[Stoney]

April 12, 2007
Does Saban know what he's in for?
Matt Hayes

It always comes back to the story of the brick. Doesn't matter who's preaching or pontificating, who's venting or fuming. It's the brick that begins and ends every coaching story at Alabama 25 years A.B. (After Bear).
Yet there's this nagging detail in the anecdote as it grows larger and looms heavier with every dissertation on the obstacles facing each new coach who follows legendary Paul "Bear" Bryant: It wasn't that big of a deal.
Hey, no self-respecting Alabama man can put up with a loss to Mississippi, especially on homecoming weekend. Bill Curry -- the coach in the barrel when the brick crashed through his office window nearly 20 years ago -- was lucky he didn't get worse.
"Strange things happen to coaches everywhere," Curry says. "That was the least of it at Alabama, I can assure you."
Which is why the brick itself was no big thing.
So it is here that we introduce Nick Saban, No. 8 A.B., and a guy who, frankly, doesn't give a flip what Alabama people think. And that's exactly what the tunnel-visioned, meddling, unrealistic, undying, unwavering, thisclose to the edge Tide Nation needs.
Someone to tell them to shut their yaps and hop on the ride.
"Nick's personality, the way he's wired," one of Saban's friends says, "he won't put up with all that crap."
As spring practice unfolds on the Capstone, a new era begins yet again in Tuscaloosa. Another coach has preached about championships, about returning the Tide to the nation's elite and reaching the bar The Bear cemented so high. They all talk a big game during the early rush of love, when bizarre and bewildering tales of the past are overlooked because, really, this time it will be different.
If only it were that easy.
This much we know: Nick Saban will win at Alabama. He's too good a coach not to. He will win a Southeastern Conference championship, maybe even a national title. But the issue isn't what goes on between the white lines -- it's the nonstop carnival of fan and booster intrusion outside them. It's draining and deflating, overbearing and overwhelming, and eventually it overruns anyone or anything in its path.
Only one coach A.B. has lasted more than four seasons -- one barely lasted four months. Some can talk about their time in Tuscaloosa, others can't -- or, in the case of recently fired Mike Shula, won't. Yet the insight and anecdotes gleaned from detailed conversations with former coaches and those close to the situation provide a clear and dangerous road map that Saban must navigate if he is to go where no other coach A.B. has gone.
"The people of this state are incredibly passionate about their football," Saban says. "I don't see how that can't be a good thing."
Let us show the way.

