Why is Nick Saban the best recruiter in college football?
A lot of it has to do with his relentless focus.
A few days after Alabama beat LSU for the 2011 national championship, one of Saban’s best friends congratulated him on the national title, according to a lengthy article in GQ magazine.
The coach’s response? “That damn game cost me a week of recruiting.”
Even though Alabama had just gotten priceless publicity from winning a national championship, Saban was focused on (and annoyed) that he would be tied up with banquet and media obligations less than a month before signing day.
Thankfully for Saban (and Alabama fans), his “distraction” from winning a national championship that year didn’t have much of an impact on recruiting: The Crimson Tide finished with the country’s No. 1 recruiting class in 2012, according to Rivals.com.
Alabama has won five out of the last six mythical national championships in the Rivals team rankings. And guess which team is sitting in first place right now for 2014?
Nick Saban doesn’t like being called the devil. "It used to upset me. I would come and say to my wife, 'I'm not like that at all. Why do these guys say I'm that way?' And she would say, 'You ever watch yourself in a press conference?' You can blame the other guy for saying it, or you can look at yourself and say, 'I must have contributed to this.'"
Nick thinks he’s more well-rounded than credited by the media: "I think I'm pretty misunderstood, because I'm not just about football. I'm kind of portrayed as this one-dimensional person who—this is everything to me."
The GQ writer on Saban’s habitual behavior: “Saban is a fit 61, owing in part to regular pickup basketball games with staff, a frenetic pace on and off the field, and a peculiarly regimented diet. He doesn’t drink. For breakfast he eats two Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pies; for lunch, a salad of iceberg lettuce, turkey, and tomatoes. The regular menu, he says, saves him the time of deciding what to eat each day and speaks to a broader tendency to habituate his behaviors. Saban comes to this system by instinct rather than by adherence to some productivity guru’s system. When I try to engage him in a discussion of the latest research on habit formation, he hits me with a look his assistants call the bug zapper, for its ability to fry all who encounter it; he has no idea what I’m talking about.”
In BYU, Georgia Tech will face a defense that is one of the toughest in the nation to score against and has a playmaking force in outside linebacker Kyle Van Noy.
Tailback J.J. Green said he can’t say for sure how many times he has heard “you’re one play away from playing” from Georgia offensive coordinator Mike Bobo and running backs coach Bryan McClendon.
Here is a clue that your trip to sunny south Florida may not be a carefree vacation: You’re a football team, and you lose one of your starters during warm-ups.
If nothing else, Georgia has ensured at least one thing about its season. Regardless of where the rest of the schedule takes them, whether its to an SEC championship, a BCS bowl bid or a national title, there will be no claims from outsiders that this team received too many breaks and escaped health issues, no suggestions that the road to success was lined with lollipops and unicorns.
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