Saban by Monte Burke

Author:Monte Burke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

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With Saban’s new contract settled, all seemed ready for a promising future for the LSU football program. Saban again recruited an incredible class in 2004—ranked number two by analysts—which included receiver Early Doucet, running back Jacob Hester, and defensive lineman Glenn Dorsey. The Tigers were ranked number three in the preseason polls. The only notable change in Saban’s coaching staff was the addition of a young former Florida State graduate assistant named Kirby Smart, who was hired to oversee the defensive backs. (Save for one year, Smart has been with Saban ever since and is currently the defensive coordinator at Alabama.)

The coming spring, however, brought with it some troubling signs. Emmert, Saban’s most powerful friend at LSU, left the university to become the president of the University of Washington. At spring practice, the LSU players showed up overweight and out of shape. Saban spent the off-season warning both his players and the media that LSU had become complacent. Another big concern was at the quarterback position: No one had stepped up to replace Mauck. Saban eventually went with the two-quarterback rotation of senior Marcus Randall and redshirt freshman JaMarcus Russell.

In the first game of that season, LSU squeaked out a one-point win over Oregon State, with the Randall-Russell combination completing only sixteen passes in forty-four attempts. When the fans booed both quarterbacks during the game, and the media questioned their abilities afterward, Saban went on the attack. He blasted the fans and called the media “heartless,” and said he’d no longer discuss the quarterback situation with them. A frustrated Saban was, at once, demonstrating his loyalty to his players—as he always has, even to this day—and lashing out at the expectations of the fans and the media, which he could not control.

After crushing Arkansas State, LSU lost 10–9 to Auburn, in part due to a missed extra point. The next week, LSU beat Mississippi State, 51–0. Then came the game that may have pushed Saban to finally make the jump to the NFL. In early October, LSU was blown out by Georgia, 45–16, the most points a Saban-led LSU team had ever allowed. “That was something we’d become unaccustomed to,” says Weems. In his press conference, Saban—sporting a cut above his eye from an inadvertent elbow he’d taken from an assistant during the game—seemed genuinely befuddled with his team, saying: “We had a good week of practice . . . that was a curveball.” The two losses had crushed any hopes of a national title defense.

Saban’s team was wearing him out. On the eve of his fifty-third birthday, at a press conference after a win over Vanderbilt, an exhausted-looking Saban indicated that his disappointments were not contained to just his players or the fans or the media. He surprised the gathered media by talking, yet again, about his own fatherhood, saying: “I do a real bad job with my kids right now. I go home at night, I’m a little frustrated because things aren’t going so well, and I don’t go and spend time with my kids.

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