‘Saban’ Has Nothing To Say About Its Subject Or The World He Helped Create
At times it really does feel like time is moving faster than ever, and even things that happened a year ago might as well have happened 10 years ago. But it is important to maintain perspective, and understand that time and history have to play their parts before we can properly recognize moments for what they meant at the time they happened. With that said, it can feel a little strange to begin reevaluating the legacy of Nick Saban, football coach, and the Saban era of Alabama football a mere three years after his surprise retirement from the team and college football in general. The man is just started getting comfortable as on-air ESPN talent, finding time to evaluate games and banter with human Red Bull can Pat McAfee, in between his actual work as minister of propaganda for archaic college sports bills.
The truth is we aren’t removed enough from the Saban era to understand what his time there meant for the sport, that particular team, or the city of Tuscaloosa at large. But the content machine needs to eat constantly in order to maintain value for an increasingly shrinking number of investors, and so it must be fed. So Nick Saban, come on down for your glossy, incredibly long, fussy, overproduced, myth-making, hagiographic sports documentary project.
The new six-part ESPN documentary, Saban, is the officially authorized story of Nick Saban as championship coach of the Alabama Crimson Tide, alongside some other stops at Toledo, Michigan State, and a national championship at LSU. If you’ve watched enough modern sports documentaries, and Lord knows we have, then you already know what to expect: a lot of inspiration-core, thinly veiled sponcon in which the product is the star of the documentary themselves.
Saban follows the legacy and legend Saban built in his Alabama tenure, starting from his 2007 arrival as the potential savior of football in Tuscaloosa to his (seemingly) out-of-the-blue retirement in 2023. Through this lens, we dig into his biography and previous stops in college and the NFL to learn how they informed his coaching philosophy and development—all as told through jagged, poorly edited and paced timeline jumping that has become de rigueur of sports documentaries now. This is just one of the myriad ways The Last Dance ruined documentary filmmaking.
This sort of timeline hopping, beyond damaging the rhythm and flow of storytelling, also makes it so you never get a full picture of Saban’s pre-Alabama history. It’s just a lot of jagged memories and asides. Bill Belichick appears in the documentary as a talking head in Episode 5, which makes sense, since Belichick was early in identifying Saban’s skill and ability, and brought him in as a defensive coordinator during his stint with the Cleveland Browns. But he ultimately talks very little about this or gets into any details about their time together. Belichick ends up with with less screen time than Van Lathan, who shows up for some reason in Episode 2 as the voice of the LSU fan, which must be heard from, I guess. There’s no talking head provided for the Michigan State or Miami Dolphins fans, who I am sure have some questions they would like to see asked.
That sort of thing, I believe, highlights part of the fault of this documentary and these types of projects in general: They’re unfocused. They have no larger theme beyond remembering some moments and treating the talking-head interview like it’s the red carpet of an awards show. They force connections for the sake of poor storytelling, such as the moment in Episode 4 when Saban’s time as a player at Kent State during the Kent State shooting is juxtaposed against coaching Bama during the 2011 tornado that hit Tuscaloosa. It’s an attempt to say that football can be the balm to ease tragedy. I guess?
These documentaries also cannot reach for anything meaningful because they are so in thrall to their subjects. This is how you end up with a documentary on Urban Meyer’s Florida teams that tries to sidestep as much of the toxicity and chaos surrounding that team as possible. It’s how you get a Portland Trail Blazers documentary that pretends “the Jail Blazers” did nothing at all to gain such an unfair nickname. It’s how you get a documentary on freakin’ Raygun and her viral Olympics performance that presents her as some kind of victim of the mean ol’ internet. There is no perspective, no 30,000-foot view. No questions or pushback on the narrative that is being pushed by the person in the center. In fact, these documentaries argue, these people have earned the right to shape their narrative and legend, because they have earned their own documentary in the first place.
Fair enough, I suppose. But my counter would be: What are we actually here for, then? If you ascribe to the Nick Saban or Michael Jordan or Derek Jeter way of life, there are plenty of other ways to gain their insights. There are books written by them or from their perspective. There are instructional guides, videos, interviews, and thousands upon thousands of clips of these people already available. What does this documentary provide to someone not already in the church of Saban?
For all of The Last Dance’s issues, flaws, and bad habits, which have informed every sports and celeb documentary that has come since, none of the people that glom onto its structure seem to understand its real draw and magic came from all that previously unseen footage. It is the hours and hours of in-depth video of Jordan in his element, Jordan unguarded, and the Chicago Bulls team as they were in 1998 that drew people in. The Last Dance, frankly, suffers every time it deviates away from that footage. It is the one thing untainted by years of content-making and sports takes. Without anything like that, what do these other documentaries have to offer? They seem to be doing brand management more than any historicizing.
