“A LOT OF people want to know why I want to come back to college football,” Saban said at a press conference upon taking the Toledo Rockets job. He was thirty-eight years old, sporting a pair of large rimless eyeglasses and thick, dark leonine hair. “I think college football is a lot more fun. The involvement you have with the players, the influence you have on their lives at a time in their lives which is critical to their development, is a lot more fun and a lot more rewarding than the professional athlete.”
It all sounded good, true, and from the heart at the time. Saban signed a three-year contract with Toledo, with a base salary of $65,000. The contract came with a buyout provision: Saban owed the school money if he left to take another college job before his contract ended. The buyout clause, however, did not say anything about him taking a job in the NFL, a stipulation that would come back to haunt the school and its athletic director, Al Bohl.
Saban stepped into a bit of a hornet’s nest at Toledo. Just a few months before he arrived, Bohl had fired Dan Simrell, Toledo’s all-time winningest coach, an alumnus of the school and a popular man on campus who had just posted a 6-5 record and finished in a tie for second in the MAC. His firing prompted protests on campus and attracted national attention in a scathing article in Sports Illustrated that slammed Bohl for what was described as misplaced priorities. Protestors delivered a petition with 22,500 signatures to the school’s president, demanding the rehiring of Simrell.
In his own defense, Bohl told the media he was simply sick of mediocrity (Simrell had gone 22-21 in his last four seasons). Toledo was in the MAC (the same conference as Saban’s alma mater, Kent State), so they weren’t necessarily expected to compete for national titles. But Bohl wanted a winner. He also had another pressure to deal with, something he didn’t highlight in his discussions with the press: The school had embarked on an $18 million renovation of its stadium, the Glass Bowl, complete with 26,000 new seats and corporate boxes. Bohl needed to sell tickets in 1990, and he believed Saban could help him.
Bohl says the entire situation back then was “an Excedrin headache.” Saban went to the media and pleaded for the school and community to rally around the team, to let go of the past and concentrate on the present and the promising future. He eventually made Bohl’s headache go away, at least temporarily.
Most first-year coaches inherit a poor team and face a major rebuild. That’s why they’re hired. Saban, instead, was taking over a team with some promise, one that was coming off two just-better-than-mediocre seasons and one that was loaded with juniors and seniors who were hungry for something more. The offense—the strength of the team—had eight returning starters, which included Kevin Meger, an athletic if somewhat unpolished quarterback; Richard Isaiah, a talented wide receiver; and Jerry Evans, a big, soft-handed tight end who would go on to play for three years in the NFL. Saban didn’t think much of the talent level on defense, but he liked their attitude, describing them to a UPI reporter as a bunch of “junkyard dogs.” The football media thought highly enough of Toledo’s returning talent—and its first-year coach—to name the Rockets the preseason favorite in the MAC.
David Walkosky, a senior safety in 1990, remembers the team’s first meeting with its new coach. “When Saban walked into the room, everything just stopped,” he says. “He started in right away. He told us there were no freshmen, no sophomores, no juniors, and no seniors on the team. There were no starters. Everything was open. I thought it was just lip service. But then a player named Dan Williams, a starter and a guy who would play in the NFL, stood up and openly questioned him. Saban kicked him off the team right then and there. He was our best defensive player, and he was gone. That set the tone right there.”
When Saban became too demanding of his players on the Oilers, or went on one of his frequent tirades, they could effectively tune him out. They were pros and he was merely an assistant coach. Saban’s college players didn’t have that option. For the most part, they were on the one-year contracts known as scholarships, which could be revoked on a coach’s whim. (Saban’s assistants later successfully lobbied for Williams’s reinstatement, with the appropriate disciplinary actions, of course.)
Saban instituted strict new academic policies for his players, which included mandatory study halls and required work with a troop of academic advisers. He gave each member of the team a three-ring binder with hundreds of pages. Along with the playbook, it included a guide on how the players would treat their fellow classmates and women on and off campus, and dietary instructions for players who either needed to gain or lose weight. The booklet was illustrated with some of Saban’s favorite sayings (many cribbed from his father) about toughness, effort, and attitude, and pictures of Vince Lombardi and Paul “Bear” Bryant.
Shortly after that first meeting, the team began its winter conditioning program, modeled after Buck Nystrom’s at Michigan State, and run by a man named Ken Mannie. “It was brutal, all blood, guts, and vomit,” says Tom Amstutz, the Rockets’ linebacker coach. Practices in the spring took on a new tenor, too. Simrell had been an offensive-minded coach, and “he screamed at us if we even touched a receiver in practice,” says Walkosky. “Saban had us hit the receivers and try to knock the ball loose. It made everyone better.” Some of the older players left the team, deciding they didn’t want anything to do with this new coach. “Nick was fine with that. He figured it was better for them to quit now rather than at fourth-and-one at the one-yard line in a game,” says Amstutz.
