Anytime Michigan State crosses paths with LSU or Alabama, Nick Saban’s name comes up. That’s true even when the subject is basketball as it was this week in Washington, D.C..
Michigan State’s second-seeded team faces No. 3-seed LSU in an NCAA Tournament’s Sweet Sixteen game tonight at the Capital One Center, Spartans’ basketball coach Tom Izzo was asked about Saban, but this time the question wasn’t about what Izzo learned from Saban, who has won six football national titles at LSU (one, 2003) and Alabama (most recently 2017).
An LSU-based reporter mentioned to Izzo in a media session Saban often talked during his Baton Rouge days (2000-2004) about Izzo. Their times in East Lansing overlapped in the 1980s as MSU assistant coaches and later as head coaches — Izzo, 1995-96-current; Saban, 1995-99.
Izzo is one of the few people in East Lansing that still smiles at the mention of Saban’s name. Scorn for Saban seems timeless for abandoning the Spartans in the middle of the night. He left for LSU after having guided Michigan State to 9-2 regular-season record in 1999 (interim coach Bobby Williams led the Spartans to a final 10-2 record with a win over Florida in the Citrus Bowl).
“Just talked to him the other day,” Izzo responded. “We came together at Michigan State as assistants and then we came together at Michigan State as head coaches. If he says that, there are a lot of times I say the same thing. I just love people that have been able to sustain stuff over a period of time. And Nick’s a very passionate guy. He’s from — as he used to call it, a hillbilly from West Virginia; I’m a Yooper from way up. We kind of had similar backgrounds and we’ve kind of shared similar things.”
Saban was Michigan State’s defensive coordinator on the Spartans’ 1987 Rose Bowl championship team before he left for the NFL and returned as head coach in 1995. He had the difficult task of rebuilding a program that had fallen on hard times. George Perles, Saban’s former boss, had neglected recruiting and other football demands while feeding his ego in pursuit of a dual role as athletic director in addition to football coach.
But here’s where the Saban and Izzo personalities separate.
Saban was believed to have taken the LSU job because he was tired of recruiting, and falling short, in the shadow of Michigan. At LSU, he didn’t have an in-state rival.
Izzo dug in and kept recruiting despite similar bitter recruiting losses to Michigan, but he kept grinding. He was finally rewarded with Mateen Cleaves choosing the Spartans over Michigan.
Izzo can laugh at a bad turn and get back on the road. Saban growls his way to seeking the right turn. That growling is accepted better in Tuscaloosa, where football coaches walk on water, than trying to cross the Red Cedar River on foot.
He mixed Cleaves while developing players around him, elevating Morris Peterson and Charlie Bell into NBA talent. Cleaves, Peterson and Bell blended their talent smoothly with role-players Andre Huston and A.J. Granger to win the 2000 national title.
Izzo, to this day, still takes pride in calling Michigan State a “blue-collar program.” He hasn’t changed with his 22nd straight NCAA bid and 14th Sweet Sixteen trip this season.
I’m don’t think Saban could have built a blue-collar program that wins on the level of the basketball program.
At both LSU and Alabama, he has won with elite talent and unusual depth. He attracted the best of the best at LSU, failed with the Miami Dolphins in the NFL and then returned to college at Alabama, where 5-star and 4-star recruits from across the nation — and Pacific Ocean, with quarterback Tua Tagovaiola from Hawaii — follow each other like lemmings to Tuscaloosa.
The talent he has had to work with has some people calling him the college football’s greatest coach of all-time. I still say he’s not the best coach at Alabama.
Bear Bryant also won six national titles (1961, 1964, 1965, 1973, 1978 and 1979) — all at Alabama. But for all Bryant’s sins dragging his feet on integration that he has received a pass on from mainstream media at the expense of Michigan State coach Duffy Daugherty’s legacy leading the integration of college football, the Bear won without the recruiting advantages Saban enjoys.
Bryant’s recruiting base was basically the South in much more primitive times for coaches to identify talent. There weren’t recruiting services grading talent that was readily available to view nationwide with the press of a few buttons.
I’m not saying Saban needed the Internet to find the talent. I’m saying he’s perfected a manner that the kids find each other and follow each other. It’s a trickle down from pro athletes signing together to build Super Teams.
Saban didn’t have the patience to stick to recruiting at Michigan State in the shadow of Michigan
Mark Dantonio, who was a Saban assistant at Michigan State before he returned as the Spartans head coach in 2007, has managed a breakthrough that Saban gave up on. It’s still tough for Michigan State to recruit against Michigan, but Dantonio has developed the Spartans in a Big Ten championship program with top five national rankings in recent seasons.
Izzo and Dantonio have been a more successful tandem than Izzo-Saban likely would have turned out.
Izzo not only had the patience to remain at Michigan State, his coaching style has lifted his blue-collar program into a college basketball blue blood.
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I invite you to follow me on Twitter @shanny4055
Tom Shanahan, Author: Raye of Light http://tinyurl.com/knsqtqu
— Book on Michigan State’s leading role in the integration of college football. It explains Duffy Daugherty’s untold pioneering role and debunks myths that steered recognition away from him to Bear Bryant.
http://shanahan.report/a/the-case-for-duffy-and-medal-of-freedom
Don’t believe the myths at Duffy Daugherty’s expense about Bear Bryant’s motivation to play the 1970 USC-Alabama game or myths about the Charlie Thornhill-for-Joe Namath trade. Bear Bryant knew nothing about black talent in the South while he dragged his feet on segregation.
http://shanahan.report/a/myths-that-grew-out-of-1970-alabama-game-with-usc
http://shanahan.report/a/mystery-solved-in-thornhill-and-namath-myth
David Maraniss, Pulitzer Prize winner and biographer; “History writes people out of the story. It’s our job to write them back in.”
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