The word around the Alabama football program during fall camp is that Nick Saban seems to be visibly more joyous than usual. In fact, there’s even something approaching empirical data to back that up, as research conducted by AL.com showed the Tide head man has spent 3.42% of his fall camp press conference time cracking a smile, which reporter Matt Stahl found to be double the smile percentage of any year in his research going back to 2017. Speaking exclusively with Sports Illustrated to promote Aflac’s ’23 college football campaign, Saban was asked about just where all this joy is coming from.
“I’m not happier; I’ve always been happy,” Saban says with a chuckle. “People always tell me I don’t smile enough, so I get it. I think maybe as you get a little older you put things in perspective a little bit better and you enjoy the relationships that you’ve been able to develop and have a lot of gratitude for the people around you and the relationships that you’ve been able to develop. I’ve been able to enjoy that a little bit more, I think.”
Maybe that surprises you. It would probably surprise the Saban who took the job in 2007 and whose “ass chewings” are the stuff of legend from those who work for him, as are the occasional sideline blowups. But at Saban’s core is an incessant need to adapt to surroundings as they change around him, so expressing a little more good vibes than usual may not be all that surprising in the end.
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On the field, the game has certainly changed, and the greatest trick Saban’s pulled as a head coach has been adapting right along with it. His early-era Bama teams were in the style of three yards and a cloud of dust. In 2012 he delivered the famous line, “Is this what we want football to be?” in response to the growing trend of no-huddle offenses and ever-higher-scoring games. It seemed like pearl clutching, but it was perhaps a threat to the rest of the sport, because Alabama was about to change course and build toward what could be considered the peak of Saban’s second chapter in charge: the ’20 national championship run in which wide receiver DeVonta Smith won the Heisman and the Tide scored 52 points in the title game with an RPO-heavy system.
But Alabama hasn’t been back to the mountaintop since then, and a third season in a row without a national championship would be the most Saban’s longest title “drought” since taking over the Tide. The main obstacle? Georgia, which has dominated the sport with a bludgeoning defense and an offense that featured heavy usage of two tight-end sets. Perhaps in an alternate reality, Jordan Davis, Nakobe Dean, and Jalen Carter play for Saban and his former defensive coordinator Kirby Smart at Alabama—but instead, they featured for Smart at Georgia. While Alabama has faced challenges to its crown in the past (namely, Clemson), its rivalry at the top with Dabo Swinney’s Tigers was the story of two programs that took divergent paths to their success. The Dawgs presently seem to be executing the Alabama blueprint better than Bama did. Georgia brought winning with defense first and foremost back to the forefront. But will the pendulum swing back to more top-end teams looking like 2012 Alabama or ’20 Alabama?
“I think it actually has started to swing back a little bit,” Saban says. “You look at some of the more successful teams, they have gotten back to not being in spread all the time, more tight ends involved in the offense, more balance in the run game and play-action passes—not just spread RPOs and drop-back passes. I think that there has been a little bit of a shift because the defense sort of shifts to adapt to what the offense is doing so even in the type of personnel that you have.
“When you play [against the] spread you have to have more athletic linebackers; they’re not as big sometimes, guys that can take on people up front, so now you go back to running the ball when you’re playing with those guys and you create a little advantage for yourself. Football is always going to evolve—when people adapt to one thing, they’re either gonna invent something else, or revert back to something that happened in the past that we now take advantage of how you’ve adapted to stop something new.”
Saban says the way the game changes keeps him energized as new circumstances bring new challenges. This year’s Alabama team has plenty of fresh faces, chief among them at quarterback. Saban declined to release a depth chart heading into Week 1, a first in his 17 years, to avoid distractions for his team. That means we don’t know which QB out of Tyler Buchner, Ty Simpson or Jalen Milroe will be Alabama’s leading signal-caller when the Tide take the field Saturday against Middle Tennessee State. The offensive scheme is expected to look different than the one Bryce Young piloted with great success the past few years, and some of that comes from new offensive coordinator Tommy Rees, a veteran of his own QB battle while he played at Notre Dame in the early 2010s.
“Some of the things that we’re doing actually benefit the players that we have now,” Saban says. “On offense you’re always trying to do the things that the players that you have can do. On defense, you’ve gotta play a system because you’ve gotta be able to adapt to whatever offense that you’re playing, so it’s a little bit different. You have a system on offense, which we do, and Tommy’s made some additions to it, which I think are very positive. But at the same time, I think it features the players that we have on this team a little bit better as well.”
Saban is currently reading a book called “Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness.” It’s teaching him new ways to present information to his team so that they can respond to it. Even at 71 years old entering his 17th season in Tuscaloosa, Nick Saban is trying to find ways to adapt.