College football inspires passion -- it's a breeding ground for loopy, lunatic fans whose obsession not only carries this regional sport but also sustains and strengthens it year after year. Now take all of those typical crazies -- whose lives consist of the regular season, recruiting season, spring practice and four excruciatingly painful summer months of waiting -- and their combined energy powers no more than a light bulb compared with the nuclear output from the 24/7/365 Alabama fans.
Early on a Monday in 1997, two days after his team had lost to Kentucky for the second time in the history of the program, Mike DuBose was jogging around town in the dark to clear his head and refocus. It was 5 a.m. when he was flagged down by an elderly man.
"He had to have been in his late 70s," DuBose says.
The man proceeded to tell DuBose that Alabama fans didn't like losing. And they sure as hell didn't like losing to Kentucky, whose worth to SEC football is slightly more than "who cares?" -- and only because The Bear spent eight seasons in Lexington in the 1940s and '50s.
"When he was finished," DuBose says, "He told me, 'You should be in your office fixing what's wrong instead of fooling around out here.' "
It has taken more than six years for DuBose to open up about his four tumultuous seasons in Tuscaloosa, to embrace what he had and what he lost. He pauses for a moment while discussing the jogging story, stares into the clear spring sky on a peaceful day in Jackson, Miss. -- a lifetime removed from the madness that ended in 2000 -- and continues in a measured tone: "I played at Alabama. I was an assistant coach at Alabama. I don't think anyone has any idea what they're getting into until they sit in that big seat. Nick absolutely cannot understand the enormity of it."
Alabama football is more than fall Saturdays and tailgating, more than watching and dissecting games, more than arguing with your neighbor the Auburn fan. It's who you are and what you mean; it's what helped heal a fractured state after civil rights unrest in the 1960s.
All those championships The Bear won in the 1970s -- three national crowns and eight SEC titles -- gave a grieving, guarded state an identity again, something to be proud of and build upon, something to hold as one. But all of that became an anchor for the program, too. The Alabama coach is expected to be extremely visible in public -- to meet and greet, to reach the line that marks outgoing and step across it any chance he gets.
This is not a job for the socially weak or inept.
Enter Saban, the hard-working, butt-kicking, no-frills, curmudgeonly coach who lives for planning, practicing and playing the game. Of the coaches hired since The Bear retired after the 1982 season, Saban is the first who has absolutely no interest in glad-handing.
He is a guy who declined dinner with President Bush last year because training camp had begun for the Miami Dolphins and you'd better believe nothing -- nothing -- is more important than X's and O's and finding a way to get that "W." (At LSU, Saban had a standing rule that couldn't, under any circumstance, be broken: Players and coaches had 24 hours to talk about a previous game -- then they couldn't say another word about it.)
"The one thing you have to understand -- and this is going to be hard for Nick -- is when you're outside and visible, you're theirs," says Dennis Franchione, the Tide's coach in 2001 and 2002. "There are so many great things about coaching football at Alabama. You just have to understand and accept the other things."
Those "other things" have pushed away four coaches since The Bear retired -- Ray Perkins left for the NFL, Curry left for Kentucky, Gene Stallings was pushed out after seven seasons (he retired before he wanted to), and Franchione left for Texas A&M. Mike Price departed after four months under different circumstances ("questionable conduct" at a topless bar), and the two who didn't leave on their own -- former Tide players DuBose and Shula -- were fired after four seasons.
The specific reasons for being run off vary, but nearly every mitigating factor can be traced to access and control by fans and boosters. Among the lowlights: multiple death threats to members of more than one coach's family; boosters funneling money to recruits; a Board of Trustees member pressuring a coach to raffle off a cake on the back of an 18-wheeler to satisfy a longtime booster; another trustee forcing a coach -- two days before a game against a top five team -- to visit a cancer patient who wanted to meet the state's most important man.
"It's a given when you walk in those doors," one former coach says. "The Alabama coach is accessible to anyone in the state for the right price."
And sometimes, for no price at all. The joke goes something like this: Every Alabama fan has a camera and a pen -- and carries them at all times. This is not the ideal situation for Saban, a coach who -- and there's nothing wrong with this -- isn't the most engaging guy.
Franchione says he was signing 40 to 70 items a day, and it was worse during the season. Nothing says "I bleed Crimson" more than a personalized Christmas autograph. Pictures, books, clothes, Christmas ornaments; you name it, the coach signs it.
Coach, the Iron Bowl is this week -- don't forget to sign these 100 Christmas ornaments.
Price once hopped on a plane to speak to a booster group, and the plane was loaded with boxes of footballs that had to be signed before the landing. Before Franchione ever coached a game at Alabama, he played in a pro-am golf event and was paired with Tom Kite. After he and Kite stepped off the first tee box, the horde moved in. Over the next 18 holes, Franchione says he signed 50 items a hole. You do the math.
"Too many boosters feel as though if they give money, they have a say in what happens in the program," DuBose says. "Not just on the field but away from it at events, speaking engagements, golf tournaments, barbecues and the like. I gave this money ... when is coach coming?"
But fans and boosters aren't alone in their meddling. The administration has had its share of blunders over the years. Stallings never wanted to leave, but he didn't get along with former athletic director Bob Bockrath, who didn't hire Stallings and allowed others (boosters, fans) to influence the A.D.'s decision making.
So after winning 10 games in 1996 -- and four years after winning the school's seventh national title -- Stallings was forced out. Fans inundated Bockrath's fax machine with letters pleading for DuBose to be hired. So instead of performing due diligence in his search, instead of interviewing the best possible candidates, Bockrath capitulated and hired DuBose -- who now admits, "I wasn't anywhere near ready to be the coach at Alabama."
Bockrath, now assistant dean of athletics at a junior college in Arizona, declined to comment.
"Of course, I still wanted to coach," Stallings says. "I wasn't finished."
Despite what many believe, Franchione wasn't, either. He, too, was pushed away. The spring before his second and final season, sources say Franchione was offered a contract extension -- a 10-year, $11.5 million deal -- to keep him at the school through 2012.
But there was one problem: The deal included a clause that prevented Franchione from coaching (professional, college or high school) for the duration of the contract if he were to leave Alabama. In other words, he was coaching at Alabama or nowhere for 10 years.
Franchione declined to comment on the proposed contract extension, but according to sources, his representatives tried for six months to get Alabama to eliminate the clause. It was removed only after Franchione informed the school of Texas A&M's offer. Once Franchione left for A&M, he was vilified by Alabama fans, boosters and administration members as a coach who walked away from a program after pleading with his players to "hold the rope" through NCAA sanctions.
The problem is, the Tide administration wasn't securing that rope.

