The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Saban rehabs fired coaches
Durkin the latest whose career needs a boost.
MIAMI GARDENS, FLA. — An unusual trickle of drama seeped out of Alabama’s buttoned-up football program last month when it was reported that former Maryland coach D.J. Durkin was spending time with the Crimson Tide coaching staff in Tuscaloosa.
Durkin had been fired as Maryland’s coach in the fall after a university investigation prompted by the death of a player after a strenuous practice. Once hailed as a rising coaching star, Durkin departed amid a hail of criticism and was broadly regarded as toxic, at least temporarily, in college football. His apparent involvement with Alabama, the exemplary team of this era, one that is preparing to play for a national championship, rattled many observers.
In response to the controversy, coach Nick Saban quickly issued a statement in which he clarified that Durkin had not been hired in any capacity and that his presence was limited to “professional development.”
“He is simply observing our operation as many other coaches have done through the years,” Saban said.
But speculation that Durkin’s trip southward might have been a prelude to his joining the program was understandable, since several high-profile Alabama assistant coaches began their tenures after similar visits. Durkin also satisfied another criterion for a role on Saban’s staff: He is an obviously talented former head coach who, whether through misfortune or misdeed, has fallen on hard times.
The “Nick Saban Witness Protection Program,” as Alabama offensive coordinator Mike Locksley has dubbed it, has in recent years hosted a number of doghouse-inhabiting former head coaches, including Lane Kiffin, Steve Sarkisian and even Locksley himself, who as Saban’s offensive coordinator helped make quarterback Tua Tagovailoa a Heisman Trophy finalist and fine-tuned an offense that might be the most explosive in Alabama’s history.
“Boy, what an honor,” Locksley said of his time at Alabama, which will end after the College Football Playoff as he returns to head coaching. “And how great it’s been for me and my career to be able to rehabilitate.”
His experience was not unique. Butch Jones, fired after five lukewarm seasons at Tennessee, spent the past season as an Alabama analyst. Mel Tucker, once an interim NFL head coach, re-entered college football as Saban’s associate head coach in 2015, and this month — after three seasons as Georgia’s defensive coordinator — landed his first top job, at Colorado.
But while Saban certainly has sent many former assistants into their first top jobs, and while he excels at persuading the best high school prospects to play for him, he also has nursed a side interest in resuscitating careers that have gone off the rails.
It is the coaching equivalent of investing in distressed assets. Both Kiffin and Sarkisian had been fired by Southern California before joining Saban’s staff. Locksley was dumped early in his third season as New Mexico’s coach after going 1-11 in each of his first two years. Their second (or third, or fourth) chances with Alabama are worthy of further study — much like everything else Saban does when it comes to coaching.
“We have coaches who have a track record of being very, very good coaches, very productive; they make some mistake or get in some circumstance or situation that maybe creates this downward plummet, but they still have a lot of positive values,” Saban said last week.
“We can get them in our program, maybe they learn a better way to do things,” Saban continued. “But we also can take advantage of the good things they know and they’ve done.”
The arrangement, he concluded, “worked out well for both.”
Still, the practice of hiring coaches with checkered histories has provided fodder for critics who accuse Saban of prioritizing winning above values.
A Saban biographer, Monte Burke, pointed to several players with troubled pasts whom Saban actively tried to cultivate and protect, such as linebacker Rolando McClain at Alabama and running back Shyrone Carey when Saban was at Louisiana State.
“Nick was always about altering behavior,” Will Muschamp, a former Saban assistant who is now South Carolina’s coach, said in Burke’s 2015 biography of Saban. “If a person was willing to change, he’d help them. He’d do anything for them.”
Sometimes it has backfired. The controversy over Durkin created an unwelcome distraction weeks before the Crimson Tide’s playoff game. Sarkisian, who joined Saban’s staff as an analyst less than a year after his tenure at Southern California ended as he acknowledged issues with substance abuse, was Alabama’s offensive coordinator for exactly one game — a national championship loss to Clemson in 2017.
But the most notorious instance of Saban taking in a former head coach with a problematic past seems, on balance, to have worked out. This was, of course, Kiffin. Though Kiffin’s worst sin as the (extremely) young head coach at Tennessee, USC and the Oakland Raiders was arrogance, he committed it flagrantly, and before Saban made him offensive coordinator after Alabama’s 2013 season, he was considered virtually unhireable.
But Saban hired him anyway, believing that he could use what was good about Kiffin and avoid what was bad by making him a coordinator — a role that, like for all Saban coordinators, came with a prohibition on speaking with the news media.
“I always thought he was a really good coach,” Saban said at the time, according to CBS Sports. “All his issues come from something we’re not asking him to do.”