THE NFL had changed in the decade Saban had been away. Free agency, in its infancy during Saban’s time at the Browns, had grown into full maturity. The players were now empowered, and they weren’t afraid to show it. The college game was—and remains today—about the cult of the coach. In the pros, the players now reigned. In the 2005 off-season, Saban discovered quickly—and rudely—just how different things had become.
At the Miami Dolphins’ annual rookie talent show, Matt Roth and Channing Crowder—the second- and third-round draft picks, respectively, that year—decided to team up for their act. Instead of trying to sing or dance or tell jokes, they opted to go with something a bit bolder. With the coaches, players, and staff gathered in an auditorium at the Dolphins’ headquarters, Crowder called the rookie head coach up to the stage, which had, as a prop, a single chair. “I looked out into the crowd and said, ‘Hey, Coach, we just appreciate you giving us the chance to play in the NFL, and we want to show you some love,’ ” says Crowder. With that, he pointed to the chair and invited Saban to sit down.
Saban, somewhat reluctantly, obliged. He sat facing Crowder and Roth. At that moment, Kay-Jay Harris, an undrafted free agent who had been signed by the team, was supposed to start playing some loud club music over the speakers, but he couldn’t figure out how to get the CD player to work. The “surprise” that Crowder and Roth had in store for Saban didn’t wait for her cue, however. From behind him, a stripper—dressed in high heels, a very small bikini, and a Jason Taylor Dolphins jersey—pranced out of a door and onto the stage. She touched Saban’s back. He flinched. When she walked around to face Saban, he shot straight up in his chair. Harris still couldn’t get the music going. The auditorium was instead filled with shouts and catcalls coming from the seats. The stripper moved in front of Saban and began to dance provocatively. He sat completely still for one more moment, then abruptly stood up, walked off the stage, and hustled up the stairs. The room went silent. “There were like thirty stairs,” says Crowder. “All you could hear was the click, click, click of his shoes, then the door creaking open and the boom when it shut behind him.” The room exploded in delirious peals of laughter. “It was pretty immature on our part to include Saban in the skit,” says Crowder. “But that’s why we did it.”
In “organized team activities” (OTAs) that spring, Saban had the entire team line up for sprints. He blew his whistle, and everyone took off . . . except for Keith Traylor, a nose tackle who weighed at least 350 pounds. According to some of his teammates, Traylor—then a fourteen-year NFL veteran and winner of three Super Bowls—had a clause in his contract that relieved him of conditioning duties. So, instead of sprinting with the rest of the team, Traylor set off on a leisurely jog. When he realized that Saban was eyeing him, Traylor began to taunt him, yelling, “Hey, Nick! Hey, Nick!” Traylor knew, as the rest of his teammates did, that Saban hated being called “Nick” by his players. He wanted them to address him as “Coach” or “Coach Saban,” just as his college players always had.
Traylor kept yelling, “Hey, Nick!” Finally, Saban snapped and told him to shut the hell up and run.
Traylor responded: “Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to?” and ambled over to the sideline and stood and watched as his teammates ran their sprints.
Later that off-season, during an intra-team scrimmage, Zach Thomas, a hard-nosed and, at times, crusty nine-year NFL vet, got into a shouting match with one of the Dolphins’ assistant coaches. Thomas, because of his experience and talent, was a leader on the defense. He got a kick out of occasionally switching a Saban-called play in the defensive huddle, something his coach had begun to notice. Saban’s face contorted into rage when he heard Thomas yelling. He stopped practice and ran over to Thomas and told him to “shut the fuck up.” Thomas told Saban to “shut the fuck up” right back, then yelled, “I’m a grown-ass man!” As the two men went at it face-to-face, Thomas’s teammates sensed that the linebacker’s fury was placing him on the verge of doing something he would later regret, so they grabbed him by the shoulders and dragged him away as he continued to shout and point a finger at his head coach.
When asked why he took the Dolphins job, Saban says: “I was offered several NFL jobs that I didn’t take. I really liked Wayne. I thought, ‘These are the right people, the right place, the right franchise, and the right time.’ ”
The perks that came along with it weren’t too bad, either. Saban arrived in Miami like some sort of potentate. He hitched a ride to South Florida on Huizenga’s private plane, then hopped on his new boss’s helicopter, which landed on the Dolphins’ practice field. That summer, Saban and Terry bought a $6.7 million house in the same Fort Lauderdale neighborhood in which Huizenga lived. The site of the home had apparently once been the hideout of the Al Capone lieutenant “Machine Gun” Jack McGurn, who supposedly planned the infamous 1929 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.
The Sabans also spent a vacation week with the Huizengas, cruising the Mediterranean on the billionaire’s yacht. On that trip, Saban visited Croatia, the first time he had laid eyes on his family’s country of origin. Huizenga later told a reporter that one morning during the trip he awoke at 6 a.m. to get in a workout and found Saban in the yacht’s office watching film. Huizenga was delighted.
The Dolphins owner also lavished his coach with almost anything he wanted, football-wise. He built Saban a $10 million practice bubble, though in the end, it would be used rather sparingly. Saban was allowed to hire as many assistant coaches as he needed (he had more than twenty of them at one point) and was authorized to pay them top dollar—his offensive and defensive coordinators would make $830,000 each, and some of the position coaches would pull in as much as $400,000. Saban’s own $4.5 million salary made the rookie head coach one of the highest paid in the league. (With perks, Saban’s annual salary was closer to $5 million.)
Huizenga also made good on his promise to provide Saban with the final say on all hiring matters—coaching, personnel, and staff. General manager Rick Spielman was nudged out and former New Orleans Saints general manager Randy Mueller was brought in, with the foreknowledge, of course, that he would be a GM in name only. Saban even had a say in the hiring of the Dolphins broadcast team of Jimmy Cefalo and Joe Rose, two former Dolphin players.
Saban, as he had told Bertman, had everything he wanted. Now all he had to do was completely turn around an NFL franchise.
That would be more difficult than he initially realized. Wannstedt had left “a loose ship that had spun completely out of control,” says one former Dolphins staffer who worked for both Wannstedt and Saban. The team had finished an ugly 4-12 in 2004. Neither of the previous two drafts had yielded an established starter, and with its salary cap nearly maxed out, the team had little financial wiggle room to improve via free agency. An upgrade through the draft didn’t seem likely, either: The Dolphins had no second- or third-round picks in 2005.
