Nick Saban sneakily feeds LSU rat poison after Tigers roster turnover

Nick Saban's college football coaching career is in the books, cementing himself as the GOAT of the profession and walking away from the Alabama Crimson Tide after yet another College Football Playoff berth. Now, he's wearing many hats, that of a College GameDay personality but, perhaps more intriguingly, that of a takesmith.

Admittedly, it makes a lot of sense for any college football fan or analyst to take credence in what Saban has to say about the sport, a given team, a player and so on. After all, whose opinion would be better respected than his? However, given that he's so closely removed from his time at Alabama, it's hard not to at least question whether or not he's working as a double agent.

Case in point, his latest comments about LSU Tigers. While he was once the head coach Baton Rouge once upon a time and won a national championship there, LSU has longer been among his biggest rivals in the SEC.

So when Saban revealed his 12-team College Football Playoff predictions and had LSU as the No. 11 seed before unpacking that further, expressing his belief in Jayden Daniels' successor, Garrett Nussmeier, and LSU's ability to find skill position players "falling off trees", it's fair for your mind to go toward arguably the coach's most famous quote -- you know, the rat poison:

"I'm trying to get our players to listen to me instead of listening to you guys. All that stuff you write about how good we are. ... It's like poison. It's like taking poison. Like rat poison."

Nick Saban hypes up LSU and it reeks of rat poison

Even as a former LSU head coach just as he's now a former Alabama head coach, Saban has already admitted that his pick of Georgia playing Texas in the SEC Championship Game was "reverse rat poison" meant to motivate the Crimson Tide. As such, is it really a stretch to say that he would look at a Bama rival and feed them the actual rat poison he'd once alluded to? To me, not at all.

For what it's worth, I actually agree wholly with Saban's assessment of LSU. Daniels was electric and Nussmeier is a different type of playmaker but he's a high-end playmaker in what should be a phenomenal offense yet again, especially behind one of the country's best offensive lines. Furthermore, the addition of former Mizzou defensive coordinator Blake Baker should lead to significant improvement on that side of the ball (there's really nowhere to go but up, but still).

Having said that, watching Saban navigate the media is already a fascinating exercise and we're just barely through Week 0. It's hard to know exactly which lens to view his comments through, especially when they're about a team that was a rival of his just eight-or-so months ago. But one thing that's without question is that those teams should definitely be wary of the rat poison just as Saban made sure his teams were in Tuscaloosa. And that's true even if it's coming from Saban himself.