published on May 25, 2024 in gacor

Soul food, Italian suits and hard truths: What its like to be recruited by Nick Saban

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — “The Process” is a catch-all term for everything Nick Saban does inside his program and all the ways he wins at Alabama, his home for six of his seven national championships. It is systemic in the way it develops players, molding teens into future pros while teaching them how to be a singular piece of a larger puzzle.

But The Process doesn’t work if Saban doesn’t recruit — and reel in — the right players, and no one has done that as well and as consistently as the 70-year-old coach. So his message hasn’t wavered in the three-plus decades he’s been a head college football coach. He hasn’t changed the way he connects with prospects. He hasn’t promised anything he can’t deliver.

“That’s the way we’ve always done it,” Saban tells The Athletic. “My approach has always focused on development. There are a lot of people — and I think it’s society, the internet, the way people are raised now — everybody’s always worried about outcomes. And, really, the key to being successful is being able to focus on what you need to do to get the outcome. There’s where development (comes in). What do you need to do to develop to be successful, personally, academically, and athletically? That’s what we try to focus on. At the end of the day, that’s what we do.

“Why promise something different than what you do? I mean, I always tell players, ‘We have a responsibility and obligation to everybody on the team to play the best players. We want to try to help develop you so you can be one of the best players. That’s how you end up playing.’”

Some of the particulars in the message have evolved. Early on, he emphasized his own NFL experience and his attention to detail in the secondary. Now, as evidenced by a Zoom video that went viral last year, his pitch includes the frequency with which Alabama makes the College Football Playoff (and wins it), as well as the fact that no school has more players in the NFL currently than Alabama.

“History is always the best indicator of what the future is going to bring,” Saban says, and he means that in terms of pro careers and life after football. His goal is to prepare his players for both. He’s selling a 40-year decision — not a four-year one.

Saban has signed the No. 1-ranked recruiting class in nine of the past 11 years and has a chance to do so again, with his incoming class at No. 2 just behind Texas A&M after the first day of the early signing period. The Athletic spoke to Saban, some of his former assistants and more than a dozen players he recruited. The sampling of stories from each stop — Toledo, Michigan State, LSU and Alabama — helps explain what makes Saban so good at the most important part of the job: building relationships.

Here, they take us inside Saban’s recruiting pitch:

‘It can be intimidating to have Nick Saban in your house’

Mel Tucker had just gotten home from school when the telephone rang. The Cleveland Heights High School senior quarterback and cornerback was surprised to hear the caller introduce himself as “Coach Saban, from the Houston Oilers.”

That label, however, would soon be shed. Saban informed Tucker that he’d just taken a job as the head football coach at the University of Toledo. “I’d love to recruit you,” Saban said. Tucker knew Saban’s reputation as one of the game’s best defensive back coaches. And Saban knew Tucker’s father had played at Toledo — Mel Sr. is in the school’s Hall of Fame for his illustrious football and baseball careers — and that his mother is from there.

“My dad’s coach was still alive,” Tucker says. “(Saban) arranged for a meeting for me, and he actually showed me some film on a projector — real film of my dad in practice that he’d dug up. That was the first time I’d ever seen footage of my dad suited up and playing.”

Saban’s message to Tucker over the winter of 1989-90 sounds familiar to anyone ever recruited by him: He’d help Tucker launch his football career, sure, but the relationship would be lasting and about more than just football. Though Tucker ended up playing at Wisconsin, the relationship endured, leading to jobs on multiple staffs with a lifelong mentor.

Saban does his research, identifying what obstacles might lie ahead in each recruitment. Is it distance? Is it playing time? Is it academic support? Is the family worried that Saban might retire soon? Tucker has seen this play out countless times in the years he spent on Saban’s staff at Michigan State in the late ‘90s, LSU after that and then Alabama in 2015.

“He does not shy away from anything,” Tucker says. “A lot of times parents will say, ‘You know I’ve got a great kid, he’s not going to be a problem, but if he were to get in trouble, how are you going to handle it? How are you going to go help him, or are you going to just abandon him? He does a really good job telling stories — because he’s seen it all. He allows himself to be vulnerable in those intimate settings, those home visits.”