Saban quickly hired Scott Linehan as his offensive coordinator. Linehan had led the explosive offense of the Minnesota Vikings for three years, and faced the challenge of trying to replicate that on a Dolphins team that had serious questions at quarterback. In college, a team could sometimes get away with a mediocre quarterback if it excelled in other areas, like the offensive line and defense. For the most part, that wasn’t the case in the NFL, and the Dolphins appeared to have something less than mediocrity at its most important position. Gus Frerotte and A. J. Feeley were the only two established veterans on the roster. Feeley was merely a competent backup, though he’d been acquired from the Philadelphia Eagles the year before for the Dolphins’ second-round pick in the 2005 draft. Frerotte was an eleven-year veteran whose best years—and they were never that great—were behind him.
The problems on offense were minor in comparison to the potential ones on defense. The Dolphins were old on that side of the ball. Eight of the eleven starters—including Zach Thomas, Jason Taylor, and Junior Seau, the team’s three big-name linebackers—were thirty or older. Saban had decided to make a big change in the defensive scheme that year, switching from a base 4-3 defense to a hybrid 3-4, something that would require patience and focus.
The age of the defense and the scheme transition made the job of the Dolphins’ defensive coordinator seem unappetizing to some. Saban’s reputation for being especially hard on his defensive coordinators didn’t help, either. Three men declined Saban’s offer to coach the position—despite the extremely high pay—before Saban finally hired Richard Smith, with whom he’d worked at the Oilers sixteen years before.
The enormity of the task of turning around the Dolphins, coupled with the pressures of being a first-time head coach in the NFL, seemed to cause an already obsessive and uptight Saban to become even more tightly cinched. By taking on the dual roles of head coach and personnel chief, he’d perhaps bitten off more than he could chew. As a college coach, recruiting and coaching could be, at times, separated. In the NFL, figuring out the personnel puzzle was an ongoing issue. Saban first had to scout his own players to see what he had. Though he had little cap money at his disposal, he still had to look at free agents and potential trade targets on the other thirty-one teams. And, of course, he had to get up to speed on the crop of college players who had entered the 2005 draft. (The Dolphins would recoup a few draft picks through some predraft trades.)I
Four months into his Dolphins tenure, Saban had not found the time to decorate his office. It had a desk, a video machine for watching tape, a pile of notebooks, stacked cardboard boxes that contained his handwritten journals and scouting reports going back to his assistant coaching days, and a picture of him playing golf with Tiger Woods. “He could have had forty-hour days and not been able to fix what needed to be fixed,” says a former Dolphins staffer. “He didn’t have time to exhale. The stress level was really building in that first year.”
That stress soon became manifest. He reportedly exploded at a young staffer for getting the wrong kind of Little Debbie Oatmeal Cream Pies. (The staffer had purchased boxes of Little Debbies instead of the individually wrapped ones he preferred.) An equipment manager, after saying “good morning” to Saban one day, was instructed by a Saban lieutenant never to speak to him unless first spoken to because Saban wanted to concentrate on football.
Of course, it didn’t help that Saban no longer enjoyed the counsel of the man who could have helped him navigate his first year in the NFL. Belichick was now not only a fellow NFL coach, he was a division rival. The two men had remained close since the Cleveland years. They’d gone to concerts together, seeing Bon Jovi, Elton John, and Ringo Starr. Belichick’s son had attended Saban’s summer football camp at Michigan State. Terry hung an oil painting by Belichick’s father in their new Fort Lauderdale home. Belichick had visited Saban in Baton Rouge as recently as the week after LSU’s national title—the two had pored over film and drawn up plays together. Those days and meetings were over, at least for now. The two men rarely talked during Saban’s years with the Dolphins. (Belichick, when asked by the media what he thought about Saban’s arrival in the NFL, rather dryly replied: “Two Croatians in the same division. You don’t see that every day.” He didn’t elaborate much more.)
Saban battled early on to get his players to buy in to his process and focus on the details. When he spotted offensive tackle Vernon Carey wearing a baseball cap sideways on the sidelines during a preseason game, he told him to straighten it out because Carey, in his estimation, “looked like a chump and not a champ.” When star receiver Chris Chambers told a newspaper that his goal was to score a touchdown in every game, Saban publicly chastised him during a press conference, describing goals like that as “clutter” and telling him instead to “focus on the next catch” and let the numbers follow. Crowder remembers one day early in his rookie season when he walked into a small bathroom set aside for the media in the Dolphins’ complex. “I went in and there was Saban,” he recalls. “It was just me and him. It’s silent, but I feel like I have to say something because he’s my coach and he’s just drafted me. All I know about him at this point is that he loved Terry. He was always saying, ‘Me and Terry’ this and ‘Me and Terry’ that. So I say, ‘Hey, Coach, how’s your wife?’ He stares at me with that stoic face and says, ‘She’ll be a lot better if you can cover backs on third down.’ I looked at him to see if he was joking, but he still had that stoic face. He didn’t laugh. I washed my hands and looked at him again. No change. And I left.”
Saban’s most publicized run-in with a player at the time happened in July. In the 2005 NFL Supplemental Draft, the Dolphins chose Manny Wright, a 6'5", 330-pound defensive lineman. He was a risky pick—he’d struggled with his weight, had academic problems, and had been arrested for various misdemeanors during his college career at USC. The physical potential was there, though. Saban viewed him as a project and took him under his wing, just as he had done with some of the more troubled players at LSU. “Saban gave Manny as much attention as he did anyone else on the team,” says Kevin O’Neill, the Dolphins’ trainer at the time. “Manny was given every opportunity to turn things around.”
He didn’t. Wright remained undisciplined and gained weight during training camp. Saban finally lost patience with him at one practice. Wright had walked onto the field without a helmet or pads, and he was wearing the wrong shoes. Saban exploded and yanked off his straw hat and pointed to his head. The incident lasted all of seven seconds.
To most on the team, it was no big deal. “Wright was a baby, one of those players who was lazy and overweight,” says Heath Evans, a fullback for the Dolphins. “Most coaches would have made him cry.” Saban himself later described the incident to the media as “C-minus butt chewing.”
The problem was that there was a television camera present, which caught not only the “butt chewing,” but also Wright wiping away tears as he walked back to the locker room. The footage led the sports coverage on local news shows, with smirking sports anchors referring to Saban as “the Nicktator.” The glee with which they reported the incident was the first visible sign of the chasm that had begun to grow between the Miami media and the Dolphins’ new head coach.
