As always, Alabama’s Nick Saban takes adapting to change to another level
In the midst of the country’s most uncertain times since at least the Great Depression, it’s impossible to know what will happen this football season, or if there will even be a football season.
But there’s one thing you can count on. You can be certain that Alabama coach Nick Saban will find a way to make the best of it.
Not that Saban is OK with having his routine disrupted, and it’s certainly not to imply that he cares more about what the pandemic has done to his meticulous planning than the pain and suffering of victims, not to mention the financial stress.
While there are more important things than the fact that spring football has been canceled, coaches still have to prepare the best they can in case there is a season. And no one will adapt and prepare better than Saban.
“These are very challenging times,” Saban said on a teleconference last week. “We’ve never had to deal with anything like this or at least in my lifetime, and it’s a global effort to slow the spread of this virus and all of us have to be responsible in the decisions that we make in our responsibility to do just that. We’re trying to stay engaged in every way that we can with our team. The technology that we have right now with Zooming and things like that, video conferences with the staff and players can help us monitor their well-being number one and their health and safety, number two their school work and the academic portion of it which is being done online.”
Yeah, most of America is working from home these days. But, as he does with everything else, Saban has taken it to a different level. Suffice to say he’s not playing Sudoku or compiling his list of 10 things that most people like that he hates. (Permissive transfers certainly would make the list.) Each morning begins with a staff meeting, just as it always does. But now it’s via video conference. The man who doesn’t even have a Twitter account is now holding meetings on Zoom.
And we’re still getting used to him throwing the football on first down.
“We usually use the morning to work on next year’s opponents, which is not specifically what we’d be doing at this time of year with spring practice going on,” Saban said.
Monday, Tuesday and Thursday are for coaching sessions with players. Afternoons are for contacting recruits.
“That’s pretty much what a day is like, and we’re doing the best we can,” Saban said.
As always, Saban has tried to find some positive in a terrible situation. The slower pace can be beneficial to younger players still learning the systems.
“Basically, there’s three parts to teaching: what to do, how to do it, why it’s important to do it that way,” he said. “If we just take a single concept — for example if we’re on offense and we’re working inside zone — well, we can take 30 minutes on teaching the techniques, the aiming, the footwork and then actually show the players video of doing it correctly or actually let them evaluate if the guy we’re looking at is doing it correctly or incorrectly.”
These unprecedented challenges call for unprecedented solutions. One that Saban has proposed is starting preseason camp earlier than the first week of August.
“I’m not talking about having pads on or anything, but just being able to teach,” Saban said. “Teach system, teach scheme. We’ll have to evaluate the players based on fall camp. I think the players who benefit the most from spring practice are really the young players on the team. So hopefully this will work out where we will have some time to be able to teach them. Otherwise, we’ll just have to evaluate them in fall camp.”
The guess — and certainly the hope — here is that we’ll return to some semblance of normalcy at least by June. That will be sufficient time to salvage football season. Nobody will be better prepared than Saban.