Before Alabama hired Saban, they’d been in the wilderness for a while. Since I’m not an Alabama insider, I don’t know if they had all the plans to build what they have when they hired Saban, but I don’t think so—I think Saban turned Bama into what they are today. Either they were extremely foresighted and picked well, or they saw that the best college coach around was going to be available, and when they hired him he set about to re-engineer all their athletics and how their AA works.
I think it’s the latter case, and Alabama got much more than they expected with Saban.
Alabama’s AA seemed pretty dysfunctional and booster-controlled before they hired Saban—like ours, but with a lot more money.
We’re in the wilderness right now, and we’re much more lost than Alabama was. We can’t really count on the result Alabama got without being disciplined and savvy.
For each of these coaches that we’re excited about, what happens to our program if we hire them? Who would be a part of really rebuilding our program? Who would do something like Saban did and get the program aligned and tune out the noise?
I think we underestimate how important the AD hire is—we need someone who will straighten out that organization and plan smarter than our previous ADs did. I also think we’re ignoring or overlooking important head coach abilities that we need.
We did get a hint how Cabrera and Neville are thinking when Neville used Tennessee as an example. We should look for our process to be like their process.