An article published by NY TIMES that sets out in some detail how close it may have been to Saban leaving for Texas (depending on who you believe). Any one of us could have written this article, imo, without any insider info.
Article:
"The Pursuit of Nick Saban: Alabama vs. Texas
Nick Saban leading Alabama in October 2013, the season after he guided the Crimson Tide to another national title.
BUTCH DILL / ASSOCIATED PRESS
By MONTE BURKE
JULY 25, 2015
In December 2012, as Nick Saban was preparing Alabama to face Notre Dame in college football’s national championship game, a
University of Texasregent named Wallace Hall received a phone call from a friend.
“It was out of the blue,” Hall says. “He is a U.T. alum, a very well-thought-of, very successful guy who really isn’t a huge fan of football.” The man, whom Hall has refused to name, also happened to be a good friend of Saban’s agent, Jimmy Sexton. “My friend told me, ‘I don’t know how to put this any other way: Nick Saban wants to come to Texas,’ ” Hall says.
Hall immediately sent the chairman of the board, Gene Powell, an email, telling him that Sexton wanted to talk. Powell forwarded it to Steve Hicks, a private equity mogul, prominent Texas regent and one of the board’s athletic liaisons. Nothing much came of the correspondence.
After Saban’s Crimson Tide won the national title, Hall contacted Hicks directly. This time Hicks acted on it, calling on his brother Tom, a former owner of Major League Baseball’s Texas Rangers and the National Hockey League’s Dallas Stars. “I had been in pro sports for a long time, so I volunteered to see if this was real or not,” Tom Hicks says.
A sign at a Texas Longhorns home game in September 2013.
RONALD MARTINEZ / GETTY IMAGES
A few days after the national title game, Hall went to Tom Hicks’s house in Dallas for a scheduled conference call with Sexton. An intermediary had provided Hall with a number for him to reach Sexton, a clever move, Hall believed. “That way, from Jimmy’s perspective, he could always argue that we called him,” he says.
Before the call, Tom Hicks told Hall that Sexton might just be playing Texas to squeeze more money out of Alabama. Hall replied that he doubted that was the case; he pointed out that his friend was friends with Sexton, and he said Sexton wouldn’t want to antagonize him. “I had called my friend,” Hall says, “and asked him if he thought he was being played. He said, ‘No.’ ”
Hall and Tom Hicks talked to Sexton for 45 minutes. They say that Sexton told them that Saban felt “special pressure” and a lack of appreciation at Alabama. “Sexton said that the day after the championship, Alabama boosters were pounding the table, talking about a three-peat,” Hall says.
Sexton also told the men that Saban felt as if he was more of a turnaround artist than a long-term C.E.O., and that it was easier and more fun to rebuild a program than it was to keep one at the top. Saban’s wife, Terry, liked warm weather, so they wanted to stay in the South. Saban also loved lakes, something the Austin area has in abundance. Sexton floated the idea that Saban could take the Texas job, his last; bring the football program back to national prominence; and then retire.
“Jimmy said that winning a national championship at three different universities would be a real legacy,” Tom Hicks said, referring to Saban’s title with Louisiana State. Hall believed that there was serious intent behind Sexton’s call, and that the agent was acting on behalf of an informed client. “No agent is going to go out and do this without consent from Saban,” he says.
Hall and Tom Hicks liked the idea of Saban’s coming to Texas. “It all resonated,” says Hall, who claims he’s not much of a football fan but was mainly intrigued by the potential financial implications of getting Saban. Texas’ athletics had their own cable channel, called the Longhorn Network, a joint venture with ESPN, but it hadn’t quite yet fulfilled the potential envisioned by the university, especially when it came to getting carried by various cable companies. “If someone of Saban’s caliber came to Texas, that would hugely enable ESPN to bring on other affiliates,” Hall says. Yet another university viewed Saban as a vehicle of greater financial growth.
As excited as they were, Hicks and Hall realized they had one significant problem: Texas already had a football coach. Mack Brown — just two months older than Saban — had won a national title at Texas in 2005 and lost another one (to Saban) in 2009, and was entering his 16th season as the Longhorns’ head coach. Hall believed that neither DeLoss Dodds, Texas’ athletic director, nor Bill Powers, the university’s president, was likely to fire Brown. The only way to get Saban to come to Texas, Hicks believed, was to get Brown’s approval and even make it look as if the entire thing was the Texas coach’s idea. He agreed to broach the topic with Brown.
