How Nick Saban Went from 'Devil' to Hero
The search is always on to find the light in Nick Saban, to get a deeper understanding.
Sure, when he was the coach of the Miami Dolphins, the team sent out a memo (theoretically at his request) warning staff not to make small talk with him. But deep down, the humanity must be there. Right?
Despite all searching, he has always come across as the Darth Vader of college football anyway. But that's over with now.
Only one guy can wear the black hat, and at this point, that's Florida State coach Jimbo Fisher. The Seminoles are the new evil ones in college football, by perception at least. And that has led to a strange transformation in how Saban comes off. He's suddenly a superhero. He's the one guy people are counting on to figure out how to beat Florida State, which hasn't lost in nearly two years.
Last year, Fisher was the aw shucks guy who brought a team together with love. And quarterback Jameis Winston—until the sexual assault allegation surfaced—was playing the part of the selfless young anti-Johnny Football.
Not anymore. And there's no need to go through all that here. Nothing has changed except that Florida State just won't lose. Just won't. The 12-0 Seminoles don't seem to know how to lose and just keep barely beating mediocre teams.
What's really new is Saban. He might already be the best college football coach ever, but it feels as if he deserves a tribute after beating Auburn, 55-44, in the Iron Bowl. Alabama is No. 1 again and needs only a win over Missouri in the SEC title game Saturday, which is a given, to become one of the four teams in the first College Football Playoff.
Saban has started to look downright likable-ish. That's partly because of Florida State but also partly that his mechanical, inhuman grasp at perfection has had some failures. It's a vulnerability, I guess.
His relentless focus has gotten him through it, so now that looks like a good thing. You get used to it, depend on it, especially when it's going to be used for good.
It started at last year's Iron Bowl when he trotted out a backup kicker to try a game-winning field goal from, roughly, Mars. You remember: The kick was short, and Auburn ran it back along the Auburn sideline as Alabama players obliviously trotted to their own sideline thinking the play was over.
Alabama went on to lose to Oklahoma in the Sugar Bowl, too. And then quarterback AJ McCarron moved on to the NFL. And Saban was left to try to figure out the next step while the sport moved toward the hurry-up, spread offenses that were frustrating him.
He brought in Lane Kiffin to run the offense, and Kiffin's career has just about fully recovered now.
"All his issues come from something we're not asking him to do," Saban told me, and one other reporter, at the coaches convention in Indianapolis in January, commenting about the hire for the first time. Kiffin's problem has always been partly personality, but now Saban would take all the hits while Kiffin worked on coordinating an offense.
Then in October, after Alabama lost to Ole Miss, McCarron was on the radio in Tuscaloosa (Tide 99.1 FM) complaining about his former team's offensive predictability.
"I don't know if that's, y'know, Lane doing that, or if Coach Saban kind of put the handcuffs on Lane, like I've known Coach to do in the past on his offensive coordinator," McCarron said. "Like, We're going to be very bland and run this play and do this, and then we'll throw it on third down if we have to."
But Kiffin has helped to modernize Saban. And it's still funny to watch Saban snapping at him on the sideline when he wished Kiffin would have been more conservative.
Alabama has continued to improve all year, and when it scored 55 points over Auburn, while giving up 44, both numbers were testimony to Saban's willingness to adapt.
People will continue with the Saban-is-an-SOB theme, but it's time to drop that. Yes, it's true that when he left Michigan State for LSU, he sent a plane back for his assistants, and they didn't get on. They were fine to let him go. Yes, last year, then-Vanderbilt coach James Franklin famously called him Nicky Satan, and a few months later, one of Saban's former assistants, Tim Davis, called him "the devil himself."
I'll never forget the national championship game when Alabama rolled over Notre Dame two years ago, and Saban tried to address the media, including me, about his postgame demeanor.
"Whether I look it or not, I'm happy as hell," he said. And then he "smiled" as evidence, an operation that took at least three whole seconds, ending up mostly as a sneer.
Do a Google search, and you'll find that most every season someone has written a story asking whether Saban has changed. It was still just last year that he was barking at students, paying customers, for leaving games early, saying that they owed it to the players who do all the work.
The truth is, Saban is probably still that guy. Still searching for the humanity in him? I mentioned the convention in Indianapolis in January. Saban gave an hourlong speech that day to coaches. In it, he said that one time he was driving somewhere with his wife, and they saw one of her ex-boyfriends pumping gas.
Saban said he told her she was lucky to have made the right choice, or look where she'd be now. And, Saban said, she responded: "B------t. If I'd have married him, he'd be the head coach at the University of Alabama."
There is no point to tearing into him anymore. He doesn't need the distraction. There is a dragon to slay.
Greg Couch covers college football for Bleacher Report. He also writes for The New York Times and was formerly a scribe for FoxSports.com and the Chicago Sun-Times. Follow him on Twitter @gregcouch.
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