The kids who stayed were, for the most part, glad they did. “Saban was able to simplify everything,” says Darren Anderson, a junior defensive back. “He had his hands on everything. He had a strong personality, but you just trusted he knew what he was doing. So we just let our guard down and let him lead.”
Saban got a late start on recruiting because of the Oilers’ playoff game, but he hustled and turned out a respectable class in one month’s time. He resorted to some unusual recruiting methods. Amstutz remembers one time when they were together recruiting a talented but troubled offensive lineman. During one visit, Saban put the kid on probation, before he’d even committed to Toledo. “As we walked out of the house, I turned to Nick and laughed and said, ‘I’ve never seen that done,’ ” says Amstutz. “Nick just shrugged and said, ‘The kid needs it.’ ” The lineman signed with Toledo and became a three-year starter.
Saban had a solid young coaching staff. Amstutz would later become the head coach at Toledo for eight years. Dean Pees, Toledo’s defensive coordinator, now holds that same position for the Baltimore Ravens. The secondary coach, Phil Parker, who also played for Saban at Michigan State, is now the defensive coordinator at Iowa. At age fifty-eight, Ellis Rainsberger, the offensive line coach, was the oldest member of the staff, and he always called Saban “boy.” “He was the only guy maybe ever to get away with that,” says Walkosky. In practice, Saban couldn’t help but get his hands on the secondary. “Phil [Parker] would recruit on Fridays, so Saban would coach the defensive backs that day,” says Walkosky. “And he would inevitably change everything Phil did. When Phil came back from his trip, he’d come to me and say, ‘Okay, what the fuck did he change?’ ” (Being Saban’s secondary coach has always been the toughest coaching job on his teams.)
The Rockets won their first six games in the 1990 season. They didn’t overwhelm anyone, but they played solidly on both sides of the ball. Saban had come to Toledo with visions of installing a wide-open offensive attack with the quarterback, Meger, similar to what Glanville had run with the Oilers. “But I was young,” says Meger. “I was an athlete who was learning to play in a pro-style set and I struggled.” So Saban simplified the offense, relying on a strong running game and an experienced offensive line.
On October 20, the Rockets traveled to Central Michigan for what appeared to be the quasi–conference championship game. Both teams were undefeated coming in. The Rockets led the game 12–7 in the fourth quarter, but Central Michigan scored a touchdown after a controversial call on a critical third down that sent Saban into a fit on the sidelines. Toledo missed a fifty-one-yard field goal attempt as time expired and lost by a point.
On the bus ride back to Toledo, Saban called Meger up to the front to talk. “Everyone got really quiet,” says Meger, who had played an inconsistent game. “They thought he was going to ream me out. But he was calm. He talked to me like a father would. He asked me what he could do to help me get better. He was always calm after a loss. Calm and analytical.”
Saban’s fatherly relationship with Meger also extended off the field. Meger came from a broken home and didn’t have much of a relationship with either of his parents. Earlier in the season, Saban had discovered that Meger had not invited his parents to the Rockets’ opening home game, so he called them and invited them on his behalf. “It initially pissed me off,” says Meger. “I didn’t think it was any of his business.” His parents ended up coming to the game, and Meger says it “turned out to be the bridge me and my family needed. I wasn’t listening to my parents and they weren’t listening to me, but we were clearly both listening to him. Things got smoother after that.”
The Rockets lost only one other game that season, to Navy on a last-minute touchdown pass. They ended the season at 9-2, with the two losses by a combined five points. When Central Michigan was upset by Ball State late in the season, Toledo became the co-champions of the MAC.I
In the 1990 season, after nearly two decades in the game, Saban finally accomplished what his father once had: He’d become a head coach and gained total control of a program. His players respected him. He had driven them and his coaches hard, and they had responded. And he’d won. His father never seemed far from his mind during that season, according to Amstutz. “It was clear that he really missed him,” he says. “I’ve thought about this a lot since then, and I realize now that you could sense that in some part of his heart he felt driven because of his father, that part of what he did was dedicated to his father.”
Bohl had every reason to believe that this was just the beginning for his coach and the Toledo program. Saban had recruited well during the season, convincing running back Casey McBeth, an all-AP Ohio high school player, to choose Toledo over some bigger programs. Bohl knew full well that budding young coaches used the MAC as a springboard to bigger and better jobs, but he also knew that most of those coaches stuck around to build and establish a program—and reputation—for at least a few years. Don James, after all, had stayed at Kent State for four seasons.
Then Saban’s old friend Bill Belichick came calling.
In late January 1991, Belichick had crafted a masterful game plan in the Super Bowl as the New York Giants’ defensive coordinator, holding a superb Buffalo Bills offense in check in the Giants’ 20–19 upset win. Shortly thereafter, he was named the head coach of the Cleveland Browns and was given free rein to hire his assistants. One of his first calls was to Saban, whom he wanted as his defensive coordinator. The two men met and discussed the job at the NFL Scouting Combine. Saban then told Bohl that he was considering the job offer.
