At this point, Alabama fans had reason to be worried. The signs disconcertingly echoed ones that, in the past, had led to Saban’s departures: Sexton was out sniffing around, and told the Texas folks almost exactly what he’d once told the Alabama athletics director Mal Moore — that the university was a place he was interested in. (Saban once told a newspaper that without his aggressive agent, “I don’t think I’d ever make one change, the way I am.”)

Saban was again in denial mode, the inevitable precursor to all of his moves. The unnamed man whom Sexton had contacted to get to Wallace Hall played the role that Sean Tuohy, a business associate, had when Sexton initiated contact with L.S.U. The “special pressure” that Hicks said Saban felt, and the unreasonable expectations that Sexton had detailed in his phone call, harked back to his later years at L.S.U. — the ones Skip Bertman, the L.S.U. athletics director, had warned him about — when a two-loss season suddenly was viewed as a failure. As Sexton had told Hall and Tom Hicks, Saban was indeed most comfortable when he was rebuilding a program — as he had at Toledo, Michigan State, L.S.U., the Miami Dolphins and Alabama — and not maintaining it.

Most significant, Saban was clearly displeased with both the fans (he’d lambasted them in midseason for leaving home games early) and his players in the 2013 season, and he was again feeling underappreciated. Those who knew Saban had long realized that two of the most significant aspects of his career — his “Process” and his near-constant job-hopping — were intertwined at one crucial juncture: Both, at their essence, were about the fact that Saban found it “more invigorating to want than to have,” as David Foster Wallace once wrote.

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The Texas football program also seemed to fit Saban’s blueprint. The university, like L.S.U. in 2000 and Alabama in 2007, was desperate to return to national football prominence. Texas had the resources — it had the biggest athletic budget in the country, at $163 million — not only to provide Saban with the largest contract in college football history but also to pay for whatever facilities and other tertiary things he deemed necessary to help rebuild the program. His recruiting base would be top-notch: The state of Texas had long been hailed as among the best when it came to high school football talent.

In late November — just as Brown had begun to falter down the stretch of what was looking more and more like his last year as the Texas coach — came the public airing of what was the truest barometer of Saban’s feelings. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Terry Saban was careful to maintain that she and her husband would indeed stay at Alabama. In a moment of candor, she issued a warning shot: “You come to a crossroads and the expectations get so great, people get spoiled by success, and there starts to be a lack of appreciation,” she told the paper. “We’re kind of there now.”

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The University of Alabama’s power brokers by this time knew their coach well. Like their predecessors at Michigan State and L.S.U., they, too, understood his restlessness and need to feel appreciated. After the 2012 national championship, they’d begun to feel jittery. In early 2013, they approached Saban. “We asked him what we could do to help him,” one trustee says. The answer came that spring.