Which isn’t to say Saban is completely uninteresting. Some of the best moments in Saban involve footage of the coach in practice, getting after the players and the coaches under him. Episode 3 has great intense footage of Bama’s “4th-quarter program,” which they compare to the military’s hell week. Or take a scene late in Episode 5, when Saban tells Tua Tagovailoa and Jalen Hurts that Tagovailoa will be replacing Hurts in the second half of the national championship game against Georgia. The most animated Saban gets is when he talks about his father, who died as he was beginning his coaching career, or when he talks about his wife, “Mrs. Terry,” and their marriage. There’s also a great moment in Episode 5 where Jerry Glanville shows up and acts as the handsome Chad to Saban’s uptight virgin for a couple minutes.
Saban also talks about speaking to a sports psychologist, Dr. Lionel “Lonny” Rosen, during his time at Michigan State in Episode 1, and how that informed his coaching philosophy, which is funny because even now he still seems like an incredibly repressed individual. He’s a tight-ass perfectionist. He’s unwilling to enjoy or indulge in the success he’s made for himself, as characterized by a scene in Episode 3, in which he calls a 7:30 a.m. coaches meeting the morning after winning the first national championship at Alabama to prepare for the next season. He won’t really get that personal about his feelings during any of his tenure with the Tide. He still won’t totally be truthful about the tension between him and Lane Kiffin. He won’t talk about Kirby Smart’s departure and how Smart attempted to poach members of Saban’s coaching staff as he moved on to Georgia. He doesn’t talk about the wins or the losses with any great detail. He doesn’t talk about the players with any specificity.
What he talks about is the job and “the process.” It’s about adhering to the process at all times. In coach-speak, everything is about “motivation” or “climbing the mountain” as well as “being accountable,” “doing your job,” and “playing the right way.” If part of the problem with the modern sports documentary is its inherent adoration of its subject, Saban does itself no favors by also focusing on a person who doesn’t want to talk about so much of what people actually want to know.
I do get it. Sports, maybe football especially, has a lot of cult ideology. You have to be a little brainwashed and a little bit of a robot in order to buy into the mission statement. The minute you start looking at it as the child’s game it is, it all falls apart. All that motivational coaching nonsense has a value, but it is also vapid when trying to pass it off as actual insight.
There’s a moment in Episode 3, where Saban goes to check in on his Tuscaloosa car dealership and service station, that probably does more to highlight who Saban is than anything else in this documentary. He is a salesman, a hustler, a guy who could get you to buy that lemon or convince your son to play for him at whatever university he’s at. He’s a slick confidence man, and at one point those powers were used for good, but lately they haven’t been.
It’s hard to remember this, but Saban in many ways was the first modern college coach. There was a time when college football bought into the myth of the lifer coach, the coach that was at your school or program for as long as possible. A coach that was there, not just for football, but to be part of the community. Saban was a pure careerist: He was always looking for the next opportunity, the next step on the ladder, the right move for his career and not the team. He eventually became that lifer-type of coach at Alabama, but only after achieving enough in his career to be a hotly demanded coach.
So there is a bit of irony in his quitting the sport at the moment players were suddenly given the chance to be careerist in the same way. For anyone under a rock lately, Saban has spent the last year being the spokesperson for the Protect College Sports Act, a Trojan horse bill that purports to be about saving the sport from the unregulated Wild West of NIL and transfer portal mania. But it is actually a thinly veiled attempt by the NCAA, the government, and the TV networks to wrest power back from the players and return the sport back to a place under their boots. Saban has spent every College GameDay segment he can stumping for this bill and using that same salesman charm to sell it as being in everyone’s best interests. I’m surprised he has not hinted at possibly even coaching again if his little old bill can just be passed—a testament, I suppose, to his comfort with retirement (or the size of his broadcasting contract).
His dedication is so complete that I believed this entire documentary was cynically building toward one last stumping in favor of the legislation. Aside from some typical finger-wagging at how far NIL has gone, it thankfully never went that far.
But it does go to show the ultimate issue I have with this documentary. If this proposal is passed—and I cannot say enough that it should not be—in a few years that might speak more to what Saban’s legacy is than anything he accomplished on the field. Time can be funny that way. Saban, for as legendary as he is, does not need hagiography while he’s fighting against those same players who gave him everything he asked of them on the field, and many of whom never accomplished as professionals what they did for him as college players. Players who got almost nothing while he helped make coaches’ salaries skyrocket. And while ESPN has been shameless in the ways they’ve aligned themselves with this bill, it would do the rest of us some good to remember on whose backs Saban built his legacy. Many of them will not get a documentary that pumps out their narrative on their behalf.