Bohl suddenly found himself in a bind. He had fired a popular coach the year before and put his reputation on the line for an unproven career assistant (Bohl’s son also played defensive back for Saban on the 1990 team). That unproven coach had delivered in spades. Now he was possibly leaving. “We were 9-2, we were selling tickets, and then he comes in and tells me about Belichick,” says Bohl. “When he was in my office, he didn’t want to go to the Browns. He made me feel, anyway, like he was really distraught.”
Bohl tried to get Saban to stay, offering to increase his salary. Saban wavered, something he would do in an even more painful fashion a few times later in his career. He told the Toledo Blade that he didn’t make his final decision until half an hour before what would become his final press conference at Toledo.
In that press conference, Saban broke the news that he was accepting the job as the Browns’ defensive coordinator. As he spoke, he pursed his lips and frequently looked down at the podium he gripped with two hands. His eyes were puffy and red. He told the assembled members of the media: “I haven’t cried for eighteen years—since my dad died—but I cried all afternoon. It was something I just couldn’t pass up. . . . It’s probably not fair to the University of Toledo. It’s a little bit of a selfish decision. But I have a responsibility to my family.” Saban would be more than doubling his salary in his new job.
Meger says he and his teammates knew something was up over the preceding days when Saban wasn’t present for a few of the team’s 5 a.m. winter workouts. “He never missed those,” says Meger. “Then one day he gathered us together and told us he was leaving. He told us first. I can remember after he spoke, I was walking across the street, from the health center. He saw me and walked up and asked me if I was mad at him. I said, ‘You’re damn right I am.’ We’d just come off a championship season. Later on I was okay with it, but I was pissed then.”
Richard Isaiah, the team’s best receiver, says he was surprised, but understood. “It was the Browns. If it had been Bowling Green, I would have had a problem. But some of the guys resented it. The community resented it a bit. We’d just gotten rid of our guy, he comes in, and then he jumps to the NFL. It didn’t look good.”
Bohl says now that he, too, understood, but that it was “a sad moment.” Back then, though, he seemed a little more defensive. When asked about that critical lack of a buyout clause for the NFL in Saban’s contract, Bohl told the Blade: “You learn. The next football coach’s contract will cover the pros, too.”II
In the aftermath of Saban’s departure, the Blade ran dueling editorials. One condoned Saban’s move and put the blame squarely on Bohl. The other excoriated the coach: “It is not unusual, though, that Nick Saban would want to leave. That is his history. Nine different stops in 18 years. . . . A guy like Saban gets a better offer and he skedaddles.”
To Saban detractors, leaving Toledo after just one year into a three-year contract is merely the first betrayal of many to come. It’s where his reputation as a mercenary for hire is first revealed. It’s one thing to skip around as an assistant—that’s expected. Assistant coaches are essentially migrant workers, and moving around is often the only way up. At Toledo, Saban was the head coach. He had made a heartfelt plea for the support of the community, and had projected the image of a man who would be sticking around for a bit, who was committed to, at the very least, his initial contract and to building a sustainable program.
It’s easy to see how Bohl could forgive and forget now, twenty-five years later. Bohl is now known as the first athletic director to hire Saban, as the man who first took a chance on an unknown coach who has since won four national titles and is perhaps the best in the business. In retrospect, Bohl looks like a genius. That revision in history took a while to develop, though. At the time, it certainly seems like Saban’s leaving—after just one year and with no protections afforded to the university—stung both Bohl and the community, regardless of whether they could see his reasoning or not.
What’s also clear in retrospect, though, is that Saban gave everything he had during his short stint at Toledo, in recruiting and coaching and in the community, where he and Terry were always available for social gatherings and fund-raisers. He certainly didn’t act like a man who was intent on skipping out after just one season.
In the end, he was made an offer that he believed he couldn’t refuse, to coach with a man with whom he had shared those many front porch sessions. Saban and Belichick were two men who loved football and shared many of the same philosophies about the game. When they hung out together, they fed off each other and took the level of discourse about a rough-guy game to some higher plane. Though Saban is six months older, then he considered his friend as a more accomplished mentor, with the more pertinent experience. Belichick had spent his entire career to that point—sixteen years—in the NFL, and he had just guided a ferocious defense to one of the most famous upsets in Super Bowl history.
Saban and Belichick’s relationship had continued to grow after Saban’s year at Navy. They made it a point to visit each other a few times a year. Sometimes those meetings were clandestine, almost like a couple having an affair. When Saban was with the Oilers, he flew up to meet Belichick, despite the fact that Glanville had a strict rule about his assistants talking to other NFL coaches while under his employ. “We’d have these meeting spots,” Saban recalled in a press conference in 2006. “West Point seemed like a place that we could hide out. So we went there and stayed for weekends, stayed in a hotel up there, and talked ball.”
Glanville says now that had he known about these secret meetings, “I would have fired Saban on the spot.”
