For Nick Saban, The Process Finally Has an End in Sight

The process that Nick Saban often speaks of leaves many confused. What is this process? A secret formula for success? A step-by-step guide? A method of merging recruits and coaching?

Quite simply, Nick Saban's process is laying out the goal of winning every game and getting the players to buy into not only that goal, but doing the things necessary to do it, things that don't make headlines. Those are things like lifting weights till you're sure your muscles will pop, respecting yourself, your team, your school and the rules, working to get better, even after winning, and more.

Nick's process is far too long and complicated to describe it all here, but at least now, if you were in the fog about it, you have little background on it. In its simplest form, it's dedicating yourself to become the best, to become unbeatable, and to dominate your opponents.

That process did help LSU win a national championship, but it was not a perfect season, and the process didn't complete the ultimate goal.

Nick Saban is 55 years old, but he's never seen the process completed. He's been teaching it, living it, and tweaking it for most of his life, and it's the single thing he may be best known for among the other coaches in football.

But that isn't Nick Saban's process he's teaching; it's Nick Saban Sr.'s.

Alabama's Nick Saban is the man he is today because of the man who raised him. Nick Jr. wasn't the biggest kid to play football, he wasn't the fastest, and he was of course the kid under the closest scrutiny.

He saw quickly he would have to work harder, be smarter, and exploit the weaknesses in his opponents to compete. Though smart enough to see that for himself, it was moulded into his being by his father as well.

When Nick's father gathered up some second hand uniforms an old, used school bus to collect players and get them to practice from the surrounding towns and hills in West Virginia, Nick Sr. started a process that took him only three years to complete.

Though he desperately wanted a youth football team in that area, a Pop Warner Team to be exact, it was Saban Sr.'s plan to be only the committee head, but when the college boys who were supposed to coach never showed up, he became the coach.

Not knowing coaching was not a problem for Saban Sr. There was plenty of time for him and his first team to learn together. That first year they were winless, but both learned much from the experience.

Saban Sr. saw conditioning as a key, and that next year they went 5-5 and saw some of the results from their hard work start to pay off. He and his young team also grew smarter and found ways to not only find weaknesses in opposing teams, but exploit them.

In only his third year, Saban Sr. got his boys to buy into the idea that they could not just win every game, but dominate them if they worked together as a team and built the strongest bodies and minds by learning the right nuances of the game as individuals.

That third year, they not only won every game, but also dominated them. Not a single team scored against them that entire season.

His father went on to win 39 straight games and has the home field named after him. Nick Jr. saw the impact his father had not only on the football success of these young boys, but the success they gained by learning and living by this process in all aspects of their life.

For most all the boys on that team, it was easy to buy into that system. In the coal country hills of West Virginia, life was hard, and the only thing these boys could do in most cases was to dream of something bigger and better in their future.

Nick Jr. is the perfect example of such a dreamer. He was, for all accounts, a boy with very limited prospects in life. He was smart, though not big, and he was athletic, but prospects of success in the hills of West Virginia were few and far between.

Through living his father's process, Nick earned a scholarship and a college degree, and soon earned a coach's job. Other boys that Nick Sr. influenced have achieved success in their lives too, all because of buying into a dream and seeing the rewards that come from it.

Nick's Kids is Saban and his wife Terry's other attempt to emulate his father. That charity reaches out and helps deserving young kids to accomplish things they otherwise couldn't without Nick and Terry Saban's help. 

The epitaph on Nick Saban Sr.'s headstone says it all: "No man stands so tall as when he stoops to help a child."

Nick was raised with the belief that achieving your own goals mean little if you don't help others achieve theirs along the way too.

He's certainly helped many of this year's team players achieve much, and a crystal ball would certainly help the long suffering Alabama Nation achieve a dream as well.

In leading Alabama to another long overdue National Championship, Nick Saban is not trying to become another Gene Stallings or Bear Bryant, he's trying to stay worthy of the name that he inherited, Nick Saban, to have that same perfect season his father had and to help others achieve their own dreams.

For Nick Saban Jr., the completion of the process is now in sight for the first time.