Saban INTRODUCTION On the first morning of 2007, as sleet fell from a dull sky, Mal Moore, the athletic director at the University of Alabama, hustled onto the tarmac at Tuscaloosa Regional Airport. With one last glance over his shoulder, he ducked his head and boarded an airplane bound for South Florida. The plane was not owned by the university--it had been loaned to him by an Alabama booster and Huntsville defense contractor named Farid Rafiee. Moore was going to great lengths to keep this trip a secret. A little more than a month earlier he had fired Mike Shula, the son of a coaching legend, and the University of Alabama''s fourth football coach in seven very mediocre years. Thanks to flight trackers on the Internet, Moore''s every move had been followed ever since as he searched--in vain, to that point--for a new head coach. This trip had to remain clandestine. Moore was after the biggest prize in the game.
A man named Nick Saban. News of a meeting with him would cause, as Moore put it, "quite a ruckus." The main reason for that: Saban, who was then the head coach of the National Football League''s Miami Dolphins, had publicly denied any interest in the Alabama job, over and over and over. Moore was flying somewhat blind. He did not have an appointment set up with Saban. The Dolphins coach had refused to take his calls. Mal Moore had a down-home manner about him. He mumbled a bit when he talked, and had the lumbering body of an ex-football player.
He''d been the backup quarterback on Alabama''s national championship team in 1961 under Paul "Bear" Bryant, one of the most successful coaches in the history of football and a man who had attained divine status within the state long before his death in 1983. Moore had parlayed that brush with Bryant''s robe into his current job, one that he now was in jeopardy of losing. Moore became Alabama''s athletic director in 1999. The first football coach during his tenure was Mike DuBose, who was also a former Alabama player. During his time at Alabama, Dubose posted a 24-23 record, was accused of sexually harassing a secretary, and his program underwent a recruiting scandal that led to crippling NCAA sanctions. DuBose''s successor, hired by Moore, was a promising coach named Dennis Franchione. He led the Crimson Tide to two consecutive winning seasons but bolted with a ten-year, $15 million contract on the table because he felt hamstrung by the NCAA sanctions. Moore replaced him with a man named Mike Price, who was fired before even coaching a single game because of a rowdy trip to a strip club, after which he may or may not have spent the night with a stripper named Destiny.
Then came Shula, who had the right pedigree--he''d been an Alabama quarterback and had that football-famous last name. But Shula never came close to living up to his father, Don''s, legacy, and he appeared overwhelmed as the head coach, running the football program in a sloppy manner. In those seven years, the Alabama football team--winner of twelve national titles at the time and, formerly, a perennial contender for said titles, and the source of much pride and meaning in the football-mad state--had spiraled downward into, at best, irrelevancy on the national stage. At worst, it had become college football''s horror show. For years, Moore had relied on Alabama''s name and past glory to acquire head coaches. After firing Shula, though, he found himself in a bind. The shine had worn off. Suddenly, the Alabama job was one that no coach of any real stature seemed to want to touch.
Moore had been turned down by Steve Spurrier, the cheeky head coach at South Carolina, a football program that didn''t come close to Alabama in terms of pedigree. Moore had offered the job to Rich Rodriguez, a young, up-and-coming coach at West Virginia, and believed that he had accepted it. As Moore was working out the final details of the contract, he was blindsided by Rodriguez, who suddenly changed his mind and announced that he was staying at West Virginia. In the end, Moore appeared to have been merely played by the West Virginia coach for a raise and an extension. The bungled coach search had earned Moore a new nickname within Alabama football circles. They called him "Malfunction Moore." Now Moore was attempting to woo the fifty-five-year-old Saban, who had been a master as a college head coach, reviving three different programs and winning the 2003 national title at his last stop on that level, with Louisiana State University. Saban had left the college game after the 2004 season to take his first head-coaching job in the NFL.
