Really? Do you think he forgot his ship had a black box?

On gcaptain.com is a video showing the final movements of the Costa Concordia, together with a commentary by a different captain (Konrad).

Briefly: the engine room was flooded quickly after the first impact and they lost power to the main propeller, so the captain is controlling the ship with rudder only. He aims for the port but can't make it. He turns the ship sideways with the rudder which slows it more quickly until it is virtually stopped. Then he is able to use the bow thrusters (on emergency power - and they only work at low speed) to turn it right around. At that point the commentary speculates that the ship was taken by wind and current until it ran aground.

It seems to me that without power, there wasn't a lot of opportunity to do anything, never mind attempt to cover his A**. I gather also it is not easy to launch lifeboats from a ship under way, so it makes sense to delay abandon ship until it was stopped. I gather also that the final running aground at an angle, and subsequent listing, was a bad thing, but if the current or wind took it and he had no power, he might not have had much choice about that. It seems to me that being aground at least meant the ship didn't sink below the surface, so they had as long as they needed to evacuate.