Bama rolls with changes

Crimson Tide’s staff features six new assistants.

The start of the college football season is mere weeks away, and fans begging for Nick Saban’s Alabama Crimson Tide to backslide do not have a lot to pin their hopes on.

The Crimson Tide have won five national championships since 2009 and they are expected to have their usual array of talent on both sides of the ball and special teams in 2018. There is something of a quarterback controversy between the junior Jalen Hurts, who led the team to the last two national championship games, and the sophomore Tua Tagovailoa, who rescued the team after halftime of last season’s championship game against Georgia. It is a luxurious problem for Saban to solve.

There is this though: Saban has six new assistant coaches. Brent Key, an offensive line coach, is the only assistant in the same role as 2017. Saban also has a new offensive coordinator and new defensive coordinator. Running backs coach Burton Burns, the last remaining assistant from Saban’s first Alabama staff, retired from coaching in January. Mike Locksley is Saban’s seventh offensive coordinator at Alabama.

In this era of the college football coach as chief executive — fundraiser, spokesman, visionary — staff turnover like this would be an impediment for some coaches, but not for Saban. He has managed similar situations before, cycling through 39 assistants since arriving at Alabama in 2007 while winning at an absurd pace (132-20). Perhaps it is because Saban has figured out how to be a different kind of leader — a very hands-on CEO.

Bobby Bowden, who was the coach at Florida State for 34 years, said when he started to lose assistant coaches, FSU went from national title contender to “above average.” Chuck Amato became coach at North Carolina State in 2000, Mark Richt, became the coach at Georgia in 2001, and Bowden’s longtime assistant, Jim Gladden, retired after the 2001 season. FSU had no Top 10 finishes during Bowden’s last seven seasons.

“All of them leaving took a piece out of the pie,” Bowden said. “The worst we did was seven wins, but it was enough to get me fired, which goes back to the question of why doesn’t the same thing happen with Saban?”

The answer, Saban’s former assistants say, rests with his unchanging belief in big ideas like structure and consistency. “Everything within the culture is clearly defined, your role, your job, and when somebody new comes in, Alabama just rolls out the playbook about what it takes to be successful coaching that position,” said Geoff Collins, the head coach at Temple, who was Saban’s first player personnel director at Alabama. “You stick with the process. There are no competing philosophies.”

South Carolina head coach Will Muschamp, an assistant under Saban at Louisiana State from 2001-04, said Saban cultivates a vertical, top-down culture that will never change.

When offensive coordinator Major Applewhite left Alabama for Texas after the 2007 season, Collins said he and then-sports information director Jeff Purinton were instructed by Saban to put together a binder that listed attributes Saban wanted. Collins and Purinton assembled a list of candidates for the binder.

It included Jim McElwain, who was eventually hired and called plays for two Alabama national championship teams.