University of Alabama - Saban: the making of a coach

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ALSO BY MONTE BURKE

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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition August 2015

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Jacket design by Rick Pracher

Jacket photograph Todd Kirkland/Icon SMI/Corbis

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Burke, Monte.

Saban : the making of a coach / Monte Burke.

pagescm

Includes bibliographical references.

1.Saban, Nick.2.Football coachesUnited StatesBiography. 3.University of AlabamaFootballHistory.I.Title.

GV939.S35B872015

796.332092dc232015018182

ISBN 978-1-4767-8993-4

ISBN 978-1-4767-8995-8 (ebook)

To Lucia Shook

Football is not Hamlet . Its not tragedy. It should be fun.

Nick Saban

What a piece of work is a man!

William Shakespeare, Hamlet

O n the first morning of 2007, as sleet fell from a dull sky, Mal Moore, the athletic director at the University of Alabama, hustled onto the tarmac at Tuscaloosa Regional Airport. With one last glance over his shoulder, he ducked his head and boarded an airplane bound for South Florida. The plane was not owned by the universityit had been loaned to him by an Alabama booster and Huntsville defense contractor named Farid Rafiee. Moore was going to great lengths to keep this trip a secret. A little more than a month earlier he had fired Mike Shula, the son of a coaching legend, and the University of Alabamas fourth football coach in seven very mediocre years. Thanks to flight trackers on the Internet, Moores every move had been followed ever since as he searchedin vain, to that pointfor a new head coach.

This trip had to remain clandestine. Moore was after the biggest prize in the game. A man named Nick Saban. News of a meeting with him would cause, as Moore put it, quite a ruckus. The main reason for that: Saban, who was then the head coach of the National Football Leagues Miami Dolphins, had publicly denied any interest in the Alabama job, over and over and over.

Moore was flying somewhat blind. He did not have an appointment set up with Saban. The Dolphins coach had refused to take his calls.

Mal Moore had a down-home manner about him. He mumbled a bit when he talked, and had the lumbering body of an ex-football player. Hed been the backup quarterback on Alabamas national championship team in 1961 under Paul Bear Bryant, one of the most successful coaches in the history of football and a man who had attained divine status within the state long before his death in 1983. Moore had parlayed that brush with Bryants robe into his current job, one that he now was in jeopardy of losing.

Moore became Alabamas athletic director in 1999. The first football coach during his tenure was Mike DuBose, who was also a former Alabama player. During his time at Alabama, Dubose posted a 24-23 record, was accused of sexually harassing a secretary, and his program underwent a recruiting scandal that led to crippling NCAA sanctions. DuBoses successor, hired by Moore, was a promising coach named Dennis Franchione. He led the Crimson Tide to two consecutive winning seasons but bolted with a ten-year, $15 million contract on the table because he felt hamstrung by the NCAA sanctions. Moore replaced him with a man named Mike Price, who was fired before even coaching a single game because of a rowdy trip to a strip club, after which he may or may not have spent the night with a stripper named Destiny. Then came Shula, who had the right pedigreehed been an Alabama quarterback and had that football-famous last name. But Shula never came close to living up to his father, Dons, legacy, and he appeared overwhelmed as the head coach, running the football program in a sloppy manner.

In those seven years, the Alabama football teamwinner of twelve national titles at the time and, formerly, a perennial contender for said titles, and the source of much pride and meaning in the football-mad statehad spiraled downward into, at best, irrelevancy on the national stage. At worst, it had become college footballs horror show.

For years, Moore had relied on Alabamas name and past glory to acquire head coaches. After firing Shula, though, he found himself in a bind. The shine had worn off. Suddenly, the Alabama job was one that no coach of any real stature seemed to want to touch. Moore had been turned down by Steve Spurrier, the cheeky head coach at South Carolina, a football program that didnt come close to Alabama in terms of pedigree. Moore had offered the job to Rich Rodriguez, a young, up-and-coming coach at West Virginia, and believed that he had accepted it. As Moore was working out the final details of the contract, he was blindsided by Rodriguez, who suddenly changed his mind and announced that he was staying at West Virginia. In the end, Moore appeared to have been merely played by the West Virginia coach for a raise and an extension.

The bungled coach search had earned Moore a new nickname within Alabama football circles. They called him Malfunction Moore.

Now Moore was attempting to woo the fifty-five-year-old Saban, who had been a master as a college head coach, reviving three different programs and winning the 2003 national title at his last stop on that level, with Louisiana State University. Saban had left the college game after the 2004 season to take his first head-coaching job in the NFL. In two seasons with the Dolphins, hed posted a less-than-mediocre 15-17 record. But his reputation as a college coach still burned brightly, and his name came up anytime a major college program needed a new head coach.

Saban, though, appeared to be staying put. The Miami media horde had persistently asked him about the coaching vacancy at Alabama. Saban had begun to get testy. At a press conference just ten days before Moore arrived in Miami, hed declared, rather definitively: I guess I have to say it. Im not going to be the Alabama coach.

At this point, Moore had no other viable options left. His trip to South Florida was all-or-nothing. He knew that his job was on the line. I told the pilots when they dropped me off in Miami that if I didnt come back to this plane with Nick Saban, they should go on and take me to Cuba, he said.