Saban had done little in his career to that point to endear himself to the media. Some of his difficulties with the press had to do with his natural shyness, but a lot of it was about control: Saban liked to exert as much of it as possible over any press conference. He couldn’t control everything, however, and when he believed he had lost control, he could become a bit of a bully. When a media member asked what Saban thought was a stupid question (and he seemed to think that many of them were), he would sigh and shuffle his feet, then look around incredulously at other press folks in the room, with a cocked eyebrow and a sardonic smile, as if asking them: “Who is this buffoon?” In that way, he turned the other media members into silent conspirators. At times in the past, they seemed to be flattered by being drawn in as accomplices. Many members of the media seemed to desire the same thing Saban’s players did: his respect and adulation.
At LSU, Saban lorded over the local media, to the point where, at various times, several of them stood up and clapped for him in appreciation and one even asked him to autograph a poster. The Miami media horde wasn’t quite so enraptured, though. They were hardened vets in a much bigger city who had covered Super Bowl–winning coaches Don Shula and Jimmy Johnson. Saban’s attitude toward them didn’t help matters.
His relationship with the media in Miami had actually gotten off to a good start. The media, like the fans of the team, expressed optimism that Saban could turn around a franchise that had been stuck in a rut for years. The press had anointed him “Saint Nick” because of his Christmas Day hire. It would be the high point of their relationship with him.
After his introductory press conference in Miami, Saban didn’t speak to the media again for two and a half weeks. He then clamped down on the media’s access to the Dolphins facility and didn’t allow them to use the media workroom except for what he deemed as special occasions. As he’d done at LSU, he also restricted media access to his assistant coaches—they needed his permission to talk. (Even Mueller, the general manager, who had worked as an analyst at ESPN before joining the Dolphins, had to run any media requests by Saban.) Saban tried to cut off the traditional Friday player interviews until the NFL intervened and told him he had to allow them. Saban once told a group of writers that if he saw an anonymous source quoted, he would root out the person and fire him, and that it would be the media’s fault.
In the end, the antagonism and attempts to restrict access would backfire on Saban: No member of the local media would come to his defense when he needed them the most.
The most significant off-the-field incident for the 2005 Dolphins, however, went undiscovered by the media for many years.
Jeno James, an offensive lineman, played college football at Auburn and was drafted by the Carolina Panthers in 2000. He signed with the Dolphins in 2004 as a free agent. The 6'4", 320-pounder was soft-spoken, well liked by both his teammates and coaches, and was a key member of the Dolphins’ offensive line.
Leading up to the first “two a day” practice of the Dolphins’ 2005 training camp, James says that he had not been feeling well. “I didn’t eat anything in the three days before we started. I shouldn’t have been out there practicing, but with the pressures of the NFL, you felt like you had to be out there.”
James made it through both practices in the searing South Florida summer heat. After finishing off the second practice with a set of sprints, the team headed back to the locker room. “I don’t remember much after that,” says James.
What happened next, say James’s teammates, was one of the most frightening scenes they had ever witnessed in football. While walking in a small hallway that led to the locker room, James suddenly collapsed. “He was on the floor, this massive guy, his eyes in the back of his head, convulsing and vomiting up this gross green stuff,” says Evans.II Then Saban walked in. “We all saw him,” says Crowder. “Saban looked briefly down at Jeno, stutter-stepped, and then walked right over him and kept going and didn’t look back.”
James remained on the floor, his body shaking uncontrollably. When the medical staff eventually showed up, “they were panicking,” says a former Dolphins staffer. James was dying right there on the floor. “The only thing I remember was when they put the paddles on me to bring me back,” says James.
A medevac helicopter was called in and instructed to land in the back of the facility, to keep the news from the media, but a medevac helicopter turned out to be a hard thing to hide. When the media asked what had happened, they were told that James had suffered a “heat-related illness.” Nothing else was said or reported at the time.
James was flown to Broward General Hospital. “When I woke up, Saban was there. He was one of the first people I saw,” says James. “I don’t remember if he said anything. I was still impaired, still fighting for my life. I was happy he was there, though. But that was before I heard what happened.”
On a Miami radio show in 2012, Saban was asked about the incident. His account differed somewhat from that of his players and staff. “At the time, no one really realized that Jeno was probably having as tough a time as he was. Immediately thereafter, I was with Jeno for several hours, Jason [Taylor] was too, and very, very concerned and caring. It was after practice and I was just walking upstairs, a lot of guys lying around kinda tired, you know. And I came back down as soon as I heard Jeno was having an issue and a problem,” he said. “Everybody has their little, sort of, perception of how things happen and whether they look at the negative or positive side of it.”
A few hours after James collapsed, Saban called a team meeting and attempted to explain his actions. “He said, ‘For anyone saying anything about the way I handled the situation, I am not a doctor. It was best for the doctors to handle this,’ ” says Crowder. “I was like, ‘I’m not a doctor, either, but I would’ve stopped.’ The worst part about it is the old cliché. He literally and figuratively stepped over a guy.”
Evans says that in his speech to the team, Saban also explained that if a leader doesn’t know the answer right away, he has to go somewhere by himself and regroup. “He was trying to appear like he was in control,” says Evans. “I thought, Man, that’s fine when it comes to a decision about who’s going to be your quarterback, but what about natural human compassion?” Evans says that Saban didn’t lose the team that night, but that he “definitely put a dent in it. Trust is what he was selling.”
As James gradually recovered in the hospital, his teammates started to call and fill him in on what had happened. “You never want to hear that another man walked over your body like that, especially after you put out so much effort and hard work. That concerned me,” says James, who now works in construction in Alabama. “We never really talked about it as far as I know. My mind was all over the place. He may have asked me if I was okay, but I’m not one hundred percent sure. We never had much of a relationship after that.”
The Dolphins were picked to finish last in the AFC East in the 2005 season. Their play in the preseason seemed to confirm that prognosis. They went 1-4 and averaged only a little more than thirteen points a game. The offense was booed heartily by the home crowd in the last preseason game.
