Wilson says today that Saban left Buffalo because "he wanted to return to college coaching."

Six years later, largely at the urging of Steinbrenner, Wilson rehired Saban, and again he was successful, restructuring a battered program and getting the Bills to the NFL playoffs in 1974. But Wilson started tampering, again taking away chunks of Saban's responsibilities, including negotiating contracts with the players. Saban left Buffalo in huff No. 2. Wilson says the reason Saban departed was that he again wanted to return to college coaching.