The Program: Alabama: A Curated History of the Crimson Tide

By Aaron Suttles and Rece Davis

In The Program: Alabama Crimson Tide, take a more profound and unique journey into the history of a historic team.

This thoughtful and engaging collection of essays captures the astute fans' history of the celebrated program, going beyond well-worn narratives of yesteryear to uncover the less-discussed moments, decisions, people, and settings that fostered the team's iconic identity.

Through wheeling and dealing, mythmaking and community building, explore where Bama football has been, how it rose to the pinnacle of college sports, and how it will continue to evolve and stay in contention for generations to come.

Crimson Tide fans in the know will enjoy this personal, local, in-depth look at team history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Oct 11, 2022
• ISBN: 9781637271056

Book preview

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To Stephanie and Grayson, who showed me what a home is.

Contents

Foreword by Rece Davis

Introduction

Part 1. The Coaches

1. Nick Saban

2. Lane Kiffin

3. Kirby Smart

4. Burton Burns

5. Bryant and Saban: More Similar Than Different

Part 2. The Legends

6. Julio Jones

7. Derrick Henry

8. Barrett Jones

9. Derrick Thomas and Will Anderson

10. The Quarterbacks

Part 3. Building the Teams

11. Ranking the Saban teams

12. 2020: The Greatest Team of All Time?

13. Legendary Recruits

14. 2017: Recruiting the Best

Part 4. Traditions

15. Rammer Jammer

16. Bryant-Denny Stadium

17. How Many Titles?

18. The Tide Don’t Lose in Baton Rouge

Part 5. Player Profiles

19. Aaron Douglas

20. Damien Harris

21. T. J. Yeldon

22. Minkah Fitzpatrick

23. Eddie Jackson

Acknowledgments

Foreword by Rece Davis

Great is so overused a word that it has largely lost meaning. When excellence is as relentless and methodical as a metronome, it numbs us, or at the very least lulls us into expecting it as normal. But there is nothing routine or normal about the history of Alabama football. Greatness is never routine, no matter how customary such a display seems. Greatest? Now you stir the blood, you invite subjectivity, and arguments ensue.

The debate should be over, for there is no rational opposition to calling the Nick Saban era not only the greatest in the storied history of the Crimson Tide but also the greatest in college football history. Under Saban’s guidance, Alabama has won games and claimed championships at an unprecedented level over an unparalleled length of time. Alabama is the standard by which others are measured—a machine that insists its parts fit in order to crush the souls and spirits of all who dare to stand in the path. That is a school of thought with which I differ. The Process isn’t fitting the next widget into the juggernaut; it’s enlightening players about the mutually beneficial relationship of creating value for themselves (to repeat Saban’s oft-used phrase) while being part of something bigger than themselves.

That is the secret: the people. The stories. The relationships. The decisions. I suspect Nick Saban would’ve won big no matter what. But take, for instance, Julio Jones’s decision to come to Tuscaloosa as part of Saban’s first full recruiting class. It kicked the Process into overdrive. There is no one player, in my judgment, who has embodied excellence and passed it down to future Alabama players more than Julio.

But this dynasty was built on a host of personalities. There is Mark Ingram, a native of Flint, Michigan, whose fandom in his post-Heisman days make him revered among the so-called Gumps. AJ McCarron brought swagger. Rolando McClain and Reuben Foster delivered an edge. Jonathan Allen and Dont’a Hightower imposed their will and demanded teammates come along. No player was ever more a reflection of his coach than Minkah Fitzpatrick. Derrick Henry and DeVonta Smith brought transcendent brilliance. Tua Tagovailoa and Bryce Young revolutionized the perception of Alabama quarterbacks. Mac Jones’s fearlessness even extended to tweaking Saban in practice as the scout team quarterback before leading perhaps Alabama’s greatest team.

There’s that word: greatest. How is it truly measured? From my perspective, it might be measured by wins. But it is built on the power of personalities and the stories surrounding them. That is the foundation of college football’s greatest dynasty and one of the great dynasties in all of sports. Few have greater insight into this than Aaron Suttles. In his own inimitable way, Aaron will deliver never-before-heard stories that will give you insight into the rich history of Alabama football. Soak this up. Never get bored with excellence.

—Rece Davis

ESPN College GameDay

Introduction

I remember the exact moment I fell in love with college football. For most things, my memory is not so good, especially for a journalist and writer. I forget names at a historic level; truly, my capacity to remember a stranger’s name after first meeting them is impressively bad. However, there are certain things that have imprinted themselves in my mind that I’ll always remember. Such as the time I stumbled across my dad’s box full of VHS tapes containing old college football games. As a young boy, this was heaven to me.