Each conversation is unique to the player present and that family’s concerns. He’ll pinpoint the most influential voice in the recruitment and work to connect with them. The best Tucker can describe it, Saban meets ‘em where they are.

“He does not go in as Nick Saban, this many national championships,” Tucker says. “He’s more focused on the prospect and their family and how he can help them.

“He lowers the temperature. It can be intimidating to have Nick Saban in your house.”

‘Y’all are invited to the cookout from now on’’

Twenty years later, Irma Spears still raves about the time she hosted Nick Saban. The mother of All-American LSU defensive end Marcus Spears reminds everyone how well-dressed he was, that time he and Jimbo Fisher visited to recruit her son. He had one of “those nice Italian suits on,” Marcus Spears explains. “And his loafers.”

His mother prepared a delicious meal of smoked turkey wings, cornbread and mustard greens.

“My mom was like, ‘I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a White man put my food down like that,’” Spears says. “Obviously, they loved the food and ate well, but it was more (Saban) being able to sit down with my family and feel like he was family, too. That’s what my mom’s impression was. She didn’t know who he was before he walked in.

“The one thing that still sticks out to me is he and Jimbo ran through that soul food. My mom was like, ‘Y’all are invited to the cookout from now on.’”

Spears laughs. He didn’t know a ton about Saban back then, either. The crux of Saban’s pitch was what he’d tell so many players before and after Spears: Don’t make a four-year decision, make a 40-year decision. Saban had a plan for him — how to get him from playing on Saturdays to playing on Sundays, and how to prepare him for whatever he wanted to do after football. Now 38, Spears can fully appreciate that message.

But LSU wasn’t the only major program recruiting Spears. There was Michigan and Lloyd Carr. Texas A&M and R.C. Slocum. Miami and Butch Davis.

“It’s like watching ‘The Bachelor,’” Spears says. “Everybody’s got great pitches, but you have to figure out who you align with more, who you feel it with more. A lot of it is gut instinct.”

Saban stated plainly that his goal at LSU was to win a national championship (which the Tigers did in 2003, with Spears earning first-team all-SEC honors that season). Part of the pitch, too, was that Saban understood that a lot of the best Louisiana prospects had been leaving the state. He believed he could keep home-grown talent home. He told Spears that if he stayed in Baton Rouge, and they built what he knew they could build together, Spears would be remembered forever. He’d have a legacy. That would matter for life after football — and it did.

“I’m living the example right now,” says Spears, one of ESPN’s top NFL analysts. Forty years, not four.

‘It was like I was in the movies’

Saban was well-acquainted with Renaldo Hill before he recruited him to Michigan State. Hill’s older brother, Ray, was part of Saban’s first class there. Renaldo visited Ray a lot, though he could tell his brother probably didn’t want him to follow in his footsteps. He’d wanted his brother to avoid whatever shadow he’d cast over him.

“Saban never made anything seem like it was about my brother,” Renaldo Hill says. “It put me at ease, knowing they were coming after me for what I’ve done on the football field.”

During Hill’s senior year of high school, Michigan recruited him hard, too. There were always rumors that Saban might not be at Michigan State much longer, so Hill wanted to keep his options open. Tennessee made a late push for him as well.

Hill knew he would probably end up in East Lansing, and he thought about the kid from his high school who had waited too long to accept his offer to Michigan State the year before. Saban wouldn’t wait around forever.

“He’s sitting in my house, and he’s always been honest and upfront,” Hill says. “He’s like, ‘Listen. You’re going to turn around and do the same thing your teammate did and your spot is not going to be there. If you want to commit to Michigan State, just commit to Michigan State.’

“The next day, it was in the papers. So, even if I wanted to go on another visit, it was not going to happen.”

For Hill, one of the best parts about saying yes to Saban was getting coached by the man himself. Saban was a defensive backs coach for much of his career, and, even now at Alabama, he pays close attention to the position group in practice.