The Cleveland Browns team that Belichick took over was a bit of an enigma. Just two seasons earlier, they’d made an inspired run to the AFC Championship game—their third trip in the past four years—and lost to John Elway and the Denver Broncos. The 1990 team, however, had been a disaster. The Browns had won only three games and their coach, Bud Carson—a key coaching figure in the 1970s Steelers dynasty (and someone whom Saban had gotten to know during his early-career visits to the Steelers)—was fired midway through the season. The 1990 Cleveland Browns gave up 462 points, more than any other defense would in the decade of the 1990s. Saban’s task in 1991 was to fix that.
Though only 120 miles from Toledo, the Sabans’ new home in Cleveland seemed worlds away. The professional game was a colder, less personal one. Saban and Terry had been a part of the community at Toledo, two of the most visible representatives of the school, a role Terry in particular had cherished. Defensive coordinators’ wives and families in the NFL didn’t take on those roles. It was neither expected nor desired of them. For Terry, especially as she raised their two young children, a college campus held much more allure, a preference she’d already formed by this time and would continue to hold throughout her husband’s career.
At the time, her husband was also going back and forth about what his career goals indeed were. During his years as an assistant at Michigan State and with the Oilers, he believed that becoming a college head coach was what he wanted. Taking the Toledo job seemed only to solidify that feeling. Now, though, he was telling friends and the media that the Browns job appealed to him, mainly because it was a possible avenue to a head-coaching job in the NFL. His internal tug-of-war between the college game and the NFL would never be decisively settled, and there are those close to him who believe that even with his prodigious successes in the college ranks, the NFL still holds some allure for him to this day.
Working with Belichick was something Saban was eager to do, though. Finally, all of those enlightened discussions about football theories could be put into practice. The two men could build something together. What Saban didn’t know going into the job was the level of exhaustion and frustration he would face. During a talk at the American Football Coaches Association convention in early 2014, Saban recalled his years with the Browns as the worst in his coaching life. Many assumed that the statement was likely some inside joke between him and Belichick, but it may have had a ring of truth to it. Though Belichick says today that Saban “is a great friend and there is no one that I have more respect for in the game of football,” it is likely that their friendship has held up over the years in part because they don’t work together anymore. The front porch would always remain their most comfortable place together.
One month before the 1991 season, Paul Brown, the namesake of the Cleveland franchise and its first coach, died. His death cast a pall over a team that seemed destined to repeat the misery of the season before. Bernie Kosar, a gangly quarterback with an unorthodox sidearm throwing motion, led the offense and was adored by the fans. He was a fairly accurate passer when given enough time, but he was limited by his lack of mobility. Elsewhere on offense, the Browns lacked playmakers.
The defense, as bad as it had been the year before, had a few bright spots. That year’s first-round draft pick, Eric Turner, was the kind of big and athletic safety that Saban adored. Two promising young players, Michael Dean Perry and Rob Burnett, anchored the defensive line. Behind them, the linebacker corps featured Clay Matthews Jr., already a grizzled vet heading into his fourteenth year with the Browns (he would play for nineteen years in the NFL and is the father of Green Bay Packers star Clay Matthews III). The Browns ended up 6-10 that year, doubling the number of wins from the season before. The biggest reason for the improvement was the defense, which moved from the league’s cellar to fourteenth.
Though Saban seemed committed to Belichick and the Browns, he never stayed too far off the radar screen of college athletic directors. In January 1992, Perles again began talking to an NFL team (this time the Indianapolis Colts). It seemed a foregone conclusion that if Perles left Michigan State, Saban would be offered the job, something he would have had a hard time passing up. Perles ended up again staying with the Spartans, but his various flirtations with NFL teams would wear on the patience of Michigan State administrators and play a role in his eventual dismissal.
Saban was also offered the job at Northwestern around that time, but he declined it, an easy decision for him. The academics-first school had finished at or near the bottom of the Big Ten since the 1970s. A far more intriguing rumor surfaced toward the end of the 1992 season when John Cooper’s job at Ohio State seemed in peril (Cooper had taken over for Earle Bruce). Taking that job would have brought Saban back in a full redemptive circle after being fired there in the early 1980s. Saban downplayed the reports, though, telling the Columbus Dispatch that he was happy with the Browns. “Someone told me once, ‘You should get your ducks in line for the Ohio State job,’ ” Saban told the paper. “To be honest, I don’t have any ducks.” That same year, Belichick brought in Al Groh to coach the linebackers. Groh had been the New York Giants’ defensive coordinator in 1991 and had worked with Belichick there earlier. The move seemed like a precautionary one on Belichick’s part, taken because of the burgeoning interest in his defensive coordinator.