I bet I watched those games 100 times apiece. These were older games—before my time, really—that only had one thing in common: at least one team featured in each was from the SEC. The 1982 Sugar Bowl particularly held my interest. I guess it was watching Herschel Walker and Dan Marino slug it out that captured my young imagination. I rewound that Marino touchdown pass for the win over and over again.

Another tape held the 1982 Cotton Bowl, a 14–12 Texas win over Alabama. Texas scored all their points in the fourth quarter, and with time running out and pinned deep in their own territory, they had the punter run out of the back of the end zone for a safety. My young mind always thought it dumb to take a safety to decrease your lead to 2 points with 48 seconds remaining. Didn’t Texas head coach Fred Akers realize that a field goal would beat him? What was he thinking? I’ve asked myself more times than I care to count.

I kept myself entertained for hours in my dad’s basement with that treasure trove of college football history. I can close my eyes and still see my dad’s VCR remote control. It was a Mitsubishi and had a round knob on it. Instead of hitting a rewind button, I could just turn the knob to the left to rewind or to the right to fast-forward. 

College football was always how my dad and I bonded. It was how we understood each other. It was the only thing either of us ever felt comfortable talking about with the other. The truth is, we never really knew each other. 

My mom and dad divorced when I was a child. He moved to Chattanooga, Tennessee, and I stayed with Mom in Fort Payne and then in Leighton, where my mother’s side of the family lived. I didn’t see my dad much, but I knew he loved college football, and I felt like if I liked it enough too, then we could share something that could cross the divide. I’d go stay with him on occasion, and I could talk to him about what those games were like to watch in the moment. Why did Texas take that safety? How good were Marino and Walker back then? 

My dad was a huge Alabama fan. He didn’t go to school there; instead a career in the air force awaited him. There, as a sergeant, he became an engineer, a career he thoroughly loved. This was a man who loved to tinker, loved to build computers—he loved his gadgets. But he loved Alabama football the most, and that’s what started my love affair with college football. 

I was accepted into the University of Alabama out of high school, but my dad lived in Chattanooga, working for the local CBS affiliate there, and he asked me if I would come there and enroll at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. That meant casting aside my plans for the opportunity to really get to know my father. I jumped at the chance. 

One of the first weeks I was there, he asked me if I wanted to go the Alabama-Vanderbilt game. Going to my first college football game with my dad? This was too good to be true. But that Saturday morning he got called into work, and we had to postpone. He knew I was disappointed, and I’ll never forget what he said to cheer me up: Don’t worry, we’ve got plenty of opportunities to go see a game. Two weeks later he died. I withdrew from UT-Chattanooga and eventually made my way to the University of Alabama. Not the most conventional route, but it was mine. 

I’ve thought about that month I spent with my dad before he died a lot over the years. We never really knew each other, not really. We never really knew how to communicate other than through college football. Maybe that’s why the game is such a part of my life now. Maybe that’s why I devoted my professional life to documenting the game. I never set out to cover Alabama football for a living. I wanted to report on Major League Baseball. God had other plans, though.

I’ve reported on Alabama football since 2007. I don’t know if it’s fate or pure coincidence that my journey has paralleled Nick Saban’s tenure at Alabama. Covering the greatest college football coach of all time during the greatest dynasty in college football history at the program my dad loved—well, it doesn’t seem like a coincidence to me. At least that’s not what I let myself believe. 

I wonder what my dad would think of my career. I think he would have been happy about how hard I worked to get to this point in my career. I think he would pepper me with questions every day about what’s going on with his favorite college football team. I like to think he’d be proud.

Covering Saban’s Alabama teams has taken me places a boy from Leighton, Alabama, doesn’t dare dream of. I’ve covered nine national championship games. I’ve covered multiple Heisman Trophy winners. I’ve covered multiple games that the president of the United States attended. 

And that’s how I’ve arrived at this book. The opportunities I’ve been provided over the years have given me access to some incredible moments in college football history. I wanted to share some of the coaches, teams, players, and stuff I’ve learned about this program in my 15 years covering it. I hope you enjoy it. 

Part 1. The Coaches

1. Nick Saban

What can you say about Nick Saban that hasn’t already been said? Probably not much, but his excellence—which has been the subject of several books and multiple documentaries—requires intense study. He developed the renowned Process that is the definition of everything in his program; his way of speaking inspires catchphrases. 

