When the University of Alabama or Auburn University needs a football coach, speculation explodes. Five likely candidates. Who would be a home run?

Those first lists quickly narrow to a few names. And sometimes the speculation is spot on: The top choice of fans or message boards ends up with the job. And sometimes the choice comes out of the blue.

Everybody's watching, everybody's talking. It's all a lot of fun, as long as you're not the one on the hook for the pick or a reporter sweating the search.

Alas, none of that is true when university trustees are searching for a new president.

Those searches are about as suspenseful as watching paint dry.

Yet those are likely the most important decisions a board of trustees can make, one almost always keep secret with little to no chance given to faculty, public or students to speculate on whether the chosen one is a good fit.

Why this lesson on searches? Because University of Alabama President Judy Bonner has announced that she is stepping down from her job later this year.

Bonner is the first woman to hold the job. That she broke the glass ceiling in Tuscaloosa was in some ways a convenient decision more than a deliberate choice by UA trustees.

Bonner was named president in the wake of Guy Bailey's unexpected exit. Bailey, whom the board hired away from Texas Tech in 2012, resigned just weeks into the job citing the serious illness of his wife.

Bailey's bailout left the board with egg on its face, and it moved quickly to appoint Bonner, a known commodity and long-time UA administrator.

So the board's next choice for UA president will be the fourth person to have held the job in three years.

It's critical trustees get this one right.

Yet right now I hear no speculation from the small group of insiders at UA as to whom the next president might be. No one is listing names. There's no message-board chatter.

There is speculation that Chancellor Robert Witt has his personal short list of names, else Bonner would not have announced she is leaving.

Maybe he does. Maybe he doesn't.

But if he wants to get this choice right, there's only one logical name at the top of that list.

Condoleezza Rice.

I'm officially throwing her name out as the home run hire.

And why not?

She is an Alabama native - from Birmingham.

She has been a professor and high-level administrator at Stanford, one of the nation's elite universities.

And then there was her time as Secretary of State and the National Security Advisor.

She is a Republican, an advantage when you turn to a Republican Congress and a Republican Legislature for federal and state dollars to benefit UA.

And she is an avowed fan of Crimson Tide football. She even served on the first-ever national championship committee this fall, which put the first four teams in the first-ever national championship playoff. (Bama was one of the four, remember).

Now, I know some of you Democrats out there are not happy right now. But there are so few of you that I am going to move on.

I can't know what kind of president Rice might make. But from a PR perspective she would be a slam dunk, a home run, a Nick Saban kind of pick. That choice would put Rice and Bama squarely in the national spotlight.

And it would, of course, make history.

A university which once denied blacks the right to enroll, where George Wallace stood in the school house door to block black students from enrolling in 1963, would have hired its first African American president.

In a state that still struggles with race relations, that is still seen as a place where racial politics too often rule, Rice's hiring would be breathtaking.

I have no idea whether she is interested. I do know that about a decade ago, then-Gov. Bob Riley approached her to ask if she might be interested in the job of Auburn president. She said thanks but no thanks.

I have read recently that she might be interested in becoming president of the University of Texas.

How would she react if Gov. Robert Bentley and Witt hopped a plane and approached her about the UA job?

We won't know until they ask her.

That's what they should do.