Greetings from the sports desk located somewhere below decks of the Good Pirate Ship RedState. Sammy the Shark and Karl the Kraken are outside getting in some laps. However, given that going into today’s (January 11) schedule, Seattle is riding a seven-game winning streak while San José has lost 12 straight games, they’re decidedly swimming in different directions. It still leaves me handling the reporting duties at the moment.

We start with football, which, as Brad Slager noted earlier in January, is the unquestioned top dog of television viewing across the land. That said, given how the Michigan Wolverines mauled the Washington Huskies en route to winning the 2024 college football championship, perhaps master mustelidae would be preferable phrasing. But we’re getting off track here.

With the NFL playoffs starting this Saturday, this week marks the annual ritual of underperforming non-playoff teams unloading their head coach in search of the next sucker … er, curer of all that ails any given franchise. Thus far, the Atlanta Falcons, Washington Commanders, and Tennessee Titans have all placed want ads. The Seattle Seahawks have moved Pete Carroll into an “advisory” position, which one suspects primarily consists of learning from previous missteps by advising against throwing the ball when you’re on the other team’s one-yard line in the Super Bowl, and you have Marshawn Lynch in the backfield. Now, the New England Patriots and Bill Belichick have agreed to part ways, with Belichick free to pursue a position elsewhere.

While Belichick’s unimpeachable résumé — six Super Bowl wins and nine AFC championships — speaks for itself, twin clouds will always hang over his accomplishments. One is the obvious factor of how much of his success stemmed from his coaching acumen as measured against how much was rooted in having Tom Brady at quarterback. The other is a fusion of Spygate and Deflategate — in less cutesy terms, blatant organizational cheating. While Belichick is unwilling to hang it up, there is little in his pre-and post-Brady eras to indicate he is the one able to turn any currently struggling NFL franchise around unless he somehow nabs the next Tom Brady, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, in the 2024 NFL Draft. Still, one imagines someone will give him a shot.

In the college ranks, an opening no one saw coming is in the thriving metropolis of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where Nick Saban surprised one and all this week by announcing he’s going fishing for trout as opposed to fishing for an additional national championship or more at the University of Alabama. Saban doesn’t leave a hard act to follow. Try impossible. In 28 years as a head football coach in college with four different schools, Saban never had a losing record on the field. He won seven championships and 11 SEC titles. Every college football season started for decades with two goals: be Alabama or beat Alabama. The latter seldom transpired.

Who the next head coaches will be for the New England Patriots and Alabama Crimson Tide remains to be seen. In both cases, they’d better have skin thickness that makes battleship armor seem like Rolo wrappers.