Nick Saban (Credit: Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images)This article's headline has been updated to reflect that Nick Saban retired in 2024 after a legendary college football coaching career. Former Fortune Executive Editor Brian O'Keefe's 2012 profile of Saban is below.
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If you want to figure out what makes Nick Saban tick, start with the little things.
It's noon on a recent Thursday, and I've been invited inside the multiple-national-championship- winning University of Alabama football coach's inner sanctum. We just returned from a quick trip across campus, where Saban gave a speech to a theater full of high school students and dispensed a bit of his patented motivational magic. ("What are you selling today? Are you selling positive, or are you selling negative? Are you affecting everybody else in a positive way or a negative way?") The whole experience, there and back, took about 25 minutes. Now we're about to multitask through lunch. He has until 1 p.m. to answer some questions, give or take one minute.
As he sits down at a small table in his expansive wood-paneled corner office, the coach grabs what looks like a garage-door opener and presses the button. Across the room, the door to his office softly whooshes shut. Boom! Nick Saban just saved three seconds. Multiply that enough times and you have a couple of extra months, or years, to recruit more high school stars.
Then there's lunch itself. He has it down to a science -- another in a series of small efficiency measures. Every day, Saban sits at this very table and works through his lunch hour while eating the same exact meal: a salad of iceberg lettuce and cherry tomatoes topped with turkey slices and fat-free honey Dijon dressing. No time wasted studying a menu. (Guests, though, aren't required to order the same thing. On this June day I'm having a turkey wrap.)
Saban runs his schedule -- and his entire program -- with similar efficiency. Nothing is trivial or unimportant. It may be the off-season, but there is very little downtime in the world of Alabama football. In a couple of days there will be 1,000 high school players on campus for camp, and they all need to be coached, evaluated, and potentially recruited. There are boosters who want to talk. There are speeches to give. Not to mention the fact that the coach has to save energy and time to deal with issues that crop up, like player problems. (Or, he says, giving me a look, "dealing with the press.") So he packs the middle of his days with meetings and saves his mornings and afternoons for "football-related stuff."
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