"For better or worse, these awards are about the coach who has surpassed expectations. Never mind the coach who was saddled with the highest of expectations -- like, say, a preseason No. 1 ranking -- and actually met them, or the coach who had to rebuild and refocus a locker room after winning a national championship the year before. Are we to believe that one is more difficult than the other? And if we are, which is it? Because there’s certainly less pressure when scaling the mountaintop than there is trying to stay atop it."
http://www.espn.com/blog/sec/post/_/...year-candidate
This speaks to your point, Wavington: "Now this is the part where someone usually argues to look at the talent in that locker room, to see the litany of future NFL players on Saban’s roster and compare it to other less endowed programs having success.... who do you think recruited those players? And, more importantly, who do you think developed them? Besides, if talent was everything, we wouldn’t be entering a bowl season absent Texas, Notre Dame and Oregon. Tennessee would have run the table in the SEC East on talent alone, rather than finish 8-4 with losses to South Carolina and Vanderbilt."
We overvalue flash in the plan flukes. It's the nature of single year awards, I think. It's why Kobe doesn't have as many MVP awards as he should. Or why BB doesn't have as many COTY as he should.
