I find it hard to believe that Malzahn would be on the hot seat so quickly, even with another loss to Bama. I think everyone (including barners) could see through the ruse of Chizik's tenure, but I think Gus will only go down quickly if more opponents than just Bama find a way to shut down his offense. Until Saban departs, AU will have a difficult time finding quality replacements that want to share this state with us.
Malzahn being on the hotseat with another mediocre year wouldn't necessarily be deserving, but that's not necessarily the point. The winds of change sweep very quickly across the Plains -- see Dye, Bowden, Tuberville, and Chizik -- and valid or not, the expectations they have placed upon them right now are enormous. With another middling year, viewed through the context of those expectations, and another loss to 'Bama, it's going to get very restless down there, especially if 'Bama continues to hum along under Saban. Again, doesn't necessarily make it right, but if Malzahn ends up 9-4 this year with a loss to 'Bama, he will have a lot on the line come 2016. As obsessed as that entire ecosystem is with Alabama, their program tends to do crazy things when they don't have the perception that they are either ahead of 'Bama (i.e. 2000-2006), or somehow gaining on 'Bama (which they have been largely telling themselves since January 2009, with the notable exception of a few months in the fall of 2012).
I wonder if Ray Perkins would have 1 or 2 good years left in him??
I know you're kidding around with that, but for all of the hatred that was lodged against Perkins, having someone like him around wouldn't be the worst thing. '84 aside -- which honestly was just as much Bryant's blame as it was Perkins' -- Perkins recruited really well and put very good teams on the field in '85 and, especially, in '86. His problem was just that he couldn't deliver in '86 to a level commensurate with the talent he had on hand, and he decided to bail after falling short. Had that '86 team lived up to expectations and potential, we might even win a national title that year, and Perkins stays on for another decade. Instead, we fell short, he felt like he had done as much as he could in Tuscaloosa, and he headed to Tampa. Not the outcome that everyone hoped for in January of '83 when we hired him, of course, but Lord knows you can do much worse (see Curry, Dubose, Price, Shula, etc.).
The good news, at least, is that if we have to make a replacement hire in the reasonably foreseeable future, the program should be in very strong standing, and will be in a far, far better place than it was when Bryant turned over the reins to Perkins. Our head coaching transfer should be much more analogous to, say, Saban-to-Miles at LSU or Tressel-to-Meyer at Ohio State. Nobody wanted to think it, muchless say it, at the time (and many still don't), but the UA program had declined pretty noticeably in the last couple of years under Bryant, and Perkins inherited the job with quite a bit of work to do. We should not have near that same dynamic should we have to make a replacement hire for Saban in the next year or two.
