Satan or saint? Saban wants to win
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ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. -- Nick Saban hasn't coached his first game at LSU, yet he said he's never been disparaged quite like this.
"I can't believe some of the things I've heard about myself since I came down here to coach," said Saban, who was hired last December from Michigan State after LSU fired Gerry DiNardo.
Since then, Saban has heard that he yelled and cussed at defensive coordinator John Thompson. Not true, both coaches have said. Thompson, though, left a vapor trail leading out of Baton Rouge a month after being hired when Houston Nutt offered him a co-coordinator's position for less money in his native Arkansas.
Saban has heard that his Michigan State assistants didn't follow him into the bayou because he was too hard to work for. Then why was he able to assemble an impressive staff of veterans with mostly Southern roots? His former coaches didn't have those regional ties, which he deemed a must, and Saban wanted them to succeed him back in East Lansing.
If that wasn't enough, recruits reported that coaches from other schools told them Saban would bolt soon to the NFL where he did two stints as an assistant. In fact, Saban said he has turned down offers to be a head coach for the New York Giants and Indianapolis Colts in the past.
And then there was the brutal nickname -- Nick "Satan" -- that the Memphis Commercial Appeal reported was what a few of his detractors have used in speaking about him privately.
He might not be St. Nick. But Satan?
People just don't know the real Saban, insists senior cornerback Fred Booker. On the plane ride to SEC Media Days on Tuesday, the coach was at ease and joked around with Booker and teammate Louis Williams.
"You'd have to sneak in a hidden camera to see how he is around players to know him," Booker said.
The bad news for Saban? Softening his public image isn't the biggest challenge he faces. Piecing together a team that went AWOL emotionally on DiNardo is.
LSU went 3-8 last season, losing eight in a row until DiNardo was told after the 10th game that he was not welcome back after the season. He refused to coach the final game against Arkansas, and the Tigers won 35-10 under interim coach Hal Hunter.
The unraveling started in 1998 after several last-minute losses led to a 4-7 disappointment, Williams said. The Tigers had been picked to win the SEC West.
"Not everybody was following [DiNardo's] plan anymore," Williams said of the 1999 season. "Half the team was, half the team wasn't. Ultimately, it broke the team apart and caused a quick downfall of LSU."
Enter Saban. He had turned around Michigan State despite inheriting a program that was under NCAA sanctions. The Spartans went 9-2 in his final season and ended up in the Citrus Bowl, in which Saban did not coach.
LSU was looking for a "name" coach to provide instant credibility. Saban saw an opportunity to climb out of the long shadow the University of Michigan casts in the state while almost doubling his pay to $1.25 million annually. The school agreed not to write into the contract a financial penalty should Saban leave, a sign of how badly it wanted him.
"We found the coach we were looking for and we brought him to LSU," Chancellor Mark Emmert.
DiNardo earned $450,000 less than Saban. Saban won exactly two more games (34) in five years at Michigan State than DiNardo did in the same span at LSU.
Saban won with a high-pressure defense heavy on man-to-man coverage and an offense that was flexible enough to feature the best talent on hand from year to year.
The same blueprint will be used at LSU, Saban said.
Even though the media that covers the SEC picked the Tigers to finish last in the West, the team received higher regard from some of the preseason football magazines. And there is optimism in the state that if Saban can make the necessary emotional repairs to LSU that the highly rated recruiting classes DiNardo stockpiled can return the team to bowl status immediately.
Not so fast, cautions Saban.
"A lot of people make statements about the quality of players we have coming back, and I don't know exactly where those high expectations come from," Saban said. "But we would like to have a winning season. We would like to be in a New Year's Day bowl game. We would like to have a consistent Top 25 program, and I think all of those things are very realistically reasonable for us to accomplish at Louisiana State University.
"I do think we have some good football players, but three quarters of our team has never won [consistently]. And whether they know how to win is something they're going to have to demonstrate, and maybe even have to go through a process of understanding how to do that."
High expectations "can create turmoil" when you're trying to rebuild a fragile team, Saban said.
So far, the players say they like what they see of Saban.
Williams described Saban as "a businesslike man, extremely professional. He goes out and conducts practice really hands-on. He gets into practice -- sweating, screaming, yelling -- but he knows what he's talking about, and ultimately we have a lot of trust in him that he's going to produce the way he has in every other conference and the NFL."
That's how Saban would like to be known.
This article was published on Friday, July 28, 2000
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