For a man who eats the same Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pies for breakfast and the same turkey salad every day for lunch, Saban is anything but boring. He’s a man of routine, but that doesn’t mean he gets stuck in his ways. Anything but. Imagine a man in his 60s—and in Saban’s case now, in his 70s—who got to the top of his industry and is unafraid to alter what got him there. 

Usually when someone reaches the top of their profession, they never veer from the formula that got them there. That was Saban for the first half of his tenure at Alabama. He was a coach who built his teams on defense and power running. That’s not to say he didn’t value the passing game, but there was a certain physicality to Saban’s early Alabama teams that had his signature on them. In the middle of that run, in the midst of that dominance, college football shifted its rules to favor the offense. 

Way back in 2012, Hugh Freeze was the first-year Ole Miss head coach who implemented a style of offense that wasn’t frequently seen at the time. His teams ran a play, got to the line as quickly as possible, and ran another play, oftentimes before the defense could adjust or make substitutions. The week following Alabama’s 33–14 win over the Rebels—a game in which Ole Miss held the ball for only 25:01 but ran more plays than the Crimson Tide (68–64)—saw more than a few raised eyebrows from the way Freeze had called the game, and afterward Saban was left wondering where college football was headed. 

Saban’s response to these new hurry-up, no-huddle offenses came in a now-famous statement during a press conferences about this new direction in college football. He uttered a combination of words that has become his catchphrase, used time and time again in college football when change is happening. It’s come to signify that while Saban is questioning whether a change is the best thing for the game, he’ll make the change and dominate within that new reality. 

I think that the way people are going no-huddle right now, that at some point in time, we should look at how fast we allow the game to go in terms of player safety, Saban said. The team gets in the same formation group; you can’t substitute defensive players; you go on a 14-, 16-, 18-play drive; and they’re snapping the ball as fast as you can go, and you look out there and all your players are walking around and can’t even get lined up. That’s when guys have a much greater chance of getting hurt—when they’re not ready to play. I think that’s something that can be looked at. It’s obviously created a tremendous advantage for the offense when teams are scoring 70 points and we’re averaging 49.5 points a game.… More and more people are going to do it. I just think there’s got to be some sense of fairness in terms of asking, ‘Is this what we want football to be?’

Is this what we want football to be? It’s become a running joke among Alabama fans whenever a change occurs. Because Saban seemingly issues a warning, then he makes whatever change is occurring, bringing it into his program, and begins to dominate with the new rule. 

The rise of the hurry-up, no-huddle offense was the impetus that completely changed the way Alabama played offense. Saban knew his way of playing—big, thudding defense with a power running game—was on its way out. He had to adapt. He did so with a new offensive philosophy outside his comfort zone. He brought in Lane Kiffin. Kiffin gets his own section in this book, but his hiring is just one example of how Saban adapted. 

Kiffin was hired to install a new offense, and he did. It wasn’t a change that happened overnight. Because although Saban got with the times and installed a new offense, it would take some time to recruit the players to run it. In Kiffin’s first season, he started a converted running back at quarterback. Then he had a pro-style passer in Jake Coker the next. In his third and final season as the Crimson Tide’s offensive coordinator, Kiffin started Jalen Hurts. You can see the evolution in three years’ time, from the body styles the program recruited to the level of quarterback it could now attract to the abundance of wide receivers. Give Saban the credit for recognizing it was time to make a change and for hiring Kiffin, which was always viewed as an odd marriage. 

Well, Lane did a fantastic job for us when he was the offensive coordinator, and I don’t think that he probably gets—we made a tremendous change when Lane came in, and Lane had always been the same…philosophy-wise as we were in terms of pro-style football, Saban said. "And because of what Ole Miss—and it’s ironic that [Kiffin is] at Ole Miss now—had done and beaten us several times running the spreads, running the RPOs, running the screens and things that are difficult to defend because of the rule of blocking downfield when the ball is thrown behind the line of scrimmage—and we weren’t utilizing some of those things, which I thought put us at a disadvantage, and Lane really hadn’t done much of that stuff either.

So when he came in, I said, ‘Look, we want to change this. You need to research this. You’re smart. We can do this.’ He actually did implement that and was the first one to sort of change how we did things on offense. It enhanced our opportunity to score more points.… Because we’re a little different, a lot of people have sort of wondered what the relationship was, but we never really had a bad relationship, because [there] was always a lot of mutual respect for the kind of play caller he was, the kind of coach that he was, and the job that he did. I actually said…when he went to Florida Atlantic that Lane will be a better head coach than even he is an assistant because he has those kinds of qualities. Obviously, he hasn’t disappointed in the job that he did there or the job he’s done at Ole Miss. So none of this is a surprise to me. And I…can only say from my perspective how much respect I have for him as a coach.