Though Saban publicly proclaimed himself happy, it was in his second season, in 1992, that the strain of the Browns job began to show. Belichick turned out to be the most demanding boss Saban had ever had, a man wholly consumed with the game who expected the same level of intensity and focus during those eighteen-hour days from his assistants. For four years, Saban basically didn’t see Terry and his kids from July through January. Louis Riddick, an ESPN analyst who played for Belichick and Saban for two years, says Saban would often talk about the demands Belichick put on his coaches. “Nick would say that coaching for Bill didn’t leave time for anything else,” he says. “He would look at me and say, ‘You ever watch film with Bill?’ ” Belichick was notorious for the amount of film he watched, of other teams and his own players, taking the time to pore over some things that would seem to be of little consequence. “I’d come in at ten p.m. and Nick and Bill would be watching film of our bag and agility drills from practice,” says Ed Sutter, a linebacker on the team. “It was amazing.”
Saban worked tirelessly on improving the defense while adding to his own workload by also coaching the secondary himself. At one point during the 1992 season, Saban’s defense didn’t allow a touchdown for thirteen consecutive quarters, a foreshadowing of the dominant force they would become a few years later. After pulling a few all-nighters in preparation for a game against Houston and their unusual “run and shoot” spread offense, an exhausted Saban told the beat reporter at the Dispatch, “I don’t know how many more of those I have in me.” Later in the season, that same reporter would write that Saban was “running himself into the ground.”
Part of the strain was caused by an unexpected clashing with his boss. Belichick was an open-minded coach who always considered well-thought-out ideas, and he let Saban pretty much run his defense in practice. However, Belichick also always had the final say on game plans and schemes, especially on defense, where he had earned the reputation of being something of a genius.III Saban and Belichick differed in their visions for that side of the ball. Saban believed, particularly as his defense matured in his last two years with the Browns, that it could become more complicated and dynamic. “Bill was more conservative,” says Rob Burnett, a defensive end. “Nick wanted to let the dogs loose, but Bill held him at bay. Bill would override him. You could see the look of frustration on Nick’s face.”
Burnett says the team actually had two defensive playbooks—Saban’s and Belichick’s. “Nick’s was a lot more aggressive,” he says. “But we didn’t use his much. I honestly think if we had, we’d have been a better team defensively.”
In 1992, the Browns ended up 7-9, in third place in the AFC Central. The defense improved to tenth best in the league. Despite the improvement, the team’s owner, Art Modell—perhaps sensing Saban’s exhaustion—asked Belichick to hire a secondary coach so Saban could become more of a “roving” defensive coordinator. Saban was reluctant to give up the hands-on role of the secondary. Eventually, he and Belichick convinced Modell that, because the secondary heading into the 1993 season was so young and raw, Saban needed to continue to coach them. Modell relented.
That 1993 season was a calamitous one for the Browns. They began with three straight wins, and were 5-2 heading into the halfway point of the season. During that season, Belichick benched—then released—Kosar, one of the most popular players in the franchise’s history (Belichick believed his quarterback had taken too many hits and had “lost it”). The Browns dropped seven of their last nine games. It was hard to tell at the end of another 7-9 season that the Browns—and particularly their defense—were poised for a special season in 1994.
As has been the case throughout his coaching career, Saban’s players had varied opinions about him. He had a hot temper and a never-waning intensity. His nickname on the team was “Grumpy.” Some players, like Burnett, loved him. “I got along great with Nick,” he says. “He knew how to teach. He was the best defensive backs coach I was ever around. He’d take guys back there who were marginal at best, or guys who otherwise wouldn’t have made an NFL team, and turned them into players.”
Others, like Sutter, didn’t like him much at all. “He wasn’t very personable, which is okay because he wasn’t paid to be personable,” he says. “But he tried to intimidate and threaten players, even vets like Clay Matthews. That works in college, but not in the pros. He was kind of a little tyrant walking around out there. And because he was just a coordinator, you could blow him off, and sometimes guys did just that.”
For most players, though, the opinions were somewhat mixed. Harlon Barnett had been a defensive back for Saban at Michigan State and was already on the Browns team the year before Saban arrived (Barnett now coaches the secondary at Michigan State). “I was so interested when he came to the Browns,” says Barnett. “His approach just doesn’t work that well in the pros. Vets don’t like to be yelled at. They say, ‘I’m a grown man!’ ” Saban’s demeanor with professional players never did change, which would come back to haunt him in his later stint in the NFL.
Saban’s knowledge of the game was the only thing that kept some of his players from tuning him out completely. “The guys would slowly start to realize that he really knew what he was talking about, and that got him the respect,” says Barnett. “The man is a nut, but he can coach football.”
Riddick, a safety who signed with the Browns in 1993, felt the Saban wrath more personally. “From the first practice on, he was all over me. He gave me no break, just pressure, pressure, pressure. For a small guy, he has this booming big-man voice. I could never tell if he even liked me,” he says.
