- [Narrator] Nick Saban's record number of championships
is so blinding, there's a game college football fans play.
If you plucked a man who's won seven national titles
and dropped him at one of the sport's worst programs,
could he still win it all?
This is a misunderstanding of why Saban
is the best at what he does.
Sure, if Nick was the head coach at New Mexico State,
they'd probably be pretty damn good
by New Mexico State standards.
Just like Toledo, Saban's first head coaching job
for a single season in 1990.
But Saban doesn't conjure wins.
He's not a warlock, we think,
and like any other coach,
doesn't possess a mythical ability to land championships
without the mandatory resources,
namely good football players and lots of money.
How he manages those things so effectively and ruthlessly.
Now that is some kind of magic.
(mystical music)
When LSU fired head coach Gerry DiNardo in 1999,
boosters fans and even the Tigers own athletic director
and chancellor couldn't decide on a replacement.
Out of ideas, LSU called on outside head hunters
with NFL connections to fix a program
in decades long disrepair.
Their suggestion, Nick Saban,
the dour head coach of Michigan State.
As a former NFL assistant under Jerry Glanville
and a close friend of Bill Belichick,
Saban had plenty of fans in league circles.
And just like that, LSU fell ass-backwards
into the greatest college football coach in history.
Oh, that LSU chancellor's name was Mark Emmert
and later on he became president of the entire NCAA,
which explains so much.
But Saban was the stoic son of a gas station owner
in West Virginia's coal country,
raised to ignore success and focus purely on the work.
The foundation of what would become Saban's famous process.
His personality was cold.
He wasn't a native of Louisiana and he lacked
the kind of gregarious evangelical personality
popular were title winning head coaches of the day.
But if you're thinking that doesn't sound
out of the ordinary that a hard ass outsider
takes over a national football brand,
we've heard that story.
Yeah, that's the point.
Nick Saban made that move normal.
From the moment he became a coach,
Saban sought college jobs
that successively increased his odds
at landing the best players in recruiting.
The Spartans had just finished nine and two
and the ever career minded Saban
was convinced he'd hit the ceiling
of what East Lansing could offer.
He jumped at the chance to go to LSU,
formerly a national power,
then lost in the sports scratch and dent pile.
Specifically because in 1999,
Louisiana yielded the most NFL players per capita.
Saban's work in Baton Rouge would define his reputation.
He took a resource rich program,
suffering logistics and leadership concerns,
and then micromanaged those problems out of existence.
He also pushed LSU to spend money
on facilities, on non-football staffers
to help with conditioning and academics,
and on assistant coaches.
At LSU, Saban assembled a lineup of elite recruiters,
strength and conditioning assistance,
and future head coaches.
As a result, the Tigers won a national championship
in January of 2004, ending decades of irrelevance.
And a culture once defined by regionality,
tradition, and cronyism,
Saban professionalized every aspect
of program management he could,
which made it inevitable that he tried
to apply his process to the professional ranks.
And he failed.
The NFL is very, very different from college football,
especially if you require total fealty
from your labor force and unilateral control
from your stakeholders in order to deliver success.
Saban doubled his salary
and earned a five year deal from Miami,
but couldn't mastermind every aspect of the dolphins
and thus, according to him,
couldn't implement that famous process.
There's a limit to everything in the NFL,
salary caps, meeting times, free agency windows,
you name it.
Demanding extra for millionaires in the league
is a lot more like requesting,
which is a problem for someone
convinced that outworking the opposition
is the fastest way to success.
So while it's possible Saban's football bonafides
could have eventually translated to NFL success
once he felt like he wasn't capable
of implementing his ideology,
he wasn't interested in waiting around.
Okay, so now you're probably thinking
well, if the NFL doesn't allow for despots,
what about Bill Belichick?
It's a good question.
Belichick is the reason Saban paused his college career
after that one season as head coach of Toledo.
Saban left the Rockets to work as defensive coordinator
for the Browns under Belichick.
So what's the difference?
Ownership for one.
Thanks to a strong relationship with his boss,
Belichick was able to rest the total control in New England
that Saban desired from the Dolphins.
It also hurt that Saban's process shtick
did not work with veteran pros.
He showed them no empathy, and in turn they hated him.
They taunted him.
They played pranks on him.
While he's equally humorous,
Belichick is much more well-versed
in how to treat and motivate pros.
Also, having Tom Brady police the locker room for you
is a big help.
So just think of the cop Drew Brees
could have been for Nick's dolphins.
According to Saban himself, Brees, a free agent in 2006
who had undergone reconstructive surgery
on his right shoulder months prior
was failed by a Dolphins team physician
who reported directly to ownership.
But Brees was healthy enough to be coveted
by multiple teams in free agency and landed in New Orleans.
So instead of a legendary record breaking Super Bowl MVP,
Saban ended up with veteran Daunte Culpepper
and a sub .500 record as an NFL head coach.
Saban has since admitted that he wanted out
the moment the Brees deal fell apart
and it's kind of hard to blame him.
Luckily for him, college football's Tiffany program
was in dire need of a new dictator
and willing to spend subserviently
for as much and as long as it would take to return to glory.
A reeling Alabama landed a wounded Saban
from the pros at the end of 2006
and pretty much everyone expected success.
After all, Saban had knocked a rust off of LSU
and built a national champion.
And if you thought frustrated boosters in Louisiana
were eager to buy their way to success,
buddy, welcome to Tuscaloosa.