The regular season started with a bang, however. On September 11, in 90-degree weather, the Dolphins beat a very good Denver Broncos team, 34–10.III Travis Daniels, the rookie from LSU, had an interception, and Jason Taylor, who had begun training camp concerned about his new roving role in Saban’s 3-4 defense, returned a fumble eighty-five yards for a touchdown. The players were ecstatic, especially given what they’d been through during that off-season and the season before. Saban, channeling Rosen, immediately began warning them about “relief syndrome,” telling the media that it was “poisonous” and “lethal,” and that when “you have something good happen, it’s harder to stay focused, to pay attention to detail. You have a tendency to want to take a break, or expect that ‘I did well once, so I should take it easy now.’ ”
His warnings went unheeded. The Dolphins proceeded to lose four of their next five games, and they were 2-4 heading into a game against the New Orleans Saints, a game that involved a strange twist of fate for the Dolphins’ rookie coach.
Because of Hurricane Katrina (which had devastated New Orleans and much of Louisiana right before the season), the Saints were playing their home game against the Dolphins in Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge, taking Saban back to his old home. His LSU tenure was the biggest topic in the week leading up to the game. Saban admitted to the media that he still watched every LSU game on television.
The fans on that Sunday in Tiger Stadium greeted Saban warmly. His old friends Charlie Weems and Richard Gill watched the game from the Miami sideline. The Dolphins played one of their best games of the year, defeating the Saints, 21–6. When the game was over, Saban came out of his usual shell, signing autographs, kissing women on the cheek, and hugging some of his former LSU players who were on the Saints. “I’m in pro football but I still love college football and I love LSU,” Saban said in his postgame press conference.
Two games later, Saban had another emotional reunion when the defending Super Bowl champion Patriots and Belichick came to Miami. Saban and Belichick chatted briefly before the game, which New England won on a late Tom Brady touchdown pass, 23–16. The loss dropped the Dolphins to 3-6, but unlike the previous year, Miami had fought hard in every one of those games.
That fight came to an abrupt end the following week. Against a weak Cleveland team, the Dolphins got trounced, 22–0. The scene in the Dolphins’ locker room after the game was ugly: Jason Taylor went wild, slamming his shoulder pads against a locker. Saban went even wilder. His old friend Dennis Fryzel was in the locker room, and later told a newspaper that he froze when Saban started shouting, only managing a quick glance at the offensive line coach, Hudson Houck, who was “white as a ghost. . . . It was as close to a come-to-Jesus moment that I’ve ever seen with Nick. I wouldn’t want anybody I know in there. I was afraid to blink.”
The Dolphins’ record stood at 3-7. The Cleveland loss—their sixth in seven games—was the sort that can cause a season to completely unravel. The next week, in a moment of reflection, Saban told the Miami media that he was focused on “building a team for the future,” and not on the results. This was, of course, more Rosen-influenced talk, but the media interpreted it differently: They castigated Saban for giving up on the season.
Then a remarkable thing happened: The Dolphins started winning. They beat the Oakland Raiders. In a game against the Buffalo Bills, they fell behind, 23–3, in the fourth quarter but rallied to win, 24–23, on a fourth-down touchdown pass to Chambers with six seconds left in the game. (After that play, Saban screamed with joy on the sideline and punched the air with his fist.) They capped a six-game, season-ending winning streak with a win over the Patriots and Belichick. (The game didn’t mean much to the Patriots, who had already qualified for the playoffs, but still . . .) The Dolphins finished at 9-7, narrowly missing out on a spot in the playoffs. The season had taken off when the players bought in to what Saban was preaching. Saban had squeezed a winning season out of what was basically the same roster that had gone 4-12 the year before. “We were the hottest team in the league at the end of the season,” says Chambers.
Much of the team’s success was also due to the late-season excellence of a player on whom Saban had taken a big risk in the off-season. That player was Ricky Williams.
The year before Saban arrived in Miami, after Williams had tested positive for marijuana and “retired,” the running back had wandered the globe, living in a tent in Australia and spending a month at a yoga center in India. He studied holistic medicine and became a vegetarian (dropping twenty-five pounds off his sturdy frame in the process). He appeared to be done with football for good, then Saban contacted him and asked him to consider coming back to the team.
Saban, of course, had ample reason to want Williams back. Williams was a legitimate NFL star and, even though the Dolphins selected running back Ronnie Brown in the first round of the draft, Saban needed all of the offensive weapons he could get, especially because he lacked a legitimate franchise quarterback. There was more to it than that, though.
Williams, like Manny Wright, Shyrone Carey at LSU, and, later, Lane Kiffin at Alabama, became one of Saban’s reclamation projects, someone whom the normally hard-edged coach opened up to and attempted to influence and help. The difference was, of course, that Saban was no longer a college coach. Williams was already a man who had earned real money (he’d received an $8 million signing bonus with his first team, the Saints). In the pros, there were no scholarships that could be revoked, and Williams couldn’t be kicked off the team or suspended without going through the thick tangle of bureaucracy of the NFL Players Association, who would likely fight for his rights. In other words, Williams had to genuinely want to be helped.
It turned out that he did. Saban convinced Williams to come back and serve out his four-game suspension for his pot bust the year before. In successfully courting Williams, Saban had also correctly deduced the sentiments held by his players toward their former teammate. Some fans and media pundits had branded Williams as a quitter and had held him responsible for the 4-12 record in 2004. But his teammates had never held a grudge. “Ricky was a guy who cared about others, a genuinely loving, good man,” says Evans. Chambers felt the same way. “Ricky was an outstanding football player, sure,” he says. “But he was also a great teammate.” In fact, the move to bring Williams back actually elevated Saban’s status in the eyes of his players. “We saw what he was doing for Ricky,” says Crowder. “He really embraced him and took him under his wing. He gained respect for that.”
Saban had seen a bit of himself in Williams. The two men were similar in some fundamental ways, both shy introverts who believed they were misunderstood by the general public (Williams later admitted publicly that he had been diagnosed with social anxiety disorder). Though the manner in which they individually expressed those feelings—one became an uptight coach, the other a mystical wanderer—seemed to make for an odd pairing, the partnership was working. Then Williams found trouble again.
In early 2006, Williams failed another drug test. The punishment this time was a yearlong suspension, which left the Dolphins seriously hamstrung: They lost one of their best players for nothing in return—they now couldn’t even trade Williams for draft picks or another player. Yet, even then, Saban stuck by him, standing up for him, both publicly and privately, after the failed test, and repeatedly telling the media that he was one of his favorite players he’d ever coached. Their relationship didn’t end with Williams’s suspension, either. On the eve of the 2006 NFL Draft, Saban had Williams over to his house and the two men shared a pizza. Saban even blessed Williams’s temporary signing with the Canadian Football League’s Toronto Argonauts, where he played one injury-marred season.