Riddick didn’t play much in his first season, but halfway through 1994, Saban told him he’d be on the field for some of the team’s pass-defense packages. “From that point on, he kind of took a different tone with me. It was almost like because I never went into the tank, because he never broke me, I earned his respect. And he can break you. I never let him see what he did to me. I didn’t break in front of him. But there were times I would go home to my girlfriend, who is now my wife, and tell her, ‘I don’t know if I can play for this guy, he’s so demanding.’ ”
Riddick adds a sentiment shared by many of Saban’s players, past and present: “The players, if they’re being honest and whether they like him or not, will tell you that the guy flat-out knows what he’s talking about. The question is, can you wade through the bullshit and get the message, or does the bullshit prevent you from hearing it?”
Saban was equally demanding of the coaches who worked under him. In 1994, Modell finally got his wish when Belichick hired Rick Venturi to coach the secondary to free up Saban for a bigger-picture role with the defense. When Venturi arrived, Saban insisted that they meet on early Saturday mornings in the off-season to go over the secondary schemes. “He just put me in a clinic,” says Venturi. “I sat there and took piles of meticulous notes. I still have them. And you know what? He never really stopped coaching the secondary anyway.”
When Pat Hill arrived as the Browns’ offensive line and tight ends coach in 1992, he ran the scout teams in practice against Saban’s defense. “I had to draw up the cards for Nick,” he says. “Usually it’s not that big of a deal, they don’t have to be that detailed. But with Nick, they had to be drawn up with the exact alignments and splits, and if they weren’t, if I was half a man off in alignment, he let me know it. It took me a little while to figure out exactly what he needed, but I did, and I took great pride in making those cards right. It didn’t seem like a big deal to me at first, but it turned out to be a big part of our success, getting those details exactly right.”
Chuck Bresnahan, Saban’s former player at Navy, was the linebacker and quality control coach under Saban for one year at Cleveland. “We had an inside joke on the staff that whenever we entered the football building, it was like we had to get ready for war. Nick was different outside of the building, more personable. But once inside, it was all business all the time,” he says. “Most of us [defensive assistants] sat in a big room. We knew when Nick was coming because he always jingled the change in his pocket when he walked. If we were bullshitting and we heard that, we’d all quickly pull out our playbooks. There were certainly times when I wanted to punch Nick in the nose but, at the same time, I knew I was getting better as a football coach.”
Saban didn’t ever seem to relax on the practice field or in meetings. “I just remember him in meetings just sitting there and rocking,” says Kirk Ferentz, the offensive line coach for the Browns from 1993 to 1995. “He would go faster and faster if he was getting excited about something.” On the practice field, Saban was always worrying a plug of Red Man in his cheek. “He could never sit still,” says Everson Walls, a veteran defensive back who finished his career with the Browns. “At practice he just paced back and forth. It reminded you of a lion in a cage.”IV
Saban did calm down, at least when it came to football, only during the actual games. “On game day, he was really different,” says Riddick. “He was cool and analytical. He never had some of those fits like he does on the sidelines now at Alabama. We never saw that. But he would explode at practice. We couldn’t wait to get to Sunday.”
Off the field, as Bresnahan said, his fellow coaches got a glimpse of a more relaxed Saban at the annual Kentucky Derby party that he and Terry hosted for them and their families. “We’d all take numbers out of a hat and bet on the race,” says Hill. “We really had a great time at those parties. Those were some of my most memorable times on the team.”
By 1994, Belichick had assembled what, in retrospect, was a truly remarkable coaching and personnel staff. Along with Nick Saban, his assistant coaches were:
• Kirk Ferentz (current head coach at Iowa)
• Pat Hill (head coach at Fresno State from 1997 to 2011)
• Kevin Spencer (current special teams coach with the San Diego Chargers)
• Chuck Bresnahan (former defensive coordinator at the Oakland Raiders and current defensive coordinator at Central Florida)
• Scott O’Brien (current special teams coach at the New England Patriots)
• Rick Venturi (longtime defensive assistant in the NFL, for the Browns, New Orleans Saints, and St. Louis Rams)
The personnel staff included:
• Ozzie Newsome (current general manager of the Baltimore Ravens)
• Michael Lombardi (former general manager of the Browns and now a personnel assistant with the Patriots)
• Jim Schwartz (former head coach of the Detroit Lions)
• Scott Pioli (former general manager of the Kansas City Chiefs and now the assistant general manager of the Falcons)
The Browns’ weekly Tuesday staff meetings during that year in particular have gained legendary status. “I wish I had tapes of them,” says Venturi. They functioned as extended versions of the Saban-Belichick front porch meetings, with the addition of ten more football-savvy participants. “Bill encouraged different views and he was a great listener,” says Ferentz. “So many great ideas came out of those meetings.”
Those were also the meetings when some of Saban’s more extravagant ideas for the defense were shot down.
There is some truth to the conventional notion that Saban and Belichick are alike, in demeanor and as coaches. Both men love defense and are systematic and detailed taskmasters. Both are perfectionists. And neither seems to enjoy dealing with the media very much. “Philosophically, they look at football the same,” says Riddick. “They think the same type of players work on defense. They want to be strong down the middle, a big middle linebacker and big physical safeties, then go from there. They always want to defend the middle of the field first, to make the offense throw the ball outside, and if they come across the middle, then they’d get the hell knocked out of them.”
