The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football (78 page)

“[My father] was the same way as a [Pop Warner and American Legion] coach; attention to detail, discipline, doing what you’re supposed to do, the way you’re supposed to do it … I think that sort of perfectionist type of attitude my parents instilled sort of made you always strive to be all that you could be, and that’s probably still the foundation of the program we have right now.”

If The Process was born in the hills of West Virginia, it evolved on the football fields of Kent State, where Saban, despite his small size, earned a scholarship in the early 1970s as a hard-hitting defensive back and spent a year as a graduate assistant under head coach Don James, an early advocate of the personal, moral and academic development of players.

Assistant coaching positions at premier programs (Syracuse, West Virginia, Ohio State, Navy, Michigan State) followed, leading to Saban’s first head coaching job, at the University of Toledo in 1990. His team went 9-2 that year and finished as co-champion of the Mid-American Conference. From there it was on to the Cleveland Browns and four seasons (1991 to 1994) as defensive coordinator under Bill Belichick.

“One of the best around, that’s Nick,” Belichick said in October 2005, during Saban’s first year in Miami. “You know, it’s funny. When you write those ‘personal evaluations’ of players, every once in a while you come across a player, ‘Strengths: All. Weaknesses: None.’

“Strengths?” added Belichick. “He knows schemes. He knows personnel. He’s a good motivator. He is very adaptable to change. He is excellent at evaluating players. Weaknesses? Uh, I didn’t see any.”

When Saban moved on to Michigan State in 1995—he spent five seasons in East Lansing before leaving for LSU—he brought along the message Belichick had posted throughout the Browns facility. Signs that reminded
players to forget about what others were doing and focus on what they alone could control. The signs read
DO YOUR JOB
.

How many times had Neighbors heard that phrase?

“Too many,” he said with a laugh. “Everyone is put to the standard that he [Saban] wants to maintain. You’re never satisfied. He said that to the players. But he also said that to the coaches. Don’t be satisfied. Don’t be complacent. You always want to try and get better.”

High achievers. That’s what Barrett Jones liked to call them. The kind of kid—and that’s really how they all start in college, as kids—capable of playing for a perfectionist like Saban and under the unremitting pressure the impassioned “Roll Tide” fans can produce. With all due respect to South Bend, Ann Arbor, Austin, Columbus, Eugene and every ESPN
GameDay
stop in between, nothing compared with the spotlight at Alabama. Not when Birmingham has been ESPN’s No. 1 television market for college football for the last ten years; not when more than seventy-eight thousand showed up for the
spring
game; and not when Paul Finebaum, a sports-talk radio star, could turn his syndicated call-in show, once beamed out of Birmingham, into a multi-platform deal with ESPN and the new SEC Network.

No matter the look of the palace or the size of the budget, as Saban made clear to Moore during their flight to Tuscaloosa, the lifeblood of every college football program was the players. Every year at Alabama The Process began not with the recruitment of talent but with the
selection
of it.

Saban and his staff followed what defensive coordinator Kirby Smart called “the blueprint” for success. As detailed by Andy Staples in
Sports Illustrated
, that blueprint targeted high school athletes who fit certain character/attitude/intelligence criteria and position-specific height/weight/speed guidelines tailored to Alabama’s offensive and defensive schemes. Cornerbacks, for example, should ideally be between six feet and six feet two inches and about 190 pounds and run a sub-4.5 forty-yard dash; linemen should stand no less than six feet two because, as Smart drily noted, “big people beat up little people.”

One of Saban’s pet peeves was the gross expansion of the entire recruiting game and the overload of information. The recruiting Web sites and four- and five-star rankings held reduced weight inside the program. “We have player descriptions, player profiles,” added Smart. “Guys that don’t necessarily fit that description, they may be a five-star guy, we’re just not interested in [them] because that’s just not what we’re recruiting. Sure there are exceptions to the rule, but we don’t want a team full of exceptions.”

For all his old-school temperament, Saban was decidedly new-school when it came to communicating with recruits. He maximized social media, routinely carving out thirty minutes to Skype with athletes he believed fit the Alabama profile.

Coming out of his high school in Memphis, Barrett Jones heard from all the big schools and all the slick pitches from coaches at Florida, North Carolina and Tennessee. “Everyone told me we’d win championships if I came there,” he said. But not Saban, after a lackluster 7-6 record his first year at Alabama. While others said it, he
showed it
.

“Coach Saban came with a detailed plan as to how he was going to do it,” said Jones. “He had much more impact. He walked me step-by-step through the process. After my first meeting with him I was blown away. I was set to go. I committed soon after that.”

Dee Milliner was one of those athletes who fit the selection process to a T. At six feet one and about 199 pounds, and with a vertical leap approaching forty inches, he was rated the No. 1 cornerback in the nation by Scout.com and was a
Parade
high school all-American. Everybody who was anybody wanted Milliner—USC, Florida State, Georgia, Oklahoma, Stanford, Auburn and Tennessee, to name but a few of the finalists. Then, one day, Saban showed up unannounced—at least to Milliner—in the football coach’s office at Stanhope Elmore High in Millbrook, Alabama.

“It was kind of a shock to see Coach Saban,” said Milliner.

Saban got right to the point.

“He didn’t sugarcoat anything,” recalled Milliner. “He didn’t tell me, ‘If you come here, you’re going to play.’ He said, ‘Look, you’re a great player. I want you. But I don’t need you.’ That’s what I was looking for. That caught my attention right there. He didn’t lie to me at all. He didn’t tell me I was going to be a starter. I had to work for it.”

