In late October, BYU was preparing to play Wyoming. While going over practice film, Mendenhall and his staff noticed something odd on the kick returns. On every kickoff, Ziggy Ansah was barreling downfield, taking out blockers left and right. “He’s not only knocking them down,” said Mendenhall. “He’s ten yards in front of anyone else on our team.”
“Yeah, he’s ten yards ahead of everybody,” someone chimed in.
“Is everyone else tired?” one coach asked.
It was clear that wasn’t the case. Special teams players—even the ones on the practice squad—have the biggest motors. They go all out every play. Ziggy was consistently beating the most intense players on the roster.
“We gotta try him in a game,” one coach said.
Mendenhall wasn’t convinced. Practice is one thing. Games are another. Until two months earlier, Ansah had never touched a football. The idea of putting him on the field in a Division I game so soon seemed premature.
“It’s a huge leap,” Mendenhall said. “He doesn’t know what he’s doing.”
But that Saturday BYU was up 16–10 at the half. Mendenhall decided to conduct an experiment. On the opening kickoff of the second half, Ziggy Ansah trotted onto a football field in a game situation for the first time in his life. “It was scary,” Ansah said. “I was trying to remember what I had been told, but it wasn’t easy, especially with a lot of people yelling.”
His instructions had been pretty simple. “We put him right in the middle of the field and said, ‘Whoever catches the ball, run right to that guy,’ ” Mendenhall recalled.
When the ball was kicked, Ansah raced downfield, taking out two Wyoming players. But he didn’t get near the return man. Convinced he had failed, he dropped his head and jogged back to the sideline. His teammates mobbed him. “Zig-gy, Zig-gy!” they shouted, slapping his helmet and butt.
“What?” Ansah said.
“You just blew up two guys,” players yelled.
Ansah shrugged.
After that, Ansah started to see more time on special teams.
But at the end of the season, Mendenhall told him there would not be a scholarship for him the following fall. He was welcome to remain on the team as a walk-on.
BYU opened the 2011 season on the road against its SEC foe Ole Miss. ESPN did the game. BYU’s offense had been stymied all day. With five minutes to play, Ole Miss had the ball and the lead, 13–7. Facing third and long, quarterback Zack Stoudt went into the shotgun. On the snap, Van Noy blew past the tackle and closed on Stoudt, swatting the ball loose while sacking him. Players converged on the loose ball. Van Noy popped to his feet, scooped up the ball and scampered into the end zone, tying the game. The Ole Miss crowd was silenced. With the extra point, BYU won 14–13.
Although just a sophomore, Van Noy had already established himself as the best all-around player on BYU’s defense. After the Ole Miss game, Mendenhall had news for him. He was getting a new roommate: Ziggy Ansah. From that moment forward, every time BYU traveled, Van Noy and Ansah would share a hotel room.
At the time, Ansah was racked with self-doubt. He was beginning to wonder if he’d ever figure out the game of football. Maybe he should not have tried out in the first place. Maybe he should quit. The whole culture was so foreign to him. It just seemed as if he’d never fit in.
On one level, Van Noy could relate. “Because of the things I’ve done and the experiences I’ve had, I’ve been pretty down in the dumps,” Van Noy said. “But because of those experiences I was capable of saying, ‘Hey, you’re not alone.’ Coming to BYU made me realize it is okay to ask for help.”
Pairing the team’s best player with its most inexperienced one proved to be a stroke of genius. Van Noy and Ansah became best friends. In their beds at night they’d discuss their fears and dreams. And Van Noy started teaching Ansah the finer points of the game—how to hit, how to leverage his size and speed and how to condition himself to improve his endurance.
“Kyle is like a brother to me,” Ansah said. “I love him. We watched a lot of film, and he taught me to stay low.”
Midway through the 2011 season, Mendenhall and his staff posed another question about Ansah: “Can he rush the passer on third down?”