Despite the fact that Belichick never let Saban do all he wanted with the Browns’ defense, Saban did absorb a lot of lessons from his boss. He learned how to better evaluate players, especially in the secondary, where both men stressed athleticism and the ability to play man-to-man and ball skills (that is, being able to knock away or intercept a pass). Later, when Saban got head-coaching jobs, he drove his staff as hard as Belichick did at Cleveland. “Nowadays, everyone wants to learn the tricks of the trade rather than learning the trade,” says Bresnahan. “It wasn’t like that with Bill and Nick. Everything was so detailed.” Perhaps the biggest lesson Saban learned from his friend was how to run an entire organization. Belichick was a master at getting everyone involved with the team on the same page by outlining exactly everyone’s individual responsibility. Saban has often publicly noted that his favorite saying of Belichick’s, which was posted on the wall of the Browns’ locker room, was the simple but powerful “Do your job.”
There are some significant differences, though, which went beyond Saban’s desire to run a more complicated defense. Saban had a hot temper. “He could fly off the handle in meetings,” says Venturi. “Bill was more methodical and consistent every day. He was more even-keeled.” Belichick wasn’t much of a yeller, either. “Bill would get his point across by being sarcastic, by questioning your intelligence. It got on your nerves sometimes,” says Riddick. “Sure, Nick would yell a lot, but at least he was more straightforward. You did it his way or he got someone else in there who would.” There was also a difference in motivation. Belichick grew up in relative comfort and attended private schools. “I always got the sense that Nick seemed like a guy with a big chip on his shoulder,” says Bresnahan. “Going back to his childhood, he’s always had to work for every single thing he’s gotten.”
The 1994 season was the high-water mark of the Belichick-era Browns, thanks mainly to the defense. Belichick and Saban had assembled a roster with an effective mix of veterans (the now-seasoned Burnett and Perry were joined by linebackers Carl Banks and Pepper Johnson, two stalwarts of Belichick’s Super Bowl–winning defense with the Giants) and younger players, like safety Eric Turner and the team’s first-round draft pick in 1994, cornerback Antonio Langham. The first sign that something special was in the works was in the third game of the season, at home against the Arizona Cardinals, when the Browns won, 32–0, and forced three turnovers. The shutout, though, wasn’t good enough for Saban, who was fuming after the game, believing his defense should have had three more turnovers and demonstrating for the first time—to the public, at least—that wins left him far angrier and nervous than losses. The victory over the Cardinals began a five-game winning streak that got the Browns off to a 6-1 start.
Despite the fast start and the stellar play of the defense, the Browns had some concerns. Even as Saban whipped his defense into a world-class unit, the mediocre-at-best offense remained a heavy anchor. “If we’d had an offense that was even above average, I seriously believe we’d have gone to the Super Bowl,” says Riddick. The middling offense left Saban frustrated. Rumors again began to swirl that he was in line for various head-coaching jobs, most notably at Stanford, where Bill Walsh was on his way to a 3-7-1 season and leaving the coaching profession for good. This time, the rumors seemed more significant. “We knew Nick was eventually going to leave because of his frustrations with Bill,” says Burnett. “They had a good relationship, but with their differences, it was just a matter of time.”
That time came on November 8, 1994, when Perles was fired at Michigan State, after failing to lead the Spartans to a winning season for four straight years, and as rumors swirled of a possible grade-tampering scandal. (Perles was allowed to coach the team’s remaining two games.) Saban immediately pursued the job with the full support of Belichick and the rest of the Cleveland staff. “We didn’t want to break up what we had here, but everyone was in his corner,” says Venturi, who drove Saban to the airport to fly up for his interview with Michigan State, then picked him up later that night.
Saban was the front-runner for the job right away. At least he believed he was. A week or so after his interview, however, media reports indicated that Michigan State was leaning toward hiring Fran Ganter, an assistant under Joe Paterno at Penn State. A few days later, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Ganter was actually offered the job but declined it. “That was an interesting week,” says Venturi. “Nick came into my office and looked pretty disappointed, but I told him not to worry about it.”
Ultimately, Saban was offered the job and accepted it on December 3, 1994, telling the media that he felt like he was “coming home.” According to Sutter, when word of Saban’s hiring filtered back to the locker room, several of his players stood up and clapped, happy to be getting rid of the “tyrant.”