Two days after the call with Sexton, Hicks had lunch with Brown. “I was trying to give him some personal advice,” he says. “I told him he should think about retiring and going out on top and becoming a TV star like he is now. But he didn’t support the idea at all. He didn’t want to retire.”
Texas Coach Mack Brown after a loss to Oregon in the Alamo Bowl in December 2013. He had announced his resignation earlier that month.
RONALD MARTINEZ / GETTY IMAGES
Hall believed that a golden opportunity had been squandered. “I am completely convinced that Saban would have come to Texas had Mack approved of the idea, or had DeLoss fired Mack,” he says.
The saga didn’t end there, though.
Sexton’s phone call with Hall and Tom Hicks became public in September 2013, but the details had remained a secret. Not too much was made of the call, and Saban responded to media questions about it by simply saying he was “too damn old to start all over someplace else.” The Texas job, it appeared at the time, might not even open up anyway. Mack Brown, after a tough start to the 2013 season, had righted his own ship and was in the midst of what would become a six-game winning streak.
The real hysteria began in early November when The Associated Press obtained an email written by Tom Hicks about the Sexton call. One sentence in the email stood out: “Sexton confirmed that UT is the only job Nick would possibly consider leaving Alabama for, and that his success there created special pressure for him.”
At this point, Alabama fans had reason to be worried. The signs disconcertingly echoed ones that, in the past, had led to Saban’s departures: Sexton was out sniffing around, and told the Texas folks almost exactly what he’d once told the Alabama athletics director Mal Moore — that the university was a place he was interested in. (Saban once told a newspaper that without his aggressive agent, “I don’t think I’d ever make one change, the way I am.”)
Saban was again in denial mode, the inevitable precursor to all of his moves. The unnamed man whom Sexton had contacted to get to Wallace Hall played the role that Sean Tuohy, a business associate, had when Sexton initiated contact with L.S.U. The “special pressure” that Hicks said Saban felt, and the unreasonable expectations that Sexton had detailed in his phone call, harked back to his later years at L.S.U. — the ones Skip Bertman, the L.S.U. athletics director, had warned him about — when a two-loss season suddenly was viewed as a failure. As Sexton had told Hall and Tom Hicks, Saban was indeed most comfortable when he was rebuilding a program — as he had at Toledo, Michigan State, L.S.U., the Miami Dolphins and Alabama — and not maintaining it.
Most significant, Saban was clearly displeased with both the fans (he’d lambasted them in midseason for leaving home games early) and his players in the 2013 season, and he was again feeling underappreciated. Those who knew Saban had long realized that two of the most significant aspects of his career — his “Process” and his near-constant job-hopping — were intertwined at one crucial juncture: Both, at their essence, were about the fact that Saban found it “more invigorating to want than to have,” as David Foster Wallace once wrote.
The Texas football program also seemed to fit Saban’s blueprint. The university, like L.S.U. in 2000 and Alabama in 2007, was desperate to return to national football prominence. Texas had the resources — it had the biggest athletic budget in the country, at $163 million — not only to provide Saban with the largest contract in college football history but also to pay for whatever facilities and other tertiary things he deemed necessary to help rebuild the program. His recruiting base would be top-notch: The state of Texas had long been hailed as among the best when it came to high school football talent.
In late November — just as Brown had begun to falter down the stretch of what was looking more and more like his last year as the Texas coach — came the public airing of what was the truest barometer of Saban’s feelings. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Terry Saban was careful to maintain that she and her husband would indeed stay at Alabama. In a moment of candor, she issued a warning shot: “You come to a crossroads and the expectations get so great, people get spoiled by success, and there starts to be a lack of appreciation,” she told the paper. “We’re kind of there now.”
The
University of Alabama’s power brokers by this time knew their coach well. Like their predecessors at Michigan State and L.S.U., they, too, understood his restlessness and need to feel appreciated. After the 2012 national championship, they’d begun to feel jittery. In early 2013, they approached Saban. “We asked him what we could do to help him,” one trustee says. The answer came that spring.
The Crimson Tide Foundation is a nonprofit booster organization that is led by Paul Bryant Jr., the intensely private son of Alabama’s legendary coach, the founder of a bank that bears his name and perhaps the university’s most powerful trustee. Bill Battle, who had replaced Moore as Alabama’s athletics director, is the nonprofit’s president. Angus Cooper, now an emeritus trustee and perhaps Saban’s most trusted confidant among the Alabama power elite, is a vice president.