In 2013, after he retired from the NFL, Williams applied for a job as the running back coach at Incarnate Word, a small FCS school in San Antonio. He asked Saban for a letter of recommendation. Saban went one step further: He offered him a job on his Alabama staff. Though Williams declined the surprise offer, he did end up getting the job at Incarnate Word, where he coached for one year.
The Dolphins entered the 2006 off-season in search of a franchise quarterback. (They cut Gus Frerotte in March, convinced he wasn’t the answer.) Saban had the option of drafting that quarterback, or to get him via a trade or free agency. Saban determined early on that there was no can’t-miss quarterback in the 2006 draft class (Vince Young and Matt Leinart were the headliners that year), so the Dolphins went shopping, and Saban ultimately made the decision that would play the biggest role in his NFL fate.
Two marquee quarterbacks happened to be available that year. The problem was that both were coming off significant injuries. Drew Brees, who’d been the starter for the San Diego Chargers since 2002, was made expendable when that franchise drafted Philip Rivers in 2004. Brees had started every game for the Chargers in 2005, but he tore the labrum and the rotator cuff in his throwing shoulder in the last game of the season. The Chargers had shown only mild interest in bringing him back.
Daunte Culpepper had been the starter for the Minnesota Vikings since 2000, and had averaged more than twenty-five touchdowns a year through 2004. His 2005 season had been a disaster, though. He threw just six touchdowns against twelve interceptions, and tore ligaments in his knee in his seventh—and last—game of the season. Though Culpepper was not a free agent, he had made it clear that he wanted to leave the Vikings.
So Saban had a choice. Chambers says it was pretty clear from the way Saban talked during the off-season that he preferred Brees. (Saban and Terry had dinner with Brees and his wife one night, and Saban came away very impressed.) The most alluring thing about Brees was that, unlike Culpepper, he was a free agent, which meant the Dolphins could get him without trading draft picks or players.
The injuries to both players, however, remained concerning. Saban and Randy Mueller flew to Birmingham to visit Brees as he rehabbed with the famed orthopedic surgeon James Andrews. Andrews told Saban that though there was no precedent for a quarterback with an injury like Brees’s returning to the game, he was confident that the quarterback would play again at a high level. Doctors were confident that Culpepper could return to form—there was positive precedent for a player with his injuries.
The Dolphins’ medical staff checked out both players as well, reaching out to various injury experts for second opinions. Culpepper appeared to be further along in his recovery than Brees was. The Miami medical staff was hesitant about Brees. Saban still wanted him, though. “We actually had a deal worked out with Brees,” he says. “But the medical people failed him on the physical.”
Going with Culpepper was ultimately judged to be the less risky move. In the end—as with all calls pertaining to personnel—it was Saban who made the final decision. It was the prudent one at the time. History, though, wouldn’t judge it so kindly.
In July of that off-season, Saban was invited to have dinner with President George W. Bush at Joe’s Stone Crab, a legendary restaurant in Miami Beach. He declined. The decision, he insisted, wasn’t political.IV “I was also invited to play Augusta by a member right after the Masters that year. I didn’t go,” Saban says. “I can’t change the schedules of 150 people to play golf or have dinner with the president. How does that benefit the team?”
A friend of Saban says that he believes Saban wouldn’t have found it that interesting to have dinner with a president. “And, anyway, he’s so focused on football that he probably thought Clinton was still president at the time.”
Throughout the preseason, Saban told the media that he was “very pleased” with Culpepper’s progress, and that he would be ready for the season-opening game. Privately, though, he was growing concerned about the man he’d chosen to be his starting quarterback and, by default, a leader on the team. In practices, Culpepper seemed to be playing carefully, like a man who was thinking about his injury, or worse, was still hurt.
That preseason, the Dolphins became media darlings. The narrative was not too difficult to construct: The team had finished with six straight wins the previous season, and Culpepper, presumably, would provide a significant upgrade to the quarterback position. Both Sports Illustrated and ESPN the Magazine picked the Dolphins to go to the Super Bowl. While those picks were certainly calculated ones that were made, at least in part, to help sell more magazines, they did reflect the buzz that the team and its second-year coach had generated, and the expectations that came with it.
Miami was presented with a golden opportunity to live up to those expectations in the NFL’s kickoff game against the defending Super Bowl champion Steelers, who would be without their injured starting quarterback, Ben Roethlisberger. With the game in Pittsburgh—just an hour and a half from Fairmont—Saban and Terry requested seventy-eight tickets for friends and family, including Saban’s mother, Mary.
What they witnessed wasn’t very pretty. Culpepper was sacked three times and threw two interceptions, the last of which effectively ended the game when it was returned for a touchdown with three minutes left to play in a 28–17 loss.
The Dolphins lost two of their next three games. Culpepper’s sack rate—he’d suffered twenty-one of them in the team’s first four games—was alarming. He was clearly not the same player he once was, and his lack of mobility was hurting the team. The Dolphins were 1-3 heading into a game against Belichick in New England.
According to the players, up until that week Saban had the Dolphins’ locker room on his side. Though Saban was still prickly and cold, his players admired his coaching abilities. He was, on the one hand, of the old school, a fiery coach who preferred a smashmouth, midwestern style of football. In other ways, he was as innovative—especially off the field—as they came. He had Rosen working on the players’ mental games. The players did martial arts in the off-season, well before most other teams ever thought of that as a legitimate training method. He hired a nutritionist for the team. He also minimized hitting in practice, believing that tactic kept players healthier, an ethos the NFL would turn into a mandate for all teams a few years later.V
Most of the players also believed that Saban was making them better. Chambers remembers a pep talk he received from Saban after his slow start to the 2005 season. “He called me into his office and told me he believed in me and thought I was one of the best players on the team,” says Chambers, who made the Pro Bowl that season for the first and only time in his career. “He put it all on my shoulders. He took me to another level.”
Crowder says that he and the younger guys on the team “loved Saban. He maximized my ability and taught me the game. I played for Charlie Strong, Dom Capers, and Will Muschamp, and I’ve never seen a defense like Saban’s. He takes advantage of every weakness. We’d keep offenses confused, shifting from zone to man on the fly, or making it look like we were in zone when we were really in man coverage.” Crowder says Saban preferred to have smart players on defense, but that he could get his points across to all players, regardless of IQ. “He could even get the dumb guys going in the right direction. He’d make it simpler for them, with some analytics. He’d tell them that, say, the Jets averaged 120 yards rushing, but that if we kept them to 80 yards, we’d win. That would give them something to hang their hats on.”