They’d have to wait a little bit longer, though. Modell declared Saban “untouchable” until the end of the Browns’ season, which had four games to go, plus a likely spot in the playoffs. This left Saban in a tough spot regarding his new job. According to NCAA rules, he couldn’t recruit for Michigan State while he was employed by the Browns, which meant—if Cleveland made the playoffs and continued to advance—he’d have to condense his first year of recruiting into just a few weeks. It also left Saban totally exhausted as he worked the two jobs at once. He handled his Michigan State business on the phone during his twenty-five-minute commute to and from the Browns’ facility and during quick flights to East Lansing whenever Belichick gave him a free afternoon (which wasn’t often), and he continued to push himself to the limit with the Browns’ defense. The strain manifested itself physically: Saban’s hair started to go gray and he looked haggard for the first time in his career. (He arguably looks younger today than he did back in late 1994.)
It didn’t help that the 9-3 Browns lost a sloppy game to the 5-7 Giants the day after Saban took the Michigan State job. They bounced back quickly. In the next game, they traveled to Irvine, Texas, to take on the 11-2 Dallas Cowboys, a team led by the formidable offensive trio of quarterback Troy Aikman, running back Emmitt Smith, and receiver Michael Irvin. The Browns held Aikman to just 177 yards passing in a 19–14 upset win, their finest of the season. When the last second ticked off the clock at Texas Stadium, Belichick, in a rare show of emotion, jumped into Saban’s arms. Their collaboration—a memorable one, even if it wasn’t always smooth—was coming to an end.
The Browns finished the year 11-5. The defense—the best in the league by far—allowed only 204 points, exactly 258 points fewer than they’d allowed the season before Saban arrived. The Browns made the playoffs for the only time during the Belichick era. The good news for Saban: His defense had led them there (and he used his $8,000 playoff bonus to pay off his in-laws’ mortgage). The bad news was that the victory cost him more invaluable time for his new job.
In the wild card game, the Browns hosted the New England Patriots, a team coached by Belichick’s former boss Bill Parcells. Cleveland won, 20–13, harassing Patriots quarterback Drew Bledsoe into throwing three interceptions. Cleveland’s next task was to travel to Pittsburgh to play the Steelers in the divisional round. Though the Browns that year had handled most of the teams they’d faced, the Steelers had been the hump they couldn’t get over—they’d lost to them twice.
On the day of the game, a cold sleet fell on the hard Astroturf at Three Rivers Stadium. “I remember coming out for pregame warm-ups and Greg Lloyd [a Steelers linebacker] was out there in a cutoff gray T-shirt with his belly button showing,” says Riddick. “He just stood there and glared at us when we came out and started barking at [quarterback Vinny] Testaverde and our offense, and I was like, ‘Oh, no, this isn’t good.’ The Steelers defense just intimidated the shit out of our offense.”
The Steelers crushed the Browns, 29–9. Saban was in East Lansing that evening, having dinner with a dozen potential recruits.V
Venturi says he remembers near the end of the 1994 Browns season when Saban was working the two jobs nearly to the point of collapse. One evening, Saban walked into Venturi’s office, slump-shouldered and hollow-eyed, lamenting the fact that he just didn’t have the time to properly set up his staff and recruit at Michigan State. Venturi, trying to lighten his friend’s mood, told him: “Just send Terry up there to do it.”
The remark—a humorous nod to Terry’s rapidly growing presence in her husband’s football life—turned out to be prescient.
I. Central Michigan, and not Toledo, got to go to the California Bowl because of its head-to-head victory.
II. Bohl’s next coach was Saban’s old teammate at Kent State, Gary Pinkel, who ended up staying at Toledo for a fruitful ten years before becoming the head coach at Missouri.
III. In David Halberstam’s book The Education of a Coach, Belichick’s father, Steve, had a rather funny riposte to his son’s oft-awarded “genius” label. “You are talking about someone who walks up and down a football field,” he said.
IV. Walls relates a story about Saban that happened after the 1993 season. That year, Walls, a fourteen-year player who had been one of the better defensive backs of his era, was let go by the Browns. Walls says that like most veterans who are basically forced to retire, he was angry, not wanting to face the facts of his own physical decline. At the time, he says, he blamed Saban, his hard-assed coach. After the season, Walls says he was on a flight leaving Cleveland when he suddenly looked up and there was Saban walking down the aisle toward him. “He had this huge smile on his face and he was like, ‘Hey, Everson!’ He was with his family. I’d never seen him like that. I’d never seen him smile. He was so engaging. It actually caught me off guard. I was so shocked I kind of blew him off. But later on I realized that that might have been the real Nick, that sometimes when you’re a coach you have to separate emotionally. I realized that I didn’t treat him the way I should have that day, so a few years later, I called him and I apologized for the way I acted.”
V. Though the Browns were preseason favorites to reach the Super Bowl the next season, the franchise went straight downhill after that playoff loss to the Steelers. The next year, Belichick appointed Venturi to replace Saban as his defensive coordinator. Venturi—pushing himself to replicate Saban’s success—was forced to take a leave of absence before the season began because of exhaustion. Midway through that season, Art Modell infamously announced that the franchise was leaving Cleveland for a new home in Baltimore. The team ended up going 5-11 on the season, and Belichick was fired.