Hill felt ready for the NFL when he got drafted in the seventh round in 2001, but he didn’t realize how much better prepared he was, from a technical standpoint, than some of the DBs working out next to him at training camp. Some of the better players started asking him questions. Why do you do that? Who taught you this? They wanted to incorporate what Hill was doing into their own play.

In March 2006, Hill was an NFL free agent, and Saban recruited him a second time, now as the head coach of the Miami Dolphins. Hill’s agent had been fielding interest in his client, and Hill had taken his first meeting with the New York Jets.

“I’m on the Jets visit and all of a sudden, I look down at my phone and I see a Florida area code — it was Saban on the line,” Hill says. “He didn’t have anybody else call me. It’s him. We have that relationship. He says, ‘Don’t you want to come down to Miami and play for me? You already know what we’re doing. No state tax.’

“The next thing I know, it’s like I was in the movies. I’m telling the people there, ‘Can you take me to the airport? I gotta go to Miami right now.’”

(Greg McWilliams / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

‘I didn’t want nobody to give me nothing’

Saban doesn’t guarantee players anything. He offers a chance to compete, which attracts a certain type of player. It’s worked for many of his biggest stars. It also turns others away.

“What put Alabama over the top for me was Saban never promising you anything in the recruiting process,” former cornerback Geno Smith says. “It was always, ‘The opportunity is there, you just will have to work for it.’”

That was the difference for Saban’s first big signee in his first full recruiting class at Alabama in 2008. Julio Jones was a superstar in the state of Alabama by the time he was a sophomore at Foley High School. Anyone who followed recruiting knew who he was.

Saban didn’t have the luxury of time to build a long-term relationship with either Julio or his mother, Queen, who was instrumental in the recruiting process. But he made up for that by striking the key characteristic that’s made Jones a household name — his competitiveness.

“He challenged me right away,” Jones said in an interview with Tide 100.9 FM in 2018. “Everybody in the country wanted me, and it was repetitive. ‘You’re going to start. You’re going to come in, and you’re going to start. You’re going to play. You’re going to do this. You’re going to do that.’ I didn’t want nobody to give me nothing.

“Coach Saban put me third or fourth on the depth chart and made me work my way up.”

How did Saban close? He told Jones Alabama would win with him or without him.

“We already had gotten commitments from three or four receivers, and I was worried because Julio was coming down to the wire, that he would look at it like, ‘Well, you’ve already got all these receivers, why would you need me?’” Saban says. “But he never looked at it that way. He always looked at it like, I’m going to choose the school I want to go to and where I have the best chance to be successful, and where I have a chance to compete and play with anybody that’s there. That was never an issue with him.

“But he was kind of quiet, so it was hard to get a feel for him. The unique thing about it all is once you got to know him, you have a great relationship with him. Very easy to talk to. That was the tough thing about recruiting him — you never got much of a feel for him because he didn’t say much. After he got here, we developed a relationship that’s probably one of the best I’ve ever had with any player.”

And, six Alabama national championships later, Saban calls Jones “the most impactful” player he brought to Tuscaloosa and “maybe the most important to turning the corner to turn around the program.”

‘Small talk is probably not his favorite thing’

When people think of Saban recruiting, the iconic coach’s role as himself in the movie “The Blind Side” often comes to mind. In the film, Saban visits with offensive tackle Michael Oher for LSU, just as he did in real life. He comes across as very engaging and quite sophisticated.

That’s exactly how offensive lineman Barrett Jones and his family viewed Saban during his recruitment for the class of 2008, Saban’s first full recruiting class at Alabama. Instead of just another ball coach, they found a charmer.

“He didn’t seem like he’s in a hurry at all when he was at our house,” Jones says. “He gave my mom a European-style kind of cheek kiss. He was very disarming. … Small talk is probably not his favorite thing to do. But in those moments, he’s really excellent at being genuine. It’s not like he turns on an alter-ego personality. It’s just that he understands that his focus and attention needs to be where he is in the moment, and you don’t get the feeling that he’s somewhere else or he’s distracted.