Jason Taylor, in his second year as the roving linebacker in Saban’s 3-4 defense, had 13.5 sacks, 9 forced fumbles, and 2 interceptions that were returned for touchdowns, and was named the 2006 AP Defensive Player of the Year. Even Heath Evans, who seems to bear little goodwill toward Saban, was impressed by his coach’s thoroughness. “One thing I really respected about Nick Saban was the fact that he knew everything that was going on with the team,” he says. “He knew the defense, the offense, and the special teams better than any other coach on the team. That was unusual.”VI
Even the earlier incidents between Saban and some of his players were taken with a grain of salt. The Jeno James episode was still viewed as pretty horrific, but it was in the past, and some chalked it up to their coach just panicking in the heat of the moment. James was still on the team, still playing hard. Zach Thomas was an intense player, and his run-ins with his coaches were just seen as part of his mien, and they seemed to fire him up and make him a better player. When Keith Traylor and others started to call Saban “Nick” just to get his goat, their teammates saw it for what it was. “That’s just what millionaire assholes do,” says Crowder.
The week before the game against the Patriots, everything began to change.
Daunte Culpepper was one of the biggest off-season signings in the Dolphins’ history. Because of his reputation and his excellent career to that point, he had the respect of his teammates, and he was a team leader. His new Dolphins jersey quickly became a bestseller among fans. Strangely, though, when the Dolphins had held the press conference to announce the signing of their new starting quarterback, Culpepper was nowhere to be found. Instead, Saban spoke for him, hewing to his policy of not allowing newly signed players to speak to the media. Saban spoke for half an hour and reported that Culpepper was “thrilled” to be a member of the Dolphins.
Culpepper played hard for Saban, and his coach publicly backed him during those first four games of the season. The week of the Patriots game, though, Saban had finally had enough. Culpepper’s name mysteriously showed up on the Dolphins’ injury report, with an unspecified shoulder ailment, though he seemed no different, physically, from how he had been at the beginning of the season.
On the Friday before the game, the Dolphins held a practice in their rarely used practice bubble. When Saban called for the first-team offense to huddle up, Culpepper made his way onto the field but found the team’s second-string quarterback, Joey Harrington, already standing in the huddle. Culpepper quickly figured out what had happened—he’d been benched without any warning. “Then he started going crazy,” says Crowder. Culpepper set off toward Saban, who stopped practice. As he got closer, several of Culpepper’s teammates grabbed him. Then Saban started making his way toward Culpepper, who shouted: “You better get your short motherfucking ass away from me, you lying motherfucker. Why didn’t you come and tell me like a man?” He then walked off the field as the walls of the practice bubble reverberated with the sounds of a season—and, in the end, a pro coaching career—petering out.
Culpepper never played another snap for the Dolphins. Harrington, though well liked by his teammates because of his easygoing demeanor, was by no means a star quarterback. He’d been thoroughly mediocre during his four previous years with the Detroit Lions before he’d been traded to the Dolphins for a late-round draft pick to back up Culpepper. The Miami offense had to be simplified for him, which didn’t inspire the confidence of his teammates.
More important, though, one of the team’s leaders had been cut off. Culpepper checked out completely after that day in the bubble, and he didn’t hide the fact that he now hated his coach and his team. Saban had lost the locker room for good, and likely realized at that moment that the professional game was no longer for him. “From that point on, everything got way more anal,” says Crowder.
On November 4, 2006, the University of Alabama Crimson Tide football team lost a game to Mississippi State at home. At the time, this was viewed as an almost unpardonable sin for a school with the history and pride of Alabama. The next day, Saban’s Dolphins beat up the previously undefeated Chicago Bears, 31–13, which improved their record to 2-6. On that Monday, a newspaper in Louisiana first floated the idea of Nick Saban becoming Alabama’s next head coach. No mention was made of the uncomfortable irony that Alabama was still coached by Mike Shula, the son of the Dolphins’ iconic former coach Don Shula.
The victory over the Bears was the beginning of a four-game winning streak for the Dolphins, which briefly breathed some life into an otherwise moribund season. On Thanksgiving Day, the Dolphins stood at 5-6.
A few days after Thanksgiving, Alabama fired Mike Shula, who had lost to Auburn in the Iron Bowl, his last game as the school’s coach. (The Iron Bowl is the annual football showdown between the state’s two large public universities.) The Saban-to-Alabama rumors started to gain some traction in the press, so much so that Saban issued a statement on the day Shula was fired, denying any interest in the job. He said he was “flattered” to be considered and asked: “Why would I have left that [the LSU job] if I was going to be interested in other college jobs?”
When asked about Saban and the rumors, Huizenga told a Miami paper: “I’m convinced he’s on the right track. I like his style. I think he’s our guy, I really do. I’m expecting big things.”
When a reporter asked Sexton about the Alabama rumors, the agent simply replied: “It’s just not true.”
Charlie Weems at LSU, however, says he knew something was up. “That fall, Jimmy called me and wanted to know if there was any way Nick could come back. It was a serious question. I told Jimmy, ‘No.’ But I knew from that call that Nick wasn’t happy, and that if Jimmy was calling us, he was going to call other folks next.”
In the twelfth game of the 2006 season, the Dolphins lost to the Jacksonville Jaguars to fall to 5-7. Any hope of continuing a late-season surge and somehow making the playoffs was dashed. The following week, the 9-3 Patriots visited Miami, and Saban coached one of his finest NFL games. The Dolphins won, 21–0, and limited the Patriots’ superstar quarterback, Tom Brady, to just seventy-eight yards passing. After the game, Belichick took the unusual step of walking into the Dolphins’ locker room and meeting with Saban in his office. The victory evened Saban’s record against his mentor at 2-2. (Total points in those four games: Saban seventy-five, Belichick sixty-nine.) It would be Saban’s last win as an NFL coach. The Dolphins lost the last three games of the season to finish 6-10.
The 2006 season remains Saban’s only losing season in his twenty-one years as a head coach.VII
In December 2006, nearly every other day Saban denied being interested in the Alabama job. He issued flat-out denials on December 1 and 4. When he issued another one on the seventh, the saga did indeed seem to be over: Alabama appeared to have landed West Virginia coach Rich Rodriguez, but he declined the job the next day, and Saban went back to his denials. On December 10, he told the media: “I have no intentions of going anywhere.” He issued more denials on the eleventh and twelfth.
