Back in 2007, Alabama faced a crossroads. Mike Shula was fired with 1 game to go in the 2006 regular season. Then, interim Joe Kines took over to finish the year.

That offseason, it looked as if West Virginia coach Rich Rodriguez was a frontrunner for the job, but of course, we all know now that Nick Saban ended up taking the gig. The rest, as they say, is history.

Recently, Rodriguez looked back at that decision in a profile piece by ESPN’s Chris Low. He provided some valuable insight into his decision-making process:

“It’s like a lot of things. It got out there and got legs and maybe there’s an assumption that, ‘Of course you’re going to go to Alabama,’ ” Rodriguez said. “Maybe I could have had more foresight than I did, but at the time — and I know it sounds crazy now — we were in a better place at West Virginia than they were at Alabama. You could see that they had a plan and that Mal was on top of everything. They showed me pictures when we were in New York of everything they were going to do facility-wise on campus.

“They were going to take a step up, and obviously they got the right person to guide them in doing that.”

And, as RichRod pointed out, though the Alabama job was tempting, he couldn’t leave behind what he built at West Virginia:

“We were one bad game away from playing for the national title that very next year, so I knew how good we were going to be,” Rodriguez said. “Listen, it was still Alabama, and I was very interested. I made that very clear to Mal, but never even visited the campus. I told him I needed to go back to West Virginia before I made any decision.”

It’s hard to fault RichRod for the decision he made. Eventually, he ended up at Michigan before bouncing around a bit, so it worked out for him financially, as well. It’s just interesting to look back at that decision and all the ramifications. Read Low’s full profile here.