MM#299--Nick Saban's Blueprint for Unparalleled Success in Coaching

Welcome to the Theory to Action podcast, where we examine the timeless treasures of wisdom from the great books in less time, to help you take action immediately and ultimately to create and lead a flourishing life. Now here's your host, david Kaiser Hello.

I am David and welcome back to another Mojo Minute, and today we're going to do something that I really didn't want to do, but in with the reality of college football, and the college football scene is right in front of us. As an Ohio State Buckeye fan and having grown up in the shadow of Columbus, ohio and all things Buckeyes, I believe we have to cover this topic and answer these questions. So in today's episode, we are going to shine a light on a legend, an extraordinary figure in the realm of college football coaching, and that would be one Nick Saban. Since he just retired, I thought it most appropriate that we do a Mojo Minute covering his extraordinary coaching legacy. Now, since taking the charge at the University of Alabama in 2007, saban has left an indelible mark not only on the university but on college football itself. Saban's tenure with the Crimson Tide has been truly remarkable, boasting numerous national championships, and I'm paralleled, and I'm paralleled when lost record. But what truly sets Saban apart is his unique coaching philosophy, known as the process. The process Saban instills discipline and preparation and execution, and he teaches his players that success is a continuous journey, not a destination. Now, it's somewhat unconventional approach to coaching that has not only produced winning teams, but also has produced well-rounded individuals who were prepared for life beyond football. So actually, let's dig in a little deeper, because I think there's some solid nuggets of wisdom that can help all of us to strive for excellence in our own lives and, ultimately, to help us flourish. So today we're going to cover the book the leadership secrets of Nick Saban how Alabama's coach became the greatest ever by John Talty. He's going to teach us these nuggets of wisdom and, in fact, let's go to the book for our first polka. As Nick Saban raised the championship trophy above his head with confetti falling all around him in Hard Rock Stadium, it solidified what many already knew to be true he was college football's greatest coach ever. His Alabama team easily defeated my beloved Ohio State Buckeyes on January 11th 2021 for his unbelievable seventh national championship, his six-walled Alabama surpassing legendary Alabama coach Paul Bear Bryant for the most in sports history. The moments after the game ended, there were already declarations that the 2020 Alabama team was the greatest in college football history. The team highlighted so much of what makes Saban the greatest coach ever. The win over Ohio State showcased Saban's evolution as a coach, his refusal to accept complacency amid tremendous success and his unmatched track record of hiring staff and recruiting players. Navigating Alabama to a national championship amid a global pandemic, with daily coronavirus testing and the bubble living, required Saban's best coaching leadership yet, and it marked the culmination of a decades-long journey from an undersized football player in West Virginia whose father owned a local gas station, to college football's highest pay. The most prominent coach, saban senior, passed away when he was only 46 years old. Nick Jr was in college at the time, but his lessons and way of living carried the Alabama coach to this day. Growing up in a West Virginia mining town, saban was taught that hard work was the only way to make it and there were no shortcuts to success. Nick Sr would tell his son if you don't have the time to do it right, where do you find the time to do it over? Because it's going to get done right. He learned that lesson over and over again when servicing cars at his dad's gas station as a teenager. Well, many when dark-colored cars came in, knowing his dad would make him wipe them down over and over again until there weren't any streaks left. The Sabans grew up in a town called Fairmont, west Virginia, just south of Morgantown, where WVU, west Virginia University is located. Let's go back to the book. Big Nick, as he was known, was a tough, hard working man who demanded perfection from his son in every aspect of life. He loved his son, but he wasn't one to dole out praise easily. He was the type of parent who would point out his son's four turnovers after he had led his basketball team to win with 30 points. In his book how Good Do you Want To Be? Saban Orrit that his father took him to the mines coal mines, that is to send a message after he got a D in his eighth grade music class. Quote when we reach the bottom. He turned to me, his face glowing red in the deep black. Is this what you want? You want to work down here the rest of your life. It scared me straight End. Quote. His influence left a deep impression on young Nick Saban and sent him on the path to always strive for more and never let success knock him off of it. Quote. His father made him do things that on the outside, looking in, almost look like too strong for a kid to have to do, says Darren Anderson. Member of the first. Saban led. Member of the first team. Saban led as a coach. Quote, but it created a person who will never relent and never relent he did. Now, coming from a family of coal miners, with two of my uncles working in the mines up until the last several decades, I can understand quite well how scared, stiff, straight, nick Saban Jr would have been back then, especially in the mid 1960s. Now let's talk about the famed Nick Saban process. You hear him all the time talk about. Let's follow the process. It's the process, the process. What is it? What is this process that Nick Saban always talks about? Let's dig into