Huizenga was also kept busy with questions about his coach’s future. He told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel on December 4 that he went to Saban’s office and asked him about the rumors. “I walked in and said, ‘Tell me.’ He said, ‘No, I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying right here.’ And he said, ‘If I was going to go somewhere sometime, I won’t go until this job is finished, and we haven’t finished our job here.’ That makes me feel good.”
On December 11, Huizenga seemed fed up with the questions. When asked by a reporter yet again about the rumors, he replied: “I think the issue is dead.” Huizenga had reason to feel confident. The self-made billionaire was accustomed to winning these battles, both in business and with the Dolphins. After all, he’d ushered Don Shula into retirement and talked Jimmy Johnson out of retirement, and he’d been the one who’d wooed Saban from a great job at LSU.
Despite the denials, Saban was indeed considering the Alabama job. He’d been, of course, talking to Chuck Moore, the nephew of Mal Moore, and telling him that he didn’t much like the pro game anymore. Saban had also been in touch with others. “I talked to Nick and Terry and Jimmy on multiple occasions once they focused on Alabama, before he took the job,” says Weems. “They were pumping me for information, asking me what I thought.” Weems says he thinks they were genuinely interested in his view of the Alabama job, but were also trying to gauge what the reaction would be at LSU if he indeed took it.
Derek Dooley, the Dolphins’ tight end coach who had been with Saban since the LSU days, says he never had any doubt about what Saban would do. “I knew the minute the rumors were coming out about Alabama,” he says. “I just knew. We were walking after practice one day and he brought up that Alabama had called him and he didn’t know how to handle it. He made every indication to me that he was going to stay, but I knew then that he was gone.”
Saban’s biggest reason for his continued denials, he says, was his commitment to the Dolphins. “I couldn’t tell people what was on my mind and still coach my team without distractions.”
Then, on December 21, Saban uttered what would become the most famous words to ever come out of his mouth, ones that would later haunt him. “I guess I have to say it,” he told a roomful of reporters. “I’m not going to be the Alabama coach.”
Saban had met with his players before the Patriots game and told them to ignore the rumors because he was staying. “We believed him,” says Crowder. In retrospect, Crowder realizes there were some warning signs. “Saban hated losing, just hated it,” says Crowder. “And whenever we got on the plane after a game, he would open his computer and start watching film of the game. He and Terry always sat in the front seat, with his coordinators right behind him. But after the Colts loss [in the last game of the season], he wasn’t looking at film. He was on his cell phone, and he was smiling and laughing. People thought it was weird. We talked about it. And then as soon as the plane landed, he was back on his cell phone and smiling again.”
On December 30, Huizenga still seemed to believe that Saban wasn’t leaving. He told the Miami Herald: “If he didn’t stay, it would be huge news to me.”
Not too long after that, Saban was holed up in his house, trapped by his own anguish, with another major career decision at hand.
As a football coach—in games, on the practice field, in meetings, and on the recruiting trail—Saban is as decisive as they come. He makes difficult choices in a timely, forthright manner—without self-doubt—then moves on and lives with the consequences. That is not the case when it comes to his career. The decision about whether to stay with the Dolphins or leave and take the Alabama job was perhaps the most agonizing one in a career filled with many others like it. “When you make a coaching decision, you can be decisive because, while you don’t control the outcome, you do control the processes that go into the outcome, the preparation of the team and the staff,” says Muschamp, who was also an assistant at Miami under Saban. “Career decisions are different. There are a lot of unknowns that are out of your control, and you don’t really know how things will change and how different they will be. I think that’s what’s frustrating for Nick.”
Saban is also extremely loyal, to his players and staff and, in most cases, his administrators. He genuinely liked Huizenga and wanted to do well by him, just as he had liked Bertman, Emmert, and the rest of the LSU folks. Though he may not have felt terribly loyal to President McPherson at Michigan State, he did feel devoted to the team, some of the trustees, and the community. Adding to Saban’s agony is his sensitivity. He knew, given his somewhat strained relationship with the Miami media—coupled with his adamant public denials—that if he took the Alabama job, he would be flayed. “I stayed up two nights in a row all night, worrying and talking on the phone,” Saban says. “People don’t realize that these kind of decisions aren’t ninety-nine to one. They’re fifty-two to forty-eight. There are personal and professional implications.”
Finally, on New Year’s Day, Huizenga realized that Saban was seriously considering the Alabama job. Just as he had done with Bertman at LSU, Saban kept Huizenga—who did his best to convince his coach to stay—in the loop, talking to him on the phone and meeting him in person. Saban once again had leverage: Sexton had smartly inserted a clause in his Dolphins contract that allowed him to take a college coaching job without any financial penalty.
Finally, on January 3, 2007, Saban told his boss that he was leaving. Huizenga would later tell the media: “I’m not upset. I love Nick Saban.” With the media mob growing outside his house, Saban was unable to get to the Dolphins’ facility to meet with his coaches, so he had a staffer gather them together in an office. Via speakerphone, Saban told them he was leaving. His players were scattered around the country, done for the season. He reached a few by cell phone, and eventually wrote them letters.
“It wasn’t about the money,” Saban says. This time, he could say that with a straight face: His eight-year, $32 million contract with Alabama actually worked out to about a $1 million per year pay cut. “It was just in my gut. I figured that if I was going to coach, I should be happy doing it, and that for me comes in college. I decided it was the best thing for me, my family, my future, and my well-being.”
That happiness had a lot to do with control and power. Once again, by leaving one football program for another, he gained more of both, becoming the embodiment of Emerson’s belief that true power “resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of a gulf, in the darting to an aim.” Huizenga had given Saban about as much control as an NFL coach could have. Still, it paled in comparison to the power he would have back in the college game at Alabama. The NFL was full of external forces: a team’s position in the draft, the salary cap, agents, and contracts loaded with special individual provisions. Owners in the NFL had, somewhat paradoxically, decided to run their league as a quasi-socialist enterprise to make more money for themselves. The worst teams were rewarded with the highest draft picks and the easiest schedules. The salary cap evened the playing field. It was almost as if the powers that be in the NFL were aiming for general mediocrity, which was a word—and a state of being—that Saban loathed. “In college, you are the general manager, coach, and head recruiter,” he says. “You can work and develop and do more things to impact your future and control your destiny.”
