Rece Davis tells inside story of Alabama's hiring of Mike Shula, why it bothers him to this day

The recent news that Scott Frost was fired at Nebraska caused Rece Davis to think back to the Mike Shula situation at Alabama. The ESPN analyst remembered how the Crimson Tide came to hire Shula over Sylvester Croom and why he feels bad for how things ended for both Shula and Frost.

Shula was hired in 2003 at his alma mater, a program in great turmoil at the time. Alabama had been hammered by NCAA sanctions that would make it difficult to stay competitive over the next few seasons. As Davis explained recently on the College GameDay podcast, the Crimson Tide didn’t believe they would get out of that hole until the next coaching hire (which would ultimately be Nick Saban) and Shula was essentially doomed from the start.

“Alabama didn’t hire Sylvester Croom largely because they felt like the program was in such a horrible state with all of the NCAA investigations and sanctions,” Davis said. “They weren’t sure anybody could get through that and they felt like it wasn’t going to be the coach they hired then. It was going to be the next one. As it turned out, the next one after that was Nick Saban. Right or wrong, you can criticize that.

“I didn’t agree with the decision. I actually thought they should have hired Sylvester Croom when they hired Mike Shula. But that was one of the reasons. Sylvester had a closer tie to the university than Shula did. Shula played there. He didn’t have the same type of relationships personally there. They didn’t want to jeopardize that by not hiring him.”

Mike Shula went on to deliver just one winning season at Alabama, compiling a 26-23 record across four years before being fired at the end of 2006. It wasn’t quite as bad as Frost’s 16-31 record in Lincoln, but Davis feels sympathy for both that they weren’t able to deliver at a place where they had so much history.

“I always feel badly when it goes awry at your alma mater because college years — and especially a college career like Scott Frost had — is such an important part of people’s lives,” Davis said. “To have that changed, altered and tainted a little bit is sad to me.”