The Back Alley Archives

Bryant's appeal came not just from winning games but also from a winning personality. Saban has established himself as a great football coach, but even Alabama fans are still trying to figure him out as a person—or determine if he is one.

I mentioned to one Tide fan I know that I was back home on a quest to find anything that might prove Nick Saban was a human being.

"Well, there's circumstantial evidence," he deadpanned. "But no proof."

4. Saban's guiding vision is something he calls "the process," a philosophy that emphasizes preparation and hard work over consideration of outcomes or results. Barrett Jones, an offensive lineman on all three of Saban's national championship teams at Alabama and now a rookie with the St. Louis Rams, explains the process this way: "It's not what you do, it's how you do it."

Taken to an extreme—which is where Saban takes it—the process has evolved into an exhausting quest to improve, to attain the ideal of "right is never wrong." At Alabama, Saban obsesses over every aspect of preparation, from how the players dress at practice—no hats, earrings, or tank tops are allowed in the football facility—to how they hold their upper bodies when they run sprints. "When you're running and you're exhausted you really want to bend over," Jones says. "They won't let you. 'You must resist the human need to bend over!'"

Sometimes players learn about Saban's arcane preparation only when they encounter the external factor it is intended to control. During a lightning delay in the second quarter of the 2012 Alabama-Missouri game, Tide players jogged back to their locker room to find dry shoes, chairs arranged by position, and coaches ready with teaching material to keep them occupied during the break. A coach might go his entire career without experiencing a weather delay, but Saban was ready. His players dubbed it "the lightning audible."

Jones says that while all the talk of "the process" can sometimes seem mysterious—the cultic manifesto of that demonic head coach—it's actually quite straightforward.

"He pretty much tells everybody what our philosophy is, but not everyone has the discipline to actually live out that philosophy," Jones says. "The secret of Nick Saban is, there is no secret."

Saban fully admits that his father's perfectionism informed the process, even if it took decades for him to codify it. Big Nick's influence also has something to do with why, even after a big victory, Saban feels less joy than relief. Saban is reaching for a standard, so there are only two possibilities: Either you did what you were supposed to do, or you fell short. If you fell short, you go work harder and better to try to meet the standard next time. And if you met the standard, you go work doubly hard to fight off complacency—a fatal disease transmitted by pats on the back and post-game confetti—so you have a shot at meeting it again. The process, then, is never over. Wins are not ends but merely data points that help Saban assess the state of the process at a given moment.

"I don't want people to think I'm not happy when we win—I am," Saban says. "But there's a difference between being happy for the feeling of accomplishing something and being overjoyed and feeling 'This is it—we conquered the world.' We didn't. We just won a game."