Some people claim it is a problem that many others treat politics like sports, but there are many ways in which doing so would be an improvement. That includes moving on from elderly leaders who have lost a step.
College football legend Nick Saban retired on Wednesday from his position as the head coach of Alabama at 72. He was still one of the best coaches in the entire country, leading Alabama to a 12-2 record and College Football Playoff appearance in his 17th and final season. At the NFL level, the Seattle Seahawks forced 72-year-old Pete Carroll into retiring as their head coach and moving into an advisory role after the team had declined from a regular championship contender to a fringe playoff team over the past few years.
On Thursday, the New England Patriots made a similar decision with Bill Belichick, the 71-year-old coach who is just 15 wins away from being the winningest coach of all time. The Patriots had fallen off thanks in part to Belichick’s personnel decisions. You could make the case that Belichick and Saban are the best at their respective levels of football and that Carroll was the best coach to succeed in both college and the NFL, and yet, all three are now gone, with only Belichick a candidate to continue coaching elsewhere.
Saban had finally decided he had accomplished enough and that it was time for him to go. Seattle and New England made those decisions for their respective legends after disappointing declines and will opt to go with younger, fresher candidates.
Compare that with the two main political parties letting even older men run them into the ground, and you could see how sports has the edge on politics.
Former President Donald Trump, 77, has been responsible for GOP election losses in the last three major seasons — 2018, 2020, and 2022. He has clearly lost a step and spent the last year of his term getting pushed around by the public health bureaucracy. President Joe Biden, 81, is a career mediocrity who lost his previous two campaigns for the presidency before finally slipping into the White House. He has since run the country into the ground and overseen multiple global disasters.
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Biden and Trump are considerably older than those three coaches and considerably worse at their jobs. Both parties and the country would be far better off if they moved on with younger, fresher candidates, as Seattle and New England plan to do, or if both men realized they were past their primes and should retire, as Saban, who could still be a top-five coach right now, decided to do.
Evidently, sports organizations care more about winning than our two political parties. Perhaps that should help explain the state of the country.