So Saban got on that plane with Moore, bound for Tuscaloosa, seeking happiness. It was a perfectly legitimate thing to do, and is the reason most people seek, then take, new jobs. The media—both locally and nationally—and Dolphins fans and some players didn’t quite see it that way. The Miami Herald called him a “loser” and a “weasel.” Other local outlets called him “Tricky Nicky,” “Nick $aban,” and a “liar.” John Feinstein, writing in the Washington Post, said Saban was “the worst person in sports.” A Cox News Service writer colorfully described him as “an impulsive scamp.” Even esteemed former Dolphins coach Don Shula got in a stinger, telling a newspaper: “My reaction is that Saban in two years was 15-17. I don’t think it will be any great loss. . . . He has run away from a challenge.” (Of course, Saban was replacing his son at Alabama.) Saban would later tell a Miami newspaper that he felt “victimized” by the reaction to his departure, and that “the circumstances changed and I made a different decision. That’s not lying.”
Some Dolphins players were less concerned with the perceived lying than with the fact that he just left. “Looking back, he was always preaching to us about overcoming adversity,” says one former player. “You’d think a guy like that wouldn’t quit. Did he quit? Well, he didn’t have a two-year contract, did he? He wasn’t successful, so he decided to leave.”
A few days later, Saban’s office was almost completely cleared. The only things left were boxes of Little Debbies and Red Man chewing tobacco.
In the end, opinions vary about Saban’s NFL career. For some, he was a failure, just another college coach who couldn’t hack it in the pros. He had a losing record overall. His famed “Process” didn’t quite work as well with professional players. His tenure was, at best, mediocre, a shade of gray that is now viewed, in retrospect, as an indelible black mark because of the impetuous and—in the eyes of many—dishonest manner in which he left.
Others argue that Saban was the victim of untenable circumstances, stuck in a franchise that was in the throes of an unavoidable death spiral, and that the job that he did in Miami—particularly in his first year—constitutes some of the finest coaching of his career. “I look back and think it’s unfair to say he couldn’t coach there,” says Dooley. “He went 9-7 that first year with a below-average team. You don’t do that if you’re not a very good football coach.” Indeed, the year after Saban left—with many of the same players—the Dolphins went 1-15, avoiding the ignominy of a winless season by beating the Baltimore Ravens in overtime in the third-to-last game of the season.
The answer to how Saban’s NFL fling should be judged is likely found in some middle space. Perhaps, everything comes down to one single decision: choosing Culpepper over Brees. It remains one of the great “what-ifs?” of Saban’s career. Brees threw for twenty-six touchdowns and led the Saints to the NFC Championship game in 2006, and is now considered a future Hall of Famer. Had he become a Dolphin, would Saban have ever made it to Alabama? Would Saban still be in the NFL? Personnel mistakes in the NFL were deadly. If a highly rated recruit in college—the equivalent of, say, Culpepper—didn’t pan out, it wasn’t necessarily a season-killer. If you recruited in college as well as Saban did, there was always the next guy, ready to step up.
Another question has remained ever since he left: Despite his subsequent mind-boggling success at Alabama (or, perhaps, because of it), is there still some part of him that aches to redeem himself in the NFL? All Saban has to do is look at Pete Carroll and his old friend Bill Belichick for two examples of coaches who at first failed in the NFL and succeeded in the highest way possible by becoming Super Bowl champions.
Saban himself has admitted that the Dolphins years did not go like he wanted them to, when it came to his coaching and the way he handled the situation at the end. Big Nick would not have approved: His son left some spots on the car.
I. In that draft, Saban relied on familiarity: In the first round he took Auburn running back Ronnie Brown, whom he’d coached against while at LSU. The second-round pick, Matt Roth, was a defensive end on the Iowa team that beat Saban’s LSU squad in the Capital One Bowl. In the third round, he took Florida’s Channing Crowder, another player against whom he’d coached. He took Travis Daniels, one of his defensive backs at LSU, in the fourth round. With his last pick, he chose Kevin Vickerson, a defensive tackle from Michigan State who’d been coached by Bobby Williams, who was now on Saban’s staff at Miami.
II. It was Evans who first told this story publicly, on a Miami radio show, in 2011.
III. The Broncos would finish 13-3 that year and play in the AFC Championship game.
IV. Saban has never spoken publicly about his political affiliations, though it is worth noting that Joe Manchin—one of his childhood friends, and the godfather to his son, Nicholas—is the former Democratic governor, and a current U.S. senator, from West Virginia. Saban has donated money to his campaigns in the past.
V. On a few occasions Saban has spoken about what is inarguably the biggest issue in football today: the short- and long-term effects of head trauma on football players, which, of course, includes degenerative brain disease. Saban continues to this day to minimize hitting in practices. At Alabama, two team doctors evaluate all potential head injuries. They make the final determination about whether a player can reenter a game or practice. Saban told the Birmingham News in late 2014 that when it comes to potential concussions, he and his assistants “never make a decision . . . as to whether a player plays or does not play.”
VI. Evans was cut by Saban during the 2005 season and never seemed to forget it. Evans says that in early 2010, he played in a celebrity golf tournament. Saban, just coming off a national title with Alabama after the 2009 season, was one of the other featured guests. Evans, who had played college football at Auburn, says he was cajoled by the tournament hosts to say a few words at a tournament gathering. “I stood up and said that as a former Auburn Tiger, I wanted to thank Nick for being such a good judge of NFL talent. That after he cut me, I was picked up by Belichick and went to a few Super Bowls, and that I was glad that Gene Chizik [then the Auburn coach] was doing our talent evaluation at Auburn. Half the crowd booed and half of them laughed. I turned and winked at Saban. I was joking around.” Saban apparently didn’t like the joke. Evans says a few days later he got a call from some representatives of the tournament, who told him that Saban wanted an apology. Evans refused to offer one. He says that last year he finally did try to reach Saban. “I got his assistant on the phone and I told her to tell him that I was being a prideful, arrogant jerk back then, and that I didn’t mean to hurt his feelings,” he says. “I don’t know if he ever got the message. But I still believe that him cutting me at the Dolphins was the best thing that ever happened to me.”
VII. Technically, his first season at Alabama—in which he went 7-6—is now officially 2-6 according to the NCAA, which later vacated five wins that year because of infractions.