From Cleveland to legendary status
How Saban, Belichick rose from the Browns’ film room in ’94
In film rooms this fall, groups of football coaches sat, breaking down tape and devising a game plan. This happened everywhere, from San Luis Obispo to San Francisco, from Washington to Walla Walla, from high school to the National Football League.
In those staff meetings — say, defensive coaches, with a line coach and maybe two linebackers coaches and a secondary coach, at the least, all overseen by the head coach — you could try to project who might end up where. This is a meandering profession, and the people in that room one season are likely to be different from the people in that room the next. But in any of those cases, could you honestly look across that table and think, “Here are two Hall of Famers”?
“At the time, we were just trying to get game plans out there,” said Rick Venturi, the defensive backs coach for the 1994 Cleveland Browns. “But I’m telling you: I recognized their greatness. I knew when I was in that room, when it came to football, these two guys were special — and they weren’t considered special yet.”
On Monday night, Nick Saban will try to win his sixth national championship as a college head coach, an accomplishment that would tie him with Paul (Bear) Bryant for the most of all-time. Five days later, Bill Belichick will begin the pursuit of what would be his sixth Super Bowl title, which would push him past ... well, wait. It would just further his own mark, because no one has won more than Belichick’s five NFL championships.
Given the time on the calendar and the position of Saban’s Alabama Crimson Tide in the national title game against Georgia, and Belichick’s New England Patriots as the top seed as the AFC playoffs begin, it’s worth pointing out what we’re watching here, which is genius, pure genius, that would translate to generations forward or back. We can splice and dice the arguments, but there’s no way Saban isn’t one of the top three college coaches of all-time, and no way Belichick isn’t one of the top three pro coaches of all time. We can debate the names that belong alongside them — Bowden and Paterno, Walsh and Lombardi — but try to shove either of them out. It’s not reasonable. Given that, it’s also worth going back to those Browns teams of the early 1990s. Back then, Belichick was a first-time head coach and Saban the defensive co-ordinator he plucked away from the University of Toledo.
Now, we’re talking a quartercentury ago. When Belichick took over the Browns, he was 39, the two-time Super Bowl-winning defensive co-ordinator of the New York Giants.
Saban, just six months older than Belichick, turned 40 during that first season in Cleveland, 1991. Together, they went through an inauspicious start — seasons of 6-10, 7-9, 7-9.
It’s funny, given their status now, to think back on those times. They were losing.
Might Bill Belichick, might Nick Saban, have been unsure of themselves?
“They were both really smart guys, just intelligence-wise,” said Venturi, a lifelong football guy who twice served as an interim head coach in the NFL — first with Indianapolis, then with New Orleans. “They had a tremendous depth of knowledge of the game. But the thing is, both those guys knew the big picture, and a lot of guys know the big picture. But they could also take you from A to Z and tell you exactly why everything would happen.
“Both of them believed in the same way of life, even though they have different philosophies when it comes to X’s and O’s. And that’s be demanding, be accountable every day, all day, and there’s no stone left unturned. A lot of people say that. Those two guys live it.”
None of this is particularly surprising to hear now, given what Belichick and Saban have accomplished. Consider that over the past 16 seasons — beginning with Belichick’s first Super Bowl title with the 2001 Patriots — either Belichick or Saban has won a championship nine times. Shoot, following the 2003 season, they both took it all, Belichick with his second Super Bowl, Saban with his first college title at LSU, this one under the old Bowl Championship Series format.
But it’s instructive, now, to remember that Belichick, the coach’s son at Navy, worked as a gopher in Baltimore with the old Colts and then in Detroit and Denver before going to the Giants — back when Ray Perkins was the head coach, before Bill Parcells’s reign. And Saban, even more itinerant, because he went from his alma mater Kent State to Syracuse to West Virginia to Ohio State to Navy to Michigan State to the Houston Oilers to Toledo before Belichick brought him to the Browns.
These are, by now, fully formed characters, legends even. Along the way?
“I remember my first practice with Nick,” said Carl Banks, an old linebacker under Belichick with the Giants and Browns who just happened to play at Michigan State when Saban showed up there.
“We’re doing a pass drop, and he’s screaming at me to do it the right way,” Banks said. “And I’m like, wow. I mean, Nick curses. He does. And he’s an attentionto-detail kind of guy.”
He also, Banks remembered, had a temper. “Coach Belichick and Coach Saban are very similar,” said Brian Daboll, the man who currently serves as Saban’s offensive co-ordinator at Alabama, but was previously an assistant with Belichick in New England.
Daboll said this in the week leading up to the Tide’s national semifinal victory over Clemson. When he uttered those words to reporters last week in New Orleans, the general sporting public didn’t know who Brian Daboll was. But then the clock was winding down, and Alabama had the lead, and Daboll decided to call a pass play, and, well ...
“I was being a bit of a fan,” Saban said after the game. Truth be told, he was dressing down Daboll in full view of a national television audience. His exact words might not have been: Run the ball, moron. But his message was: Run the ball, moron.
Which gets to the difference between Belichick and Saban, both now and then.
“Nick was more of a screamer,” said Banks, who joined the Browns in 1994 when Belichick was the head coach and Saban the defensive co-ordinator. “But Bill, he can make you feel just as bad, and his voice never raises. Belichick curses, too. But he does it in the same monotone he always has. He makes you feel crazy sometimes.”
Call up anyone from those days — Jim Schwartz, the former Lions coach who now coordinates the defence in Philadelphia, or Iowa’s Kirk Ferentz, who is the longest-tenured major college coach. They have stories about younger Belichick, younger Saban, what they were then, and what they have become.
But as each pursues another championship, it’s remarkable to remember a time when they weren’t anything special. The current Cleveland Browns are 1-31 over the past two seasons. Maybe there’s a Belichick and a Saban sitting in those film sessions, waiting to be identified as all-time greats. But it seems implausible now, just as it seemed implausible then.