He certainly had the speed and size. But he had zero technique. In practice one day they tried another experiment. With Van Noy lined up on the strong side, they lined up Ansah on the weak side, outside the tackle. Once again they gave very simple instructions: “Go get the quarterback.” He did just that, racing past the beefier tackle and recording a sack. The next time BYU was way up in a game, Ansah got to rush the passer on third down. Little by little, he was gaining confidence.
No one was happier for him than Van Noy. After the 2011 season, Ansah had one year of eligibility remaining. Following Van Noy’s lead, he had lived in the weight room, bulking up to 270 pounds. He had even gotten faster, especially laterally. His importance to the team as a situational player on defense was increasing.
Mendenhall had seen enough. He offered Ansah a scholarship for his senior season in 2012.
“It’s hard to even articulate how far this guy came,” Mendenhall said. “He was so naïve, so raw, when he walked on. But he worked and worked. He’s a statistics major. He’ll do exactly what you tell him after you tell him one time. He doesn’t know why he’s doing it. But he’ll do it.”
The New Testament of college football
“You better play the seam a little better, guys!” he barked. “Eight yards outside the seam!”
The voice was insistent and seemingly everywhere at once. On the Wednesday of a bye week in early October 2012 before a game against Missouri, at the final practice before a three-day break, Nick Saban was in his element. A minor misread by junior linebacker C. J. Mosley and Saban jumped his ass. Defensive lineman Damion Square made a mistake only Saban seemed able to see. “Ninety-two! You’re doing the same thing every day! Every day!”
The Alabama practice stretched across three of the most pristine emerald-green fields that about $90 million in football revenue a year can buy. Rising nearby was a $9 million, thirty-seven-thousand-square-foot weight room and conditioning center complete with its own Performance Nutrition Bar, yet another of Saban’s cutting-edge, damn-the-cost improvements, the result, actually, of input from his player leadership council that a few years before had brought up the quality of the training table food.
“He values our opinion,” said Barrett Jones, a three-time all-American lineman.
Standing on the sidelines, NFL scouts from Houston and Tampa Bay watched as Saban, an old DB coach, went to work. He couldn’t stand still. He grabbed a football, licked the first two fingers of his right hand and tossed a series of perfect spirals that landed in the outstretched arms of defensive backs who ran like gazelles. The pace was frenetic. A two-hour symphony of whistles and shouts emitted by a small army of assistants and staff.
“Blow the horn! Blow the horn! Ones and twos over here,” yelled Saban.
First-team O against first-team D. Seven solid minutes of pad-popping intensity. Unlike most college football teams, the Tide practiced in pads four days a week with no shortage of contact. At midfield Saban paced like a lion. Ten feet one way, ten feet back. Up on his toes. Dissecting every drill. Coaching at Indy 500 speed.
“Let’s go! Let’s go! Let’s go!”
At sixty-one, this is what got college football’s greatest coach up at 6:15 every morning and drove him through a ruthlessly efficient schedule devoted to an approach that is a visionary blend of old-school football and New Age philosophy. Simply known as The Process.
In some quarters of college football The Process is seen as nothing less than the New Testament of coaching. It was spread by former Saban assistants to Michigan State (Mark Dantonio), Florida (Will Muschamp), Florida State (Jimbo Fisher), Colorado State (Jim McElwain) and other schools. The Saban Way is an increasingly popular answer for coaches seeking a fresh path to the top of the mountain. It is the result
of a continuing forty-year journey: small, careful steps away from cheap motivational tools like playing-time incentives and intimidation and inexorably toward the higher power of expectation built around three major components—personal development, academic development and football development—Saban has been preaching like gospel for years. His multilayered system within the system is fueled by phrases and words like “internal excellence,” “psychological disposition,” “mental energy” and “accountability.”
“You can talk about winning all you want,” he said, “but really the goal is for our guys to go out there … and play with the best of their ability from an effort standpoint, from a toughness standpoint and from a discipline-to-execute standpoint.”
Which from Saban’s standpoint was what The Process was all about: creating a team of individuals striving to be the best at what they do.
