Nick Saban on Benching Jalen Hurts for Tua Tagovailoa in the National Championship Game

Nick Saban opened his visit to The Rich Eisen Show by asking the questions. Having seen Rich run the 40 at the combine, Saban wondered whether that speed might have helped Michigan against Iowa this week. Rich took it in stride. "I was looking for that extra second on the clock this time around," he said. "Didn't get it."

Then the conversation turned to the reason for the visit: a six-part ESPN original docuseries from ESPN and Words and Pictures on Saban's life and coaching career, premiering Thursday, October 8 at 6 p.m. Eastern on ESPN, with all six episodes bingeable on the ESPN app.

Saban said plenty of people wanted him to write a book, but he wrote one back in 2003 after winning a national championship at LSU and said, "Never again." What appealed to him about a series was showing how a program gets built, through all the people who shaped it, from friends and family to coaches and players. Around 70 people were interviewed. And it goes all the way back to his childhood, including the fact that he never really wanted to be a coach. He was going to stay for graduate school because Miss Terry had another year of school, and that is how Don James got him into coaching. "If you can see it, it's better than reading it," Saban said.

The biggest surprise came from Alabama itself. Saban never let the media in the locker room after games, because he believed what a coach says to a team is not public information. What he didn't know was that Alabama had been building an archive of team meetings and more. "I didn't know there was something when I told, you know, Tua that he was going in at halftime for Jalen," Saban said. "I didn't know any of that existed."

That led straight to one of the best stories of the interview. Rich mentioned that Tua Tagovailoa had told him the angriest he ever made Saban was taking a sack in that national championship game. Saban confirmed it. The last thing he told Tagovailoa was not to take a sack, since a field goal could extend the game. "Not just a sack, a 16 yard sack going backwards," Saban said, adding that he broke the headset. After the game, he tried to turn it into a teaching moment and explained that the sack could have cost them the game by knocking them out of field goal range. Tagovailoa looked at him "serious as a judge" and said, "Coach, we just needed more room to throw the ball." Saban's response: "I couldn't do anything but laugh." Alabama did win, as Rich noted, thanks to the throw to DeVonta Smith.

As for why he benched Jalen Hurts, Saban walked through the reasoning. That team had three or four future first-round receivers. Hurts was 26-2, a great athlete who ran and made plays, but he was not yet as developed a passer as he became later. Tagovailoa, even as a freshman, "was sort of a natural." Against Georgia, Saban said, half their front seven played for the Philadelphia Eagles, so Alabama couldn't run the ball. Down 13-0 at halftime, with the receivers having no impact, he made the switch. "These kind of decisions are only good ones when they work out," Saban said. "This one worked out."

Rich argued that Hurts still carries an unfair perception from that moment. Saban agreed completely. "There's no human being that ever handled it better," he said. Hurts supported Tagovailoa, stayed the whole next year as a backup, and used that time to develop as a passer after Saban told him to drop back, process the information and get more accurate. Then, when Tagovailoa got hurt, Hurts came in and won the SEC Championship game. "This is the way you handle adversity," Saban said. When Rich pointed out that Hurts became a Super Bowl champion, Saban added that Hurts doesn't have a greater fan than him.

Asked which players he is proudest of developing, Saban named two who were not heavily recruited out of high school: Josh Jacobs and Quinnen Williams. Both went about it the hard way and became first-round picks.

Rich then asked whether Saban knew his final College Football Playoff would be his last. "No, not really," Saban said. The docuseries shows him at 3:50 before a 4:00 team meeting, sitting alone in the staff room staring at the clock with two speeches, one to retire and one to stay. He had a young team with a lot of players coming back. But his family had first asked him after the 2017 national championship, "When is enough enough?" He wasn't ready then. Each year after 2020, the question returned. Being a coach, he said, "is a way of life. It's not a job." It was getting hard on him, he didn't want to ride the program down, and opponents were using his age against Alabama in recruiting. He wanted time with Miss Terry, and it has been very rewarding.

He misses the players and the competition, not the 70-hour work week. And any program tire-kicking a comeback runs into a problem. "Miss Terry said, 'If you take a job, you're going to commute,'" Saban said. "She's not moving." College GameDay keeps him involved, and it answered one of his biggest fears about leaving coaching, since he had been part of a team since he was 9 years old.

Finally, the College Football Playoff picture. Saban had picked Miami over Texas for the national title in the preseason, and he didn't exactly take a mulligan. The most complete teams so far, he said, are Georgia and Miami, and even after Ohio State's loss at Texas, he still considers the Buckeyes one of the most complete teams in the country. "I think the heat got them a little bit in the fourth quarter," he said, while putting Texas in that category, too. Rich added that one loss is no longer the end of a season in a playoff world.

On the Heisman, Rich asked about Jeremiah Smith. Saban called him "one of the most dominant players in college football," big and strong, and compared him to Julio Jones, whom he once thought was one of a kind. Whether the trophy goes to the player with the best stats or the one with the biggest impact on the game, Saban said, Smith "has got to be one of the players that is very much considered for it."

After the interview, Rich said he had heard the series is the best thing since The Last Dance, with Bill Belichick, Hurts and Tagovailoa, Steve Sarkisian, Lane Kiffin, Kirby Smart and Manti Te'o among those who sat down for it.