“He’s very locked in on where he is.”

Before the home visit, Jones and his parents decided that no matter how well the night went, there would be no commitment on the spot. It was too big of a decision, and they didn’t want to make it on emotion alone. But after the meal, Jones and Saban exited to the den, where Saban laid out his pitch. Saban was such a good salesman that Jones nearly sunk the carefully crafted plan.

“It was just such a moving presentation that I was ready to go out there right now and get started,” Jones says.

Saban is known for being so meticulous that he leaves nothing to chance. He once called an assistant who was waiting outside a recruit’s home and quizzed him about various details of the athlete and their family. The assistant coach didn’t have all the answers, so Saban told him to call the recruit and cancel the appointment. Saban sent him home.

That attention to detail sets Saban apart. In Jones’ recruitment, though, he also had a secret weapon: his agent.

“He definitely knew a lot about me,” Jones says. “He had an advantage there, too, because he’s been to my neighborhood before. My next-door neighbor growing up was Jimmy Sexton.”

‘We didn’t know about you, that’s on me’

Saban visited Jacob Hester’s practice at Evangel Christian Academy to watch a few of his teammates play. A two-star recruit and Louisiana kid, Hester desperately wanted to go to LSU. But he hadn’t been offered, and other schools had shown interest. So, he’d committed to Texas — the biggest and best school that had wanted him.

After practice that day, Saban called Hester over and offered him a scholarship.

“Coach Saban was just like, ‘Hey, we dropped the ball. We didn’t know about you, that’s on me,’” Hester says. “He goes, ‘I don’t just look for highly rated guys. I look for football players.’”

Saban became Hester’s primary recruiter — the head coach, for a two-star fullback, the lowest-rated recruit in the class. He laid out a vision for Hester’s career: He’d be the starting fullback as a freshman, and he wouldn’t get the ball as much as he’d like that first year. Then, as a sophomore, he’d still be a fullback, but he’d also start the transition to running back. By his third and fourth seasons, he’d be the starting tailback. (“He wasn’t there for the last three years, but that’s exactly how it played out,” Hester says.) It wasn’t sexy, and it didn’t sugarcoat a season or two of mostly blocking.

“Most kids want to hear they’re going to get a chance to play running back from Day One — he didn’t say that,” Hester says. It didn’t take long for him to flip from Texas to LSU.

https://cdn.theathletic.com/app/uploads/2021/12/07223505/Nick-Sban-on-recruiting-Jacob-Hester.mp3

In early 2003, Saban had not yet won a national championship, but he would later that fall.

“I remember him saying, ‘Hey, this is close.’ That was his message,” Hester says. “It was almost like a tagline. This is close. We’re close to being a championship program. He’d say he felt like he had the guys, the Marcus Spearses, the Michael Claytons, and he would say, ‘If they can just buy into the process, we are very close to winning here.’”

LSU receiver Michael Clayton and coach Nick Saban celebrate winning the 2003 BCS national championship. (Chris O’Meara / Associated Press)

‘He defied the stereotypes’

The loafers. Former LSU wide receiver Michael Clayton will never forget those loafers. Saban wore a yellow shirt underneath a blue blazer and khaki pants — and penny loafers. No socks.

“Man, he got some swag,” Clayton remembers thinking. He laughs.

Like Spears, Clayton grew up in Baton Rouge and didn’t really think much of the hometown team. Gerry DiNardo didn’t really recruit him; there was a significant disconnect between the program and the inner-city kids, Clayton says. Saban addressed that head-on, and he said he was going to change it. He knew Clayton was considering Florida State, and that part of the appeal is the ability to win a national championship there. But he believed that an LSU team with players such as Clayton, Spears, Marquise Hill and Andrew Whitworth could win one for the Tigers.

“He said, ‘If you go to Florida State, you probably will win a national championship. But when you come back home, nobody will care,’” Clayton says.

