Nick Saban is successful because he gets it.
The man who has won three of the past four BCS national championships, and a total of four, recruits relentlessly.
He groused to a friend after thumping Notre Dame for his last championship that the game cost him a week of recruiting. While he should have been celebrating at the dinners and banquets and enjoying all the warm feelings, he was worried about losing a week of contacting prospects.
He is fearless about it, even going after Ohio players orally committed to Urban Meyer and Ohio State.
It is not a small wonder that his name has come up on the wish list of fans at Southern Cal and Texas. His agent, Jimmy Sexton, probably gets more calls about Saban than any other client.
If the other 13 schools in the SEC were smart, they would each put up $1 million that could serve as a $13 million signing bonus for Saban if he left for any school outside of the SEC with a promise to never return.
Gene Chizik, Phil Fulmer and Tommy Tuberville would vote for it if they hadn’t been fired after losses to Saban.
Saban has changed SEC football. Every school butLSU, South Carolina and Georgia has changed coaches since he arrived in Tuscaloosa in 2007.
He has made it the best football conference in the country.
If he weren’t in the league, Steve Spurrier, Les Miles and Mark Richt would get much more credit for being great coaches. Instead, they live in Saban’s shadow that casts much larger than his 5-6 frame.
It started when Sexton talked Saban into leaving Michigan State for LSU, where he turned the Tigers into national champions in his fourth season.
In his first five seasons at Alabama he is 4-1 in bowl games, including the three national championships, and has a record of 74-13 and 42-9in SEC play, not counting the victories vacated because of actions that occurred during the previous regime.
Saban, who will turn 62 on Halloween, and the No. 1 ranked Crimson Tide are riding a 10-game winning streak that dates to Nov. 10 of last season, when they fell to Texas A&M in a rare home loss.
Coaches respect him because he doesn’t run up the score.
Fans - and this is confined to the ones where he is coaching - love him because he brings success and never embarrasses the school.
This week he was complimentary of the Arkansas Razorbacks, who go to Nickville this Saturday, and he didn’t have to be.
Saban is not charming. He is not a people pleaser. He is not always kind. If half the stories about him are half true, he can be a real jerk, but he and his wife donate to charities and the University of Alabama.
He’s probably the most powerful man in the state of Alabama.
He sneaks out to play golf with one of his few friends, and he is an avid golfer. He and Terry, his wife, have two children, a getaway home on a lake in Georgia, and he attends Mass before every game.
By most accounts he has an ego bigger than Alabama. Maybe as big as Texas. Apparently, one time Coca-Cola did a promotion that featured life-size cutouts of Saban and Tuberville. When Saban realized everyone could see Tuberville was taller, he used his influence to get the cutouts recalled.
This weekend Saban won’t be thinking about cutouts. Or Texas.
He’ll be thinking about how to control every aspect of the game. He’ll be thinking about how he can help the stats of quarterback A.J. McCarron, who could look like a Heisman candidate, and still not run up the score. That is, unless he took Bret Bielema’s statement that he came to Arkansas to beat Alabama literally.
Of course, that is what every coach in the SEC wants to do, but the bar is mostly too high.
Sports, Pages 17 on 10/17/2013