it. Quoting from chapter seven of the book, the process. The co-creator of Alabama's most famous product is a slender man who wears a long gray beard and thick glasses and his nicknamed Gandalf and Loni gray beard by his players. The guy looks like they dragged him off in off the streets of Seattle from a homeless shelter, says former Alabama staffer Todd Ailes, but he was absolutely brilliant. Dr Lionel Lonnie Rosen's day job is asa, michigan State University psychiatric professor, but he's most famous for his role in creating the process, along with Saban. Not that the media shy Rosen wants any credit for that. The process is the engine that powers the Alabama organization, the system and mindset that everyone must follow. Competing organizations have tried to copy it, though no one has perfected its execution like Saban in Alabama. The process is many things. Most importantly, though, it's a daily way of living. It focuses on completing the task ahead of you at that moment and not worrying about what happened in the past or what might be around the corner in the future. You can't worry about what anyone else around you is doing. As New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick would say just do your job. Quote. It's broken down to a granular level that you're not worried about the big picture, says Trevor Hewitt, who spent six years working at Alabama. I'm worried about this one specific task. It makes things so much simpler and clear, not just at the top, but all the way down to the bottom. We are here to accomplish this mission, and that's what we're going to do. The process is Saban's life work, the culmination of his upbringing, personality, and what he has determined is the best path for success. Many of the trademarks of what we've come to understand about the process are things Saban has been preaching for most of his coaching career, dating back to when he was a young assistant coach. It's why it would be most inaccurate to say the process was born on any one day. However, the most popular theory is that it crystallized for Saban in 1998, with Michigan State struggling with consistency in achieving their desired level of success. Can you imagine the tall, lanky guy walking in as the professor of psychiatry for Michigan State and they nickname him Gandalf? I just find that absolutely hilarious. Let's go back to the book for more about the process and his first three seasons at MSU, michigan State University. Saban managed only a 1916 in one record, a far cry from the success he later achieved at LSU in Alabama. Saban inherited a program that was hit with a scholarship reduction and put on probation in 1996. That slowed his expected progress. Msu players could see themselves getting better and the program was getting closer to being competitive on the field, but the results didn't always match up with that feeling. As Saban struggled to get the Spartans winning more, an unlikely friendship blossomed with Rosen. Saban had long been interested in human psychology and Rosen introduced him to process thinking. That emphasized breaking down big things into more easily completed tasks. Out of the game against number one undefeated out of Ohio State. Saban asked Rosen an important question what do you tell a team that thinks it has no chance to win. Rather than identifying winning the game as the goal, rosen encouraged Saban to stress winning each play as the goal. If players could zero in on what they needed to do for a few seconds at a time to win the play, it could repeat that behavior throughout a game, then tend to get that desired big result without making it the focus. It took a 60-minute game and broke it down into hundreds of seven-second plays. The idea deeply resonated with Sabin, who told his team that we to focus on the process rather than the results. It was put to the test early in that game when Ohio State raced out to a 17-3 first-quarter lead To outsiders. It looked like more of the same for the 4-4 Spartans. The MSU players, though, focused on what they could control, trying to win every play and not worrying about what the scoreboard said. They battled back in one, 28-24, when Ronaldo Hill intercepted the pass to end the game. It was Sabin's biggest win as a coach to date and a sign that he was on to something emphasizing process thinking. It was further solidified the following year when Sabin put together his best season as a head coach. He finally had the right mix of players and experienced staffed and talented, talented veteran players like receiver Plexigirl Burris and linebacker Julian Peterson, who became first-round NFL picks, all in on the vision. The Spartans went 10-2 in 1999, which included another win over my beloved Ohio State Buckeyes, and Sabin became a hot coaching commodity. So we have the process breaking down everything into small, bite-size chunks, and I think that's fascinating. I think we heard something similar to Urban Meyers above the line philosophy. Perhaps he stole it from Sabin, not sure, but nonetheless it's a fascinating John into human psychology and how these high-profile sports coaches get their players to perform at their highest levels. Let's go back for some more about the process, because I'm intrigued. For Sabin, the process really came down to discipline. His system was predicated on everybody in the organization having the discipline to avoid the things they knew they shouldn't do and do what they knew they should, even if they didn't want to. That could be anything from getting to bed early rather than going out with friends to giving you it your all on every single repetition during a grueling fall camp practice in August, with the Alabama heat beating down on you. If you can master those simple concepts, you've flourished in Saban System. I love when authors use the word flourish. Just warms my heart. He tells us team that everyone has the