ESPN Nick Saban Documentary Explores The Myth, The Money & The Man

For six episodes -- six hours -- of the Nick Saban documentary on ESPN they set it up.

You get the back story. The father who was a community leader and football coach before an untimely death at a young age. You see the mistakes of the son and the glories. You see the Forrest Gump-ism of Nick Saban. He was at Kent State during the shootings. He coached with Bill Belichick. He coached with Jerry Glanville (who might steal the entire documentary in just two minutes of screen time). He was on the sidelines of some of the greatest college football games ever.

The ESPN producers of the documentary set it up. It’s the very last scene after six hours. Saban is watching his mother talk on an iPad about how she hopes her son knows how proud the father would be of what he’s accomplished. The seven national championships, the lives he’s changed for the better.

Nick Saban watches the clip, puts the iPad down and says it’s the first time he has heard his mother say this.

He doesn’t cry. End scene.

The six-part ESPN documentary on Nick Saban does so many good things. I marveled at the number of people interviewed. Jalen Hurts goes deep on being benched in the 2018 National Championship game. Belichick makes a light-hearted (for him) appearance. Former U.S. Senator Joe Manchin, Saban’s old friend growing up, is here. Kirby Smart is here. There are Bama players from Saban’s past, Michigan State players, LSU players, even Saban’s sports psychologist Dr. Lonny Rosen is an integral part of the story and gets a lot of screen time.

The origin story of Saban is growing up in West Virginia with his father running a service station where Nick performed menial tasks. It’s a coal mining town. He was/is still called “Brother” there because that’s what his sister called him. Nick was an avid athlete in high school, went to Kent State and kind of fell into coaching. He makes it clear it wasn’t what he wanted to do.

Methodically he moves up the coaching ladder. He ends up being the head coach at Toledo for a year. One of the parts of the documentary that gets glossed over quickly is how mad those players are after he leaves, but it’s just the beginning. Nick goes to the Browns, where Belichick isn’t Belichick yet, then out to Michigan State.

Under Saban the Spartans are ‘mid.’ Then, Saban has an epiphany. Stop focusing on the outcome. Just focus on one play at a time. You can control those six seconds of the play. Don’t let emotions govern your decisions. Forget about everything else.

Michigan State uses that philosophy and upsets No. 1 Ohio State. That elevates Nick Saban into the stratosphere. The infamous ‘Process’ is Born.

I’m not here to ridicule anything about Saban’s legendary Process. You know why? Because it works. He has plenty of championship rings encased in Lucite on his desk at Alabama and a statue to prove it. The real genius of it to me is that it gets talented players to focus on their own improvement without worrying about everyone else. Belichick calls it “Do Your Job.” And it’s true, the result, the outcome will take care of itself. Especially when you have the best players, like he did a lot of the time.

The only thing I would have loved to see is whether Saban could talk about players who improved by using the Process standard who weren’t, you know, Julio Jones or Mark Ingram. What about the 65th best player on the Alabama roster? I would have loved to see some mention of the Process working for them.

Saban is the hottest coach in the nation when LSU comes calling. And then the dance begins. Saban can’t go down there to visit, too many people watching, so his wife, ‘Miss Terry’ does. Their relationship is another wonderful part of the series. She gets down there and says LSU is a dump (as a graduate of the school from around then, I totally vouch for that), but man, they have some players (I can vouch for that as well).

Saban says that he would have stayed for Michigan State for an extra $100,000 but the school president wasn’t coming up with the money.

Remember that, because it’s important.

Saban goes to Baton Rouge with some doubts. He builds an academic center at LSU and an indoor training facility. Much is made about LSU’s struggles to recruit African-American players from Louisiana, but Saban is able to do so.

(There’s a scene where, I think it’s Ryan Clark asks ‘do you know who the biggest recruits are in LSU history?’ Again, as an alum, my mind turned. Did he mean all sports? Shaquille O’Neal? Pete Maravich? Billy Cannon? Kevin Faulk? Because there are so many. Bert Jones? Booger McFarland? Leonard Fournette? Let’s just say I found Clark’s eventual answer utterly ridiculous).