“Successful, to me,” he said, “is being all you can be at what you’re trying to do. You have a trend that you’re trying to develop with these habits so that people are doing the right things the right way at the right time so they have the best chance to be successful.
“You know you can put all that [winning] out of your mind if you just focus on being a relentless competitor, playing every play like it has a history and life of its own. Be the best player that you can be. That guarantees you the best result if you’ll just do it that way.”
Room 240 of the Mal M. Moore Athletic Facility at Alabama is home to the tight ends. Clean but cramped, the meeting room is outfitted with eleven industrial chairs, a large video monitor at the front of the room and whiteboards along the side. It also happens to house the “office”—that is, two computers crammed onto a table stuck in a back corner—of twenty-two-year-old former Tide defensive back Wesley Neighbors.
In the fall of 2012, Neighbors was one of the youngest members on the largest and most expensive coaching staff in the country. For the 2011–12 season Alabama’s football expenses totaled $36.9 million, according to NCAA data, $3.5 million more than second-place Auburn ($33.3 million) and $10 million more than third-place Texas ($25.9 million). In addition to listing nine assistant coaches, the 2012 Alabama Football Directory included an NFL front-office-like roster of thirty-five other staff members, such as directors of strength and conditioning, player personnel, football operations, player development, performance nutrition, rehab services, video operations and creative media as well as the more typical tasks of academic program adviser and assistant equipment manager.
All of which reflected what Alabama had now become—the NFL’s thirty-third team.
On the staff page Neighbors was listed as a defensive analyst. His specialty was really breaking down special teams film and organizing day-to-day practice for the scout team. On the Tide coaching ladder he stood a rung or two above interns and student assistants. What made his job interesting to an outsider was his inside view of The Process at work.
“It goes top to bottom, but it also goes bottom to top,” said Neighbors before practice one day. “The top of the totem pole works on the big details. The farther you go down, the finer the details get. The smaller the details get. And I would work on the smaller, finer details. That’s kind of how I see my job.”
It was two in the afternoon. Neighbors was wearing an Alabama football T-shirt, gray shorts and a two-day growth on his face. He looked as though he hadn’t slept in a week.
The fact was that Saban didn’t sleep all that much either, especially during the season. His mind, he said, was too busy dissecting the hours and days ahead. But you’d never know it from the look of him. Even up close, he bristled with the energy of a lightweight boxer training before a title fight, appearing nowhere near his actual age. What was powering his internal engine?
“No question,” said his longtime defensive coordinator Kirby Smart. “He’s driven to be the greatest coach in the game.”
His days began in earnest no later than 7:15 a.m. in a cavernous wood-paneled corner office decorated in warm earth tones. By the time he arrived, he would be well into his early-morning routine: up at 6:15, watching the Weather Channel until 6:40—not 6:45, 6:40. He would eat two Little Debbie cookies in three small bites each and drink his first two cups of coffee of the day. Between 12:00 and 1:00 almost every afternoon, from the middle of February until the first of June, Saban would play an intense game of four-on-four basketball with selected members of his staff. The rules never changed: three games to eleven; baskets counted one point, three-pointers one and a half points (Saban rules). The opposing squad had come to be known around the football office as the Washington Generals, a nod to the longtime designated patsies of the Harlem Globetrotters. “We don’t get too many calls,” said Jeff Purinton, associate athletics director for football communications, who regularly drew the duty of guarding Saban. The coach, true to form, was known to become rather, shall we say, exercised when a teammate failed to block out or call out a screen.
Afterward, lunchtime. The same meal every day: iceberg lettuce salad topped with turkey and cherry tomatoes. The usual dressing, light Dijon mustard on the side, which has been said by close observers to actually change from time to time.
In a world where little things could make a big difference, Saban’s microscopic approach to success stood alone. “He is very detail orientated,” said Smart, who had worked alongside Saban since 2006 and was a regular in the noon hoops games. “I mean, he wants every second of practice organized, every walk-through rep. He wants to plan for it. He wants it on paper, and he wants you to execute it.”
