🏈 Why Nick Saban, Alabama are the greatest job-placement program in CFB (ESPN video)

[TerryP]

 

[TerryP]

ESPN has another good piece on their CFB front page today.

How Nick Saban and Tuscaloosa drew closer after Alabama's 2011 tornado

A coaching nomad of three decades who was widely expected to leave Alabama one day, Nick Saban instead put down roots after the deadly tornado a decade ago.

www.espn.com

THE MORNING AFTER THE TORNADO, associate A.D.s Jeff Purinton and Thad Turnipseed wandered into Saban's eerily quiet office and could sense the coach's anxiety.

The power was out and Saban's cellphone wasn't working. He wanted to help. "But there was no plan," Turnipseed later recalled. "That's what was driving him crazy."

They headed for a relief effort at the Ferguson Student Center only to find more than 100 people looking at one another, lost. There was a leadership vacuum. Saban felt a familiar tug. "People need direction," he recalled a decade later.

Saban climbed on top of a bench and began speaking. When something bad happens, he told the crowd, it's an opportunity "for all of us to pitch in and help and do everything we can."

He issued a challenge: "Be ready when you're called."

Purinton remembers Saban's presence as he spoke, as if he was trying to get across, "We're going to get through this and I'm here with you."

Turnipseed gets chill bumps when he thinks about it years later. He calls it simply, "The Speech."

Saban pushed back leaving for the NFL draft, choosing instead to hand out water bottles to first responders and visit a shelter for victims.

When he met with his team that afternoon, he ordered his players to forget about football. Instead, he said, think about what you can do to help.

Players volunteered between practice and classes. Jones, the offensive lineman, took a chainsaw around town to help clear debris; tight end Preston Dial loaded up 18-wheelers with supplies; and linebacker Courtney Upshaw raised roughly $20,000 toward relief.

Saban said he didn't have to use the storm in pregame speeches the following season because his team never forgot.