In two seasons with the Dolphins, he''d posted a less-than-mediocre 15-17 record. But his reputation as a college coach still burned brightly, and his name came up anytime a major college program needed a new head coach. Saban, though, appeared to be staying put. The Miami media horde had persistently asked him about the coaching vacancy at Alabama. Saban had begun to get testy. At a press conference just ten days before Moore arrived in Miami, he''d declared, rather definitively: "I guess I have to say it. I''m not going to be the Alabama coach." At this point, Moore had no other viable options left.
His trip to South Florida was all-or-nothing. He knew that his job was on the line. "I told the pilots when they dropped me off in Miami that if I didn''t come back to this plane with Nick Saban, they should go on and take me to Cuba," he said. Moore, however, had reason to feel a sliver of optimism. By coincidence his nephew, Chuck Moore, a home builder, had remodeled Saban''s lake house in Georgia during Saban''s years at LSU. Saban, of course, knew who Chuck''s uncle was. During the last few weeks of the 2006 Dolphins season, despite his public denials, Saban had called Chuck a few times to tell him that he was possibly interested in the Alabama job, knowing full well whom Chuck would call the minute they hung up the phone. Moore had also been in contact with Saban''s agent, Jimmy Sexton.
Six days after Shula was dismissed, Moore and Sexton had secretly met in New York during the National Football Foundation awards dinner. Sexton had told Moore then that if Saban were to leave the NFL, Alabama would be at the top of his list. Though Saban continued to rebuff Moore, the Alabama athletic director knew that at the very least, the coach''s interest was piqued. What Moore didn''t know at the time was that a far more important ally was waiting for him in Miami. On the evening of January 1, 2007--after trying, in vain, to reach Saban all day while hunkered down in a hotel room--Moore finally made contact. During a brief phone conversation, Saban made it very clear that he wanted to talk to Wayne Huizenga, the Dolphins'' billionaire owner, before he did anything else. He ended the call with a promise to contact Moore the following day around lunchtime. The next day, Moore waited.
The call never came. Moore contacted two of the most important Alabama trustees: Angus Cooper II, a shipping magnate from Mobile, and Paul Bryant Jr., the son of Alabama''s most famous coach. (The trustee duo had passed some of their own nervous hours by going quail hunting.) Moore told them that Saban hadn''t yet called him back and still refused to meet with him. "We thought we''d lost Nick then," says Cooper. "We knew Huizenga was trying to keep him, and we thought that meant he''d pay him a lot more money." After waiting by the phone a bit longer, Moore finally gave up.
He checked out of his hotel and had his driver--Francisco Rengifo, whom he called "Frankie"--take him to the airport. As they drove, Moore--on a whim--decided to make a last-ditch detour. He asked Frankie to drive him to Saban''s neighborhood in Fort Lauderdale. They parked a few blocks away, which gave him a view of the comings and goings of the Saban house. Moore sat there, staring out of the car window like a papal supplicant waiting for the white smoke. He later described his first day and a half in Miami as "excruciating." It wasn''t exactly pleasant for Saban, either. He paced the floors of his spacious house.
He called former colleagues and old friends for advice. He talked to Sexton. He endlessly ran through everything with his greatest confidante: his wife, Terry, whom he''d married during his junior year in college. Saban knew how it would look if he left the Dolphins, after just two seasons and in the wake of his litany of flat-out denials of any interest in the Alabama job. He would be called a liar, a failure, and a quitter. Most of the dread he felt, though, came from the fact that he already knew what he wanted to do. The NFL was not for him. Saban had been an assistant coach in the NFL in the 1980s and ''90s, but the game had changed significantly since then.
Free agency had blossomed, turning some of the best players into prima donnas who often placed the desires of their agents and themselves over those of their coaches and their teams. The NFL had become more of a socialist enterprise than the meritocracy that Saban preferred. "In the NFL you were penalized for success," Saban says. A good season meant a more difficult schedule in the following one. It also meant a lower position in the subsequent NFL Draft. This left Saban feeling constricted. "In the NFL you only get one first-round draft pick, and that''s if it hadn''t already been traded away," he says. "You couldn''t really outwork anybody.
In college, I could recruit ten players with first-round talent every year." In the college game, he had more c.