Saban implements the Process at LSU and the school wins the national title in 2003. After one more year in Baton Rouge, here come the Miami Dolphins with an offer for big money. (People were already whispering he was leaving after 2003 in Baton Rouge and it clouded the whole 2004 season).

Saban and his agent Jimmy Sexton, who also shows up, say that they go to then-LSU AD Skip Bertman and are hoping he will ask them to stay, but Bertman is like “Miami can offer you six million, I can offer you 2.4 million, I get it.”

You’re supposed to believe Saban would have stayed at LSU for less money, because…why exactly?

Saban’s Process doesn’t exactly quite stick with the Dolphins. And then he’s in the middle of a decision that changes the NFL for 15 years (more Forrest Gump). Left to pick a QB after the 2005 season, Saban says that the medical people in Miami favored Dante Culpepper over free agent Drew Brees and ‘there wasn’t anything I could do about it,’ Saban says.

So yes. You want us to believe that the coach the Dolphins just hired, who led them to a 9-7 season his first year, who they are paying a lot of $$$ to coach, who is already sort of becoming The Nick Saban at this point, couldn’t influence the Dolphins decision at all.

Uh-huh. It’s too bad because Saban – to his credit – cops to making mistakes later in the documentary. It’s OK for him to say here that he should have pushed harder for Brees, but he fobs the decision off elsewhere.

Brees goes on to the Hall of Fame and a Super Bowl title with the Saints. Culpepper is damaged goods.

Incredibly though, it all works out for Saban. After a year with Culpepper and Joey Harrington at QB (now there’s a name you haven’t thought of in a while), Alabama comes calling. They have big bucks. Natch. Saban does a terrible job in the Florida press denying he is taking the job (again, he cops to that mistake) but he heads to Tuscaloosa.

And the college football world has never been the same.

Each championship season at Bama and close call is well chronicled. The return to Tiger Stadium in 2008 is here to face LSU. The Kick Six is here. Lane Kiffin is here (sitting in an Ole Miss team room). Taking out Hurts for Tua Tagovailoa at halftime of the 2018 championship game is here. Saban recounts it all through his prism of the Process and trying to do what’s best for the program and not just the individual.

And I get it. There’s also no one-size-fits-all philosophy. There can’t be. Saban’s true greatness is sticking to that philosophy.

There is a long chapter devoted to the tornadoes that ravaged Tuscaloosa in 2011. And the overhead shot of the devastation is still harrowing. Saban uses his position and his team for all the good it can do in the community. It’s commendable.

It’s heavily implied that more job opportunities are presented to Saban, but after the tornadoes in Tuscaloosa, the family just can’t leave.

The cynic in me also recognizes that by this point Saban is making as much money as anyone in the coaching profession and he has the best players. Why would you leave at that point? The Alabama train is rolling.

Saban’s retirement is quick and seemingly joyless. A few days after losing to Michigan in the 2024 college football playoffs, he tells the team he can’t do it up to his own standards anymore and is retiring. If he cries, you don’t see it.

Overall, the documentary is mesmerizing. The film clips inside the Alabama locker room through the years are amazing. Alabama strength coach Scott Cochran is a delight reciting stories. Miss Terry is a delight. There is a certain ESPN-washing of the whole thing though. It just so happens that a lot of people featured talking about Saban are ESPN personalities (I wonder how that happened?). Somehow, Pat McAfee isn’t in it. Yet.

But no one else could have produced such a deep chronicle of a figure that has impacted football for the last 30 years. He still is important as a face on College Gameday, often serving as the voice of reason during the sausage fest. ESPN still takes big swings at sports topics and figures. They take a lot of hits, but who else could have done something like this?

And Nick Saban is fascinating. The Process fundamentally works. Focus on the six seconds of the play, nothing else. He has hundreds of former players who can vouch for it.

But I also think Nick Saban took the money to leave Toledo, to leave Michigan State, to leave LSU and to leave the Dolphins. That doesn’t make him a bad person at all, but it does complicate things when he rails against college players transferring out for more NIL money and the current college football system.

They’re all just doing what they learned from watching you Nick. No reason to cry about it.

This article was originally published on Forbes.com