The upgrade helped the offense become one of the most explosive in college football. The offensive coordinators have come and gone, but the results remain largely the same. After Kiffin, it was Brian Daboll. Alabama won a national championship with him. Then it was Mike Locksley, who got Alabama to the national championship game in 2018. Then it was Steve Sarkisian, who helped Alabama win a national championship in 2020. This past year it was Bill O’Brien, who got Alabama to the national championship game. 

The style of offense attracted better skill position players too. Jalen Hurts, Tua Tagovailoa, and Mac Jones were all NFL starters during the 2020 season. Before them, Alabama didn’t have a full-time starter at quarterback for an NFL team, although John Parker Wilson, Greg McElroy, and AJ McCarron had made NFL rosters. The wide receivers have followed suit with elite talents such as Calvin Ridley, Jerry Jeudy, Henry Ruggs III, DeVonta Smith, and Jaylen Waddle all taken in the first round of the NFL Drafts. (Amari Cooper was too, but he was recruited before the change in offensive identity.) 

Elite running backs have been part of the formula since Saban’s arrival in 2007, and they weren’t forgotten about as the offense shifted focus to the passing game. Kenyan Drake, Josh Jacobs, Damien Harris, and Najee Harris are all on NFL rosters. (Mark Ingram and Derrick Henry are too, but they were recruited before the change in offensive identity.) 

Not only is Saban a master at assembling talent, but he also seems to thrive when making difficult personnel decisions. For instance, when his team was floundering in the 2018 national championship game against Georgia, Saban made the difficult decision to bench starter Jalen Hurts and insert Tua Tagovailoa. The decision paid off, as Tagovailoa led a legendary comeback for the national title in overtime. Saban’s decision, though, led to an off-season quarterback controversy for the 2018 season. Tagovailoa won the job, and Saban was able to keep Hurts in the fold until the following season, when he transferred to Oklahoma. It was a balancing act of a season for Saban, and when the roles were reversed in the SEC Championship Game and Tagovailoa was injured and Hurts was inserted into the game, Saban had instilled confidence in Hurts for just that moment. It worked, and Hurts led a comeback win over Georgia. In an emotional postgame interview, Saban proclaimed how proud he was of Hurts for what he’d endured during the regular season going from a starter to a backup. 

The Hurts-Tagovailoa relationship was widely speculated about and awkward, but both were mature in how they handled it. 

I’d say our relationship has grown, Tagovailoa said. Our communication with how we see things now, I think, has grown a lot. When I go in on 7-on-7, he’s kind of watching in the back. When he goes in, I watch in the back. Sometimes we question each other, like, ‘Why did you do this, why did you do that?’ The communication with us has been really good. I think we’ve been improving a lot as an offense, within not only our running game but also our passing game while we’re communicating to each other as well. It benefits both of us. And Mac Jones as well. I’m happy that Mac Jones got his first touchdown this season. It’s exciting.

Who would have thought that Alabama—who before Saban’s arrival last had a quarterback start and win an NFL game in 1987, when Jeff Rutledge did it—would have three future NFL QB starters on the sideline at the same time? All three of those guys were Heisman Trophy finalists, although Hurts did it after he transferred to Oklahoma. 

That’s part of the Saban legacy now. Alabama quarterbacks are viewed completely differently now than before his arrival. Before Tagovailoa was drafted fifth in the 2020 NFL Draft, the last Crimson Tide quarterback to get drafted in the first round was Richard Todd, who was selected sixth overall in 1976. 

It’s not lost on anyone that Tagovailoa and Jones were Heisman Trophy finalists and then Bryce Young became the first Alabama quarterback to win college football’s top individual award in his first year as a starter. Much like with wide receivers and running backs, Alabama has become a program that attracts top-flight quarterbacks. 

McCarron was a highly regarded recruit, but he was from the state of Alabama. Saban went to Texas to get Hurts, to Hawaii to get Tagovailoa, to Florida to get Jones, and to California to get Young. He also just signed another highly regarded quarterback in the recruiting class of 2022 in Ty Simpson from Tennessee. 

There’s no guarantee that Simpson will be the next guy, but Saban was high on him during the recruiting process. Ty Simpson is certainly someone that we recruited a long time, know a lot about, is made of the right stuff, and certainly has a lot of talent and ability, Saban said. 

If