This was the ultimate mess to micromanage.
Alabama suffered from way, way too many cooks
in the booster kitchen and noise around the program.
When Saban arrived in Tuscaloosa,
his initial move was to send a message to every booster,
former player, athletic department staff,
or anyone else who fancied themselves
part of the crimson tide universe.
From now on, Saban was the tip of the spear.
Bama finished seven and six in his 2007 debut.
By January of 2010, Alabama
was undefeated national champions.
Saban had built another championship program
without any changes to the process
or any adjustments from his time with the Dolphins.
Alabama's unlimited desire for dominance
matched their deep pockets.
After a three loss hangover in 2010,
Alabama won back-to-back national titles in 11 and 12.
Off the field, Bama consistently recruited the best players
in the country by pouring extra staff
and insane hours into evaluation.
Then they developed as many of those players
as possible into NFL draft picks
with a conditioning program that mirrored the pros.
The frequency and consistency at which this occurred
turned recruiting the sport inside of college football
into something of a moot point.
Rather than battle above or below the table,
Saban now a four-time national title winner
could simply point to a top prospect weighing the tide
against any other program
to Bama's cavalcade of Saban developed players in the NFL
at any position.
On the field,
Alabama didn't look like the work of a chess master.
It was like playing a game of checkers against a bulldozer.
Bama's defense smothered opponents
with their size and strength,
and a heavily run-based offense, shortened games,
and reduced risk.
But college football is notorious
for its sudden evolutions
and critics were quick to pounce
on Saban's on-field scheme as dated,
specifically when a young dual threat quarterback
named Cam Newton was able to exploit the tide defense
in route to rival Auburn winning a national title in 2010.
At the time, Newton was considered a one-off
generational talent, the thing you really couldn't stop,
but not any kind of indicator of the future
until a mobile, fast Texas A&M quarterback
named Johnny Manziel Upset the tide in 2012
for Bama's only loss of that season.
Then Ole Miss recreated that upset of the tide in 2014.
In all of these upsets,
Bama's normally terrifying defenses looked slow, too big,
and out-schemed against mobile quarterbacks.
In September of 2015, Alabama lost to Ole Miss
for the second time in two years.
Stunned, journalists declared the Saban dynasty
was arriving at its end.
This was maybe one of the worst forecasts
in the sport's history.
To start, the upset itself was bizarre, fluky,
and happened early in the season
when Alabama was still rotating quarterbacks
in a rare instance of personnel issues.
Bama committed five turnovers in that game
and also, insanely unlikely shit like this happened.
Yeah, he ran it all the way in.
I mean, even Nick Saban can't out-coach a helmet doink.
But you know how this ends
and it's not with the death of a dynasty.
Alabama won every game for the rest of that 2015 season,
including seven ranked opponents
and beating Clemson for another national title.
From 2015 to 21,
Alabama made the College Football Playoff Championship game
six out of seven times, winning three more titles
and cementing Saban's legacy as the greatest ever.
So how did the media misdiagnose
the most prominent program in the sport again?
Because while people recognize the traits of Saban,
they don't understand him.
And maybe because of his monolithic image,
they never seem to expect him to change.
To be fair, Saban never had to change this much,
but he did, evolving his defense to become quicker
and more adaptive to mobile quarterback play
and overhauling the Tide's bulldozer offensive philosophy
to join and then beat the trend of tempo and space.
Saban hired former USC head coach Lane Kiffin
as his offensive coordinator,
setting in motion a trend of fired head coaches
rehabbing their careers as tide assistants.
Saban, firmly entrenched as supreme leader
bucked the market trend
by bringing in the most experienced
and talented coaches possible,
usually former head coaches of major rivals
or even NFL teams.
And adhering them to the Bama culture,
not the other way around.
This flew in the face of conventional wisdom
about coaching staffs.
The idea of hiring potential usurpers
instead of promoting a loyal underling,
seemed to defy the Saban mythos of control.
But much like Saban's record of success for players,
the Crimson Tide coaching staff
became a launching pad for second-chance jobs,
and big ones at that.
Bama's run of national titles in the late 2010s,
cemented the program as the best in college football,
and it did so by leaning
into what other successful programs
consider to be a disruption.
Saban's control, that famous process never changed
because to Saban it's not how a thing looks,
it's how it operates,
and most importantly how it doesn't react to change
until it needs to.
That's the secret to Alabama,
a relentless desire to reduce uncertainty,
reduce emotional swings from young players
too high after wins and too low after losses,
reduce championship hangovers by fostering a culture
of brutal internal competition,
reduce transitions by creating an internal language
that doesn't change even when the leadership does.
As he's adapted, Saban is no less a totalitarian,
but where he deserves credit
and where he excels above his peers
is the ability to create consistency
through periods of tremendous fundamental change
in the sport of college football.
In 2022, we publicly campaigned for Bama's boosters
to meet the demand of college football's next big change,
paying players via name, image, and likeness.
He's already factoring in a potential issue
and one that vexed him in the NFL, increased player agency
into the future of his system.
This is why he's misunderstood.
He isn't rigid to change.
He's rigid in how it will be received, processed,
and the effect on his system neutralized.
All right, thanks for watching.
Be sure to like and subscribe to Secret Base
if you're interested in more college football videos,
check those out.
And also special thanks to the authors
of these Nick Saban books
you should definitely check out.