ability to invest in the process. It just comes down to whether they have the desire and discipline to do it. So he framed it as a decision everyone had to make Do you want to live with the pain of discipline or the pain of disappointment? He told them he'd always choose the pain of discipline because it meant he never dealt with the pain of disappointment. When Saban woke up each morning, he believed there was only two options available Either you got better or you got worse. There was no such thing as maintaining the status quo. In Saban's mind, either did something that made you better or brought you closer to being a champion, or you didn't. Being a champion, saban would say, was about focusing on what it took to get there and on on simply getting there. It was about investing your time rather than spending it, a metaphor that he would repeat frequently throughout his organization. We're focused on what it takes to win and doing what it takes to win, not talking about winning, says former Alabama offensive lineman Taylor Farr. He's always talking about what we are doing and what we're not doing. And if we're not doing it, how do we fix it? To get back to what we do. So all this begs the question that Saban's the process, and its brilliance lies in its simplicity. It is based on focusing on the variables that are within one's control and emphasizing execution over outcome, and Saban continues that mantra if you do your job successfully, the results will ultimately follow. That begs the question how do you get 18, 19, 20 and 21 year olds to do it repeatedly? It's hard enough for adults to do it, let alone very young kids at a very high level college football program. Let's go back to the book for our last quote. Saban liked to reference Martin Luther King Jr with one story serving as a perfect metaphor for his process. In King's sermon the three dimensions of a complete life he told the story of a man who shined his shoes in Montgomery, alabama, who was, above and beyond, the best he had ever seen at shining shoes. He said it was like the man had a PhD in shoe shining. What it taught King was, if you had to be a street sweeper to street sweeps, like Michelangelo painted pictures, it was to take pride in your work and do the best you could, no matter what it was. There's no better feeling than knowing you did the best you could. Saban said, referencing King's sermon I don't care if it's, I don't care if it's what you do, what I do, what the street sweeper does, it really doesn't matter. It's not about all the results. Telling someone just to do their best is about as cliche as it gets. Actually, living day to day, every day, striving to do your best isn't. Sabin isn't a profound philosopher who came up with the phrases we'll be quoting for a century. He is a football coach who relied on some of the inspirational quotes the rest of us have read. The difference was how he molded them to fit his approach, how he could explain them to his organization in a way that felt new and unique. One of his favorite quotes is your actions. Speak so loudly, I can't hear what you're saying. It was a Ralph Waldo Emerson quote, but Sabin said it so frequently and authentically. One formal coach admitted it took him years to stop attributing it to Sabin in emails to players and parents. Man, did the guy ever read a book? Needs to attend the Mojo Academy. Going back to the book, as Alabama likes to point out, the process has been often intimated, never duplicated. Focusing on the process to success rather than results is something that any organization can do. The challenging part is following through with it every day, not letting negative self-talk overtake you, not worrying about your monthly sales goal or what one of your coworkers is doing. The process requires supreme focus and commitment, which Sabin has proven to his organization, gives it the best chance of being successful. The process is simple, really. It might leave the destination off, but it is the roadmap to success. It's up to the individual whether to be committed enough to follow it. So, in today's Mojo Minute, whether you are a Roll Tide fan or not, whether you can't stand Nick Sabin or you think he's the greatest coach, college football coach, to ever walk the sidelines, and that's something to be admired. Either way, you have to respect his success, as he has elevated the University of Alabama to back to its reputation for winning national championships, especially seven, and what I think is 18 years, 13 years Let me double check that yeah, six national championships in 17 years at Alabama just an incredible, incredible feat. Plus you got just the crazy winning percentage, plus his transformative influence on his players and then, like I said, the undeniable impact that he has brought to the University of Alabama, restoring it to a very high level of competitiveness. So it's hard to argue against whether Nick Sabin is the greatest coach. His coaching legacy is truly unmatched. No matter how you answer the question, is he the greatest coach or not, one thing is for sure Alabama has at least two coaches in the top 10 of the all-time greatest coaches in college football history. One is Bear Bryant and another now is Nick Sabin. And for us, in our own lives, let's follow Nick Sabin's device. Let's follow the process, the simple process. Let's leave the destination off of our goals but follow that road map to success. After all, he said, it's up to us, the individual, whether to be committed enough to follow it. Let's be committed enough to follow it, because when we do, we'll be on the road to a flourishing life.

Thank you for joining us. We hope you enjoyed this Theory to Action podcast. Be sure to check out our show page at teammojoacademycom, where we have everything we discussed in this podcast, as well as other great resources. Until next time, keep getting your mojo on.