In March 2013, the foundation agreed to purchase Saban’s house for $3.1 million, roughly $200,000 more than he paid for it in 2007. The Sabans, of course, would be allowed to continue to live there. Buying a coach’s house was nothing new at Alabama: The university had owned both of Paul Bryant’s homes. Various Alabama trustees say that this purchase — as well as its timing — was a gesture of goodwill. It also, they say, helped Saban out a bit when he needed it financially, perhaps because of some real estate decisions in recent years that reportedly hadn’t quite panned out as planned.
The university didn’t stop with the house. Around the same time that Terry Saban made her comments to The Wall Street Journal, and right before the 2013 Iron Bowl, Battle approached Nick Saban about a revised contract, one that would provide him with a raise and an extension. As the Texas rumors burned on, Saban told Battle that he was too focused on the rest of the season to talk about his contract. Some months later, Battle admitted to The Tuscaloosa News that at that point, “I was worried about it, I’ll tell you that.”
One thing Alabama had going in its favor was that the University of Texas was in turmoil in late 2013. The university’s president was under pressure to resign, and the board of regents had become an unhealthy and unproductive hive of infighting. The athletic director, Dodds, had announced his retirement in the middle of the season. Though most assumed that Brown would resign or be fired at the end of the season, no one knew his fate for sure, or how protracted the process would be. This being the land of the independent and entrepreneurial, a few prominent Texas boosters used the uncertainty to talk to, and lobby for, their own preferred head coaching candidates. “To say it was dysfunctional would be about the highest-class way you could describe it,” the Texas booster Red McCombs says.
In November, Steve Patterson, the former president and general manager of the N.B.A.’s Portland Trail Blazers, became the university’s athletic director, replacing Dodds. Patterson was tasked with cleaning up the mess at Texas, something he would soon begin to do. Of course, he had come to Texas well after the Sexton call with Tom Hicks and Hall. It wasn’t too long after Patterson had taken the job at Texas that Sexton called him, too.
Patterson says he believes he knew what Sexton was up to. “I’ve known Jimmy for 30 years,” he says. “I told him if he wanted to come here and drink bourbon and eat barbecue and talk about Saban, that’d be fine. But I told him not to come here if he just wanted to get Saban an extension and a raise at Alabama, which I thought was his intention all along.
“Of course, Jimmy took great affront to that, which is fine. He was just doing his job. But that was the end of the conversation. I never talked to Saban and we never made an offer.”
Publicly, though, the Saban-to-Texas rumors were only heating up then. In early December, an Oklahoma City broadcaster named Dean Blevins posted a message on Twitter that claimed Saban had been offered a 10-year deal by Texas for $100 million and a small piece of the Longhorn Network. Right around the same time, Stefan Stevenson, a sports reporter at The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, posted a tweet that read: “Source close to Texas executive council of regents says Nick Saban will be next Longhorns coach.”
Stevenson, to this day, doesn’t back down from the information in that tweet. “I had a good source, someone on the athletics staff, and I absolutely believed the source was certain,” he says. “I wouldn’t have tweeted it if I didn’t believe the source believed it.”
What Stevenson wasn’t prepared for was the hell storm that ensued on the Internet, which caused even those who had been dead certain that Saban would stay at Alabama to waver a bit in their conviction, and heaped much derision on its originator. “I regretted tweeting it almost immediately,” he says. “But not because I didn’t think it was true.”
The common belief among Texas regents was that one or more “rogue” boosters were talking to Sexton behind the scenes. And given the free-for-all chaos from which the Texas leadership was just beginning to emerge, that thesis has some merit.
Given the lack of authority that boosters had in hiring a new coach, any deal with Saban would have been hard for any of them to pull off alone, or even as a group. Saban denied having contact with anyone at Texas. A few weeks later, though, a man described as a “Longhorn lifer and big donor” told The Austin American-Statesman: “The funny thing is, they had Saban this time. He was coming. Only problem was, there was no formal offer from U.T. Patterson was the only one who could do that.”
On Dec. 13, 2013, Alabama gave Saban a new contract, once again the largest ever in college football, that would pay him $6.9 million a year — with possible performance bonuses of up to $700,000 a year — through Jan. 31, 2022, when he would be 70 years old.
The next afternoon, Mack Brown officially resigned as the head coach at Texas.
Monte Burke is a staff writer at Forbes magazine and the author of the books “4th and Goal” and “Sowbelly.” This article is adapted from the book “Saban: The Making of a Coach,” to be published on Aug. 4 by Simon & Schuster.