Clayton thought about it, and then he committed. He felt that this coach who had spent a day in his home was serious about changing the culture at a program that had long ignored players like himself.

“If you’re from where I’m from, you just don’t trust every White man that comes through your door,” Clayton says. “He defied the stereotypes and created his own lane, and he immediately became a part of my family.

“It’s because of him that I will go down in LSU’s history as one of the best players.”

During the course of his illustrious college career, Clayton knew he could go into Saban’s office and put his feet up on the desk. He could grab water bottles out of the coach’s refrigerator. Other players wouldn’t dare.

“He’s like a chameleon,” Clayton says. “There was a time where he pulled me out on the field, and I was on the defensive side. He says, ‘Hey, Mikey, watch this.’ And he just rips everybody. Then, he turns back to me, and he winks.

“Anybody who thinks Coach Saban is how he is on the sidelines really doesn’t know him personally. But there’s a reason he does what he does — and that’s to get the very best out of players.”

‘I was just kind of starstruck’

Saban was one of the first coaches to use helicopters to get around larger metropolitan areas such as Atlanta. To reach Iowa, though, Saban only needed the phone.

Ross Pierschbacher was in the middle of class when he was told he needed to step out for a phone call. The offensive guard had been committed to his home-state school, Iowa, since January 2013, but that changed quickly that day. On the other line was Saban with the words he’d been waiting to hear.

Pierschbacher had gone to the 2012 Iron Bowl just for the experience. He didn’t think Alabama was all that interested, and he wasn’t even sure that Saban knew his name. Saban was interested though, and Alabama offered the talented Midwesterner after his junior season.

“My emotions were just going all over the place,” he says. “It just felt bigger than life, you know? … I was just kind of starstruck.”

Even now he doesn’t know who was more excited every time Saban would call — him or those around him.

“I remember being at O-line dinners in high school and my phone would ring and I’d say, ‘ Hey, I gotta go take a phone call,’ and they’d say ‘Who’s that?’ ‘Oh, It’s Nick Saban,’” Pierschbacher says. “It seemed like it wasn’t real at the time. … It’s probably like the ‘Bear’ back in the day where it’s like that’s the phone he called me on right there and they frame it or whatever crazy people do.”

Saban’s recruiting process is as much about avoiding the wrong players as it is selecting the right ones. There have been examples of Saban dropping a five-star player from the Crimson Tide’s recruiting board because of character issues.

“The players that go for that other stuff that other coaches are selling probably wouldn’t fit very well in Alabama,” Pierschbacher says. “I think that’s what he’s trying to weed out — the guys who want to be babied and kissed up to and everything like that. He’s not going to do that.”

Saban can boil his pitch down to a few basic bullet points:

Express interest in the player.
Find out his goals and aspirations.
Show him how the program is built to help him achieve those goals, step by step, year by year.

“I don’t think it’s changed a lot,” Saban says. “But it’s about a significant amount of attention and time. Developing relationships is always critical. You can’t do it in one conversation. … Everybody, eventually, is concerned about their children having the best opportunity to be successful. Whether it’s me with my kids, or somebody we’re recruiting with their kids, I mean, that’s always of utmost importance.

“Whether it’s personal development, academic support, career development, how we’re going to develop those football players — those things are always pretty common ground for what people are interested in. Some of those things are more important than others. By just listening and asking questions, you find out pretty quickly what’s most important.”

A few months ago, Saban called Clayton one random evening, around 9 o’clock. He’d listened to an interview that Clayton had done, and it reminded him to pick up the phone and tell Clayton that he was proud of him; that Saban himself only had success because of players like him.

Forty years, not four.

It’s more than a catchy slogan. Clayton’s favorite tale might be when Saban showed up at Clayton’s high school jersey retirement ceremony at Christian Life Academy, his team buses filled with Alabama players headed to play at Tiger Stadium that day.

“He delivered a 20-minute speech at my high school,” Clayton says. “I didn’t even know he was invited.”

(Illustration: Wes McCabe / The Athletic; photos: Getty Images)

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