LSU coach Nick Saban took the reins of the LSU football program in the 2000 season, has turned the program around and has began to fulfill the dreams of LSU fans. Jason Doré sat down with him in his office on Tuesday afternoon.
JD: Did you have a mentor that helped you develop your coaching philosophy? What are the basics of that philosophy?
NS: I’ve had a lot of mentors through the years. I think my college coach Don James was probably the first one who started to instill in me philosophy on how things should be done systematically. How coaching is teaching and teaching is an ability to inspire learning. Lots of different people learn in different ways. We try to teach everybody to reach their full potential as a person so they can have more success in life and as a student so they graduate from school. As a football player, so that hopefully they all will have an opportunity to reach their full potential. But bigger than that as a team, they will have the opportunity to win a championship. That’s kind of how we make our decisions and go about doing what we do.
JD: You talk a lot about human nature and how people just try to survive not excel. Do you find it difficult to instill in players a desire to strive for perfection?
NS: It’s a condition that we all have. I mean everybody is that way. Some people learn how to have a lot of pride in their performance, set a high standard for themselves and work towards it all the time and some people don’t. I don’t think it is an innate thing that we all have. Some are more apt to it than others and what we try to do is bring out that competitive spirit and have a high standard of excellence all the time in everything that you do so that you always bring your ‘A’ game so to speak. If you look around the country at all college football teams and any kind of competitive events, you see that’s not what always happens. There are always upsets. There’s always really good teams that don’t play well then the next week they play extremely well. Virginia Tech is a great example of that. It’s a constant battle to try to keep everybody striving for perfection and to be motivated to want to do it that way.
JD: How do you like life in Baton Rouge?
NS: Baton Rouge is great. We really enjoy living here. The people are great. The passion for football here is outstanding and that’s what you want as a coach. You want people to be interested in what you’re doing. You want them to be positive and supportive so that passion actually helps you accomplish the goals that you want to accomplish and it’s not something that can be a negative in terms of what you’re trying to build. It’s always been a positive here. You know we just really enjoy it.
JD: LSU coaches, especially football coaches, are often treated and looked at upon like icons. Do you find it difficult to deal with that attention or do you even notice it?
NS: Well I don’t really notice it that much. I have a process of a way I try to go about things every week and a focus that I try to stick with in terms of how we prepare our team and what we do to prepare the team. Nowhere in that is something that I’m worried about how everybody is viewing me. I certainly appreciate the interest and feel that people have a right to have some access to the program and what they are doing because of their interest. I try to do that whether it is through a TV or radio show or whatever so that people have the opportunity to do that. I’m just like everybody else. I have a wife and two kids and everybody has their pain and suffering that they go through in trying to get everybody to do the right things all the time, do well in what they do, and be supportive of other people so they have the best chance to be successful and that’s what we try to do.
JD: You spent some time as an assistant coach in the NFL. How would you compare the NFL coaching and playing environment to the college level?
NS: Well, I don’t like to make comparisons, but I don’t think that there is a lot of difference. Football is football. College players are probably a little bit more apt because they are more in a development stage of their careers, not only as football players, but also as people. You can have a little more significant impact on their development I think when they are 18-to-22 years old. Pro players are a little older and a little more set in their ways, but I find that if players feel like you are actually helping them to perform better, they will always be respectful and appreciate what you are trying to do for them. I actually found that to be true on both levels.
JD: With the pending BCS controversy and recognizing that the bowl system in essential to college football, do you think there is any way to maintain the bowl system and make everyone happy?
NS: I don’t know that you could ever make everybody happy in anything that we do, but I think the bowl system is important to the long-term success of college football. It’s been a part of college football for a long time. It gives a lot of young people that play this game and put a lot into the opportunity to get some positive self-gratification in playing an extra game and make a nice trip for them at the end of the season. I think keeping the bowl system in some form as it is now is probably important to the future. Maybe after the bowl games are played, even if they have a BCS that picks the eight teams some kind of way. I don’t know what the best process or procedure of that might be. Maybe you pick two teams or four teams and have just a two or four-team playoff after that’s over. That’s always been the way I thought it should be. Rather than just have a playoff system kind of like where you pick 16 teams and go through a playoff system. These guys are college students, student-athletes, and they have a lot of other responsibilities. They are just young people that are trying to get all those other responsibilities right whether it’s academics or developing as a person. Playing football in the SEC is a pretty big stage for them and difficult for some of them to deal with sometimes in terms of what the expectations are and what people expect from them and to be able to balance all those other parts of their life. So to make this an NFL-style playoff system, I don’t think is in the long-term best interest of college football. To have a game or two that decides it maybe after the bowl games might not be a bad addition.
JD: Thank you for your time.
NS: Thank you. I appreciate it.