Upon their return to bowl practice earlier this month, when greeted by the news that there had been a big change in upper management, the Alabama football team reacted with a group shrug.
Cam Robinson’s first thought when the junior offensive tackle learned that Steve Sarkisian was picked to replace Lane Kiffin as the Crimson Tide’s offensive coordinator?
“Just go to practice,” the big Outland Trophy winner said.
This probably isn’t the place to come if you are a coordinator in need of an ego supplement.
We on the outside tend to place great importance upon those who work at the right hand of the head man, keeping all the X’s and O’s fed and watered. They have been elevated to seven-figure-salaried assistants, and as part of deal, they also serve as convenient targets for fans’ discontent when the machinery gets all gummed up.
And yet here is the dynastic Crimson Tide, its coaching offices routinely raided by other programs seeking to borrow from that success. And it just keeps producing championships while replacing these Executive VPs of offense and defense as regularly as light bulbs on the Vegas strip.
Consistency in results in the face of such turnover is an Alabama trademark, and a reminder that there really is only one indispensable figure behind it all.
Nick Saban’s Alabama has won four of the past seven national championships, and is favored to win again (next step Saturday’s Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl vs. Washington). Three of those have been co-authored by different offensive coordinators — Jim McElwain, Doug Nussmeier and Kiffin. If the Tide wins out this season, it will do so with a different defensive coordinator — Jeremy Pruitt — than the one who was in that chair last season — Kirby Smart.
On and on the Tide rolls: Last season, Smart finished Alabama’s championship run after being hired as Georgia’s new head coach. In stepped former Bulldogs defensive coordinator Pruitt this season, only to oversee the nation’s most dominant unit, one being measured as perhaps the best of this era.
Likewise will Kiffin coach out the string this year before reporting to the modest head coach’s office at Florida Atlantic. Sarkisian, who like Kiffin was a former head coach with heavy baggage, had been working as a Bama “offensive analyst” this season before the promotion.
As Smart demonstrated last season, it is quite possible to serve two masters at this critical point. The divided coordinator has become something of a bowl-time status symbol around Tuscaloosa.
Programmed to ignore anything that is not directly in front of their face masks, the Alabama players said they really don’t care who is coordinating them — just point them to the field and let them go to work. Their actions have tended to back up their choreographed responses to every question about the possible distractions of the big coaching changes.
“I doesn’t matter about the offensive coordinator, the defensive coordinator,” Butkus Award-winning linebacker Reuben Foster said.
“They all know football or they wouldn’t get hired here. Everybody knows football. It’s your relationship with them — do you want to die for that coach, do you want to play hard for that coach and play hard for your teammates?”
Either it’s very difficult to work for Saban — example, the chewing-out he gave Kiffin on the sidelines in the last minute of a 28-point win over Western Kentucky this season. Or a place on his staff is just about the best launch pad this side of Cape Canaveral. Whatever, change is bound to be a constant around his program.
In dealing with that reality, Saban, naturally, seems to have a plan. One that has worked spectacularly. You know it as “The Process.”
“It never changes, and (Saban’s) the same way whether it’s recruiting, whether it’s dealing with the coaches,” Kiffin said this week in Atlanta. “There are no highs and lows.”
Having failed at Tennessee and USC, a victim of coaching hubris, Kiffin came in as Alabama’s OC and helped fashion three trips to the College Football Playoff with three different quarterbacks.
Sarkisian, fired from USC in 2015 after a public battle with alcohol issues, was imported this season as a behind-the-scenes advisor for the Tide.
“I think it’s going to be an easy transition,” Kiffin said. “I think in some ways he’ll do a much better job than I do with (Saban).”
And on defense, Pruitt was brought in to replace Smart. A former DC at Georgia and Florida State, Pruitt also had put in five years as an assistant under Saban.
The common thread running through all these moves: a well-cultivated familiarity with all things Bama.
“When you have a guy who has been here for a season (Sarkisian), he knows the terminology. He comes from a similar background in what we’ve always done in terms of pro-style, spread, combination (offense), which is where we want to be,” Saban said.
“I think it makes the transition easier. It makes it easier on the players, and I think it’s a lot less change for the players. They have a comfort zone with people they know. I think it does make a huge difference.”
The Saban Approach is that how his teams play is far more important than who designs the plays. He maintains certain immutable ideals and philosophies, and then interchanges the people who employ them.
“We don’t make wholesale changes in what we do systematically, so it’s not as difficult for the players,” he said.
“I think it gets a little over-rated sometimes what you do systematically,” he said. “I think that how (players) compete, how they work, what their perseverance is, what their competitive spirit is, how they tackle, how they block, how they play fundamentally — those things at the end of the day are what help you be successful in whatever offensive play you run or defensive call you make.”
Coordinators come and go. The winning is forever.
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