In the big picture Saban saw himself as the CEO of what he repeatedly referred to as “the organization.” His style was similar to that of a chief executive officer—polite but fast moving, his fifteen-hour days during the season meticulously organized to strip away what he liked to call “the clutter” in his life. To wit, with the click of a garage-door-like remote Saban could automatically close his office door, saving precious steps and time; his master calendar was plotted out at least eighteen months in advance; meetings with academic advisers and coaches all but eliminated small talk in favor of a quiet, direct “What do we got?”
“You function better when you’re in a routine. Most people do,” Saban said during an interview with 60 Minutes in the fall of 2012. “Maybe it’s the obsessive-compulsive personality we all have to some degree, but I always function better in a routine. So when things go a certain way, I feel like I’m going to be more productive because I know what’s going to happen next. I can stay more organized in my time management of doing things a certain way all the time and trying to duplicate that on a day-to-day and week-to-week basis.”
But contrary to his intense, grind-it-out image, Saban always maintained a life away from football, particularly from about the middle of February until training camp opened the first week in August. His favorite methods of relaxation were golf (with practice, he played to about a 10 handicap), spending time on the water in his boat and reading. He was also not afraid to break out a deck of cards and challenge you to a hybrid game of gin.
Over the years Saban’s departure from the Miami Dolphins and hiring by Alabama in January 2007 have been the subject of more than a bit of mystery and outrage by die-hard Fins fans. How was former Alabama athletic director Mal Moore able to spirit Saban and his wife, Terry, out of South Florida and on a private plane to Tuscaloosa? Especially after Saban had repeatedly denied the rumors, going so far as to say on December 21, 2006, “I guess I have to say it: I’m not going to be the Alabama coach.”
And one might add: with good reason. At the time Alabama was in a sorry state. Mired near the bottom of the SEC pack, it was coming off five years of NCAA probation for recruiting violations. The Mike Shula era turned out to be long on hope and short on results, especially at the end.
It was late in the 2006 season, Shula’s fourth and final year, when Moore said he began contemplating another head coaching change. When he finally pulled the trigger on November 27, aft
er a fifth consecutive loss to Auburn in the Iron Bowl, he made clear one of his top priorities was hiring a man who had won a championship.
“I couldn’t be trying anyone out,” he said.
Moore, who died from a lung condition in late March 2013 at the age of seventy-three, was one of those athletic directors cut from a different cloth. Tall and courtly, he came from a more genteel and less cutthroat time in college football. He was anything but a CEO for hire; cut Moore open and he would have bled crimson and white. His ’Bama bloodlines stretched back nearly fifty years. He had first walked on campus in 1958 as a scholarship quarterback on Bear Bryant’s first team. In the ensuing years Moore was part of ten national championships in football as a player, coach and athletic director. He returned to Alabama in 1990 as an offensive coordinator under Gene Stallings before moving into athletic administration in 1994. By the time he took over as athletic director five years later, the Tide had turned, and his beloved program was living in its gilded past. “Their side of the campus used to be an eyesore, including Bryant-Denny Stadium,” said IMG’s Ben Sutton, a longtime friend of Moore’s.
During his tenure Moore turned Alabama into a shining star of the SEC, pumping more than $200 million into facilities improvements. His efforts helped produce conference championships in no fewer than eight sports, including baseball, women’s golf, softball and gymnastics. Yet Moore knew full well on which side his financial bread was buttered; more than ever, he needed a rock star football coach, someone capable of winning games and reenergizing the fan and donor base.
In Moore’s mind he had three candidates to replace Shula: South Carolina’s coach Steve Spurrier, West Virginia’s red-hot Rich Rodriguez and … Saban.
Moore said he first offered Spurrier the head job in December 2006 when they were both in New York City for a Hall of Fame dinner. “It was intriguing, that’s the word he used, ‘intriguing,’ ” Moore recalled. “But he said, ‘Mal, I’m just too dug in at South Carolina.’ ”
The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football Page 33