After years of botched contract negotiations -- DuBose and Shula were each awarded multimillion-dollar extensions the offseason before they were fired -- Alabama finally has gotten it right in spite of itself. Saban's eight-year, $32 million guaranteed contract forces the Tide not only to have patience but to protect Saban from outside influences, too.
"They want him there -- the powers that be need him there," Price says. "When they need you instead of you needing them, it's a whole different game. I'm not saying that's going to protect him from everything, but it will surely insulate him."
If it doesn't, then Saban always has Cedric Burns to run traffic. Burns has been part of the Tide program for years, and his official title is athletic relations coordinator. His job is rather simple: Take care of coach.
"If I needed gas in my car, Cedric got it," DuBose says. "If I needed my shoes shined, Cedric did it."
And if you wanted a pack of gum?
"He got it," says DuBose, adding a bit ominously, "You don't go to the store."
A couple of months after Saban was hired, the Birmingham News ran a story about the $2.9 million home he purchased in the posh Crown Pointe subdivision in Tuscaloosa. The story detailed the number of rooms, including a breakdown of bedrooms and baths, and how much the previous owner had made on the sale of the home.
So much for things being different this time around. The same thing happened to Curry shortly after he arrived in 1987.
"My wife is a strong, intelligent woman," Curry says. "She has a Ph.D.; she's not someone who is going to be intimidated. But she felt like our children were at risk. Those kinds of things just wear on you. Ninety-five percent of Alabama people are wonderful. The negative ones are throwing bricks or planting stories or doing whatever they can to make you uncomfortable. And when they want to make your life miserable, they work at it."
Forget about the brick. The mark it left doesn't even scratch the surface.




This comes from the Vanderbilt website.

[BamaGal4ever]

That came from the Vanderbilt website, huh. If their coaching staff spent half as much time on recruiting and preparation as the author of that article spent on gathering info on our previous coaches, they might be able to win some football games. I know one game they're gonna lose on Sept 8, 2007. Beware of Big Al, Mr. C!

[Stoney]

The most important thing I saw in the article "Saban will win the National Title" just as I have been predicting.

Well,
at least this insight is well drawn.
I can't help but feel that the demands of coaching at Miami, or even LSU were much different than Saben will encounter at Bama. His closed personality will serve him well.
The most important thing for Saben is winning, I think. If he does that, he will enjoy coaching at Alabama.

[Stoney]

Originally Posted by Crimson Knight

Well,
at least this insight is well drawn.
I can't help but feel that the demands of coaching at Miami, or even LSU were much different than Saben will encounter at Bama. His closed personality will serve him well.
The most important thing for Saben is winning, I think. If he does that, he will enjoy coaching at Alabama.

He has 40 million reasons to win... and he will win Vanderbilt already knows it and says he will bring home another national title.