For Milliner the work—The Process—began in the classroom, proving to Saban he could be on time and make good decisions. “He would tell us, ‘If you’re not doing it in the classroom, you’re going to have a problem with me on the field,’ ” said Milliner. After the textbook came the playbook, and more tests, Saban again looking for consistency. “He starts trusting you,” said Milliner.

Milliner would earn enough trust to start his last eleven games as a true freshman in 2010 and make some freshman all-American teams. He started six times his sophomore year. In 2012 he earned consensus first-team all-American honors and blossomed into one of the true stars and trusted leaders on the team before coming out early for the 2013 NFL draft.

“It was a long process,” said Milliner, the ninth overall pick of the draft, selected by the New York Jets. “But it was worth it.”

Damion Square knew full well the meaning of those words. He committed to Alabama in the spring of 2008, along with Jones, shortly after Saban’s initial season, which saw the Tide lose four of its last five games. The six-foot-three, 286-pound Square was such a talent coming out of high school in Houston that he was ranked in the top forty nationally as a linebacker, defensive tackle and defensive end. He had stunned Smart and other coaches with his athleticism. Saban went to Houston and made his pitch. “Coach Saban said to me, ‘You come here, we’re going to win games,’ ” said Square. “ ‘That’s the way we recruit. We only recruit great ballplayers that want to play ball and that fit into my system.’ ”

Square accepted the challenge and chose Alabama over LSU. He was on his way to being a star when, as a redshirt freshman, he suffered a serious knee injury and was out for the year. But Saban and his staff loved his attitude and athleticism, and by the time his final season was starting at the Capstone, Square was as well. It was his face featured on the cover of the 2012 football media guide.

“He handles us like men,” Square said in an emotional locker room following the BCS title-game win over Notre Dame. Square found that out firsthand during one particular leadership training session in which he had stood up to Saban, telling him, in essence, he didn’t want to be a leader. All he wanted to do was his job.

Saban gave him a look. “That
is
your fucking job,” he snarled.

“He holds us accountable for everything,” said Square. “And that’s the way I live my life now.”

Sometimes lost in the holistic-sounding nature of The Process was this cold-blooded football fact: under Saban, the Crimson Tide had become the most physically dominant team in college football. Beyond big athletic linemen, the Tide consistently rolled out tackle-breaking backs, quicksilver corners, smashmouth linebackers, a quarterback who could think and throw and top-end athletes at every skill position. And then there was this: Alabama is unquestionably the best-conditioned team in the country.

To that end the program employed no fewer than four strength and conditioning coaches, led by Cochran, the 2011 Samson Strength & Conditioning Coach of the Year and a certified wild man known for his signature yell—
Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, YEAH!
—and infectious high-octane energy. “The
days you
don’t
feel like it, that’s when I’m going to get the most out of you,” he said. “And you might hate me at first, that’s okay. But you’re going to have to do this for your own kids and your own job one day—and I’m not going to be there! I’m not going to be sitting right there jumpin’ your tail when you ain’t ready to get up.”

Watch the start of the fourth quarter of any Alabama game ever played and you’ll see Cochran five or six steps onto the field in the center of a swarm of players, arms above his head and four fingers extended. He’s not signaling the start of the final fifteen minutes of the game. No, those fingers and thumb symbolize something else entirely. “Commitment, discipline, effort, toughness, and the thumb is pride,” said Cochran.

Those fingers also symbolized Alabama’s Fourth Quarter off-season conditioning program, a not-so-secret weapon at the heart of the Tide’s success.

“The longest hour of my life,” said running back Eddie Lacy, describing the seemingly endless drills and sprints the previous spring and summer. “Seemed like five hours.”

“Running, tears as you sweat,” recalled Milliner.

“It will get you prepared, I tell you that,” said starting left tackle Cyrus Kouandjio. “It will get you prepared for anything you have to counter during a game.”

In its most basic form the Fourth Quarter program was no different from any other elite program. Spring and summer months devoted to drills and 110-yard sprints until you dropped. Saban used Fourth Quarter first at Michigan State, then later at LSU, where he hired Cochran, who at the time was an assistant strength coach for the NBA’s New Orleans Hornets.

There was no magic to any single drill or sequence of sprints, said Cochran. The difference, he said, was—not surprisingly—in the details: how the players were coached; the pressure Saban put on his assistants to ensure
every
little thing—the placement of a foot in a mat drill, for example—was done
exactly
the way he wanted it. “Coach Saban has a command that each coach has to use for their drill,” said Cochran. “Coach walks around, and if it’s not the way he sees it, that coach is going to get coached up. So the players know they better get in line or their coach is going to get chewed.”

Jones told the story about the importance of putting your hand
exactly
on the line for sprints. Not an inch over the line. Not an inch behind the line. On the line.

“If not, and Coach catches it, we start [the sprints] all over again,” said Jones.

To watch the discipline and suffering firsthand is to see a methodical breakdown of ego and self. In March 2013 about 120 players attended a Monday afternoon conditioning session, every single player, from stars like quarterback AJ McCarron on down, identified by the last names taped to the backs of their T-shirts. In the middle of the indoor practice field stood, or actually, more accurately, raged Cochran, screaming in some foreign football language long on grunts and indecipherable roars. He took charge of about 60 players lined up in waves of 10 or 12, running them through an endless series of explosive, oxygen-sucking push-ups, jumps, hops and knee lifts, all conducted under the watchful eye of a platoon of trainers, managers and coaches.