How programs from Tennessee to Louisiana-Lafayette are implementing Nick Saban's 'process'

Alex Byington | Montgomery Advertiser

For six seasons, Mark Hocke was admittedly spoiled while cutting his teeth as an assistant under longtime Alabama head strength coach Scott Cochran between 2009-2014.

Which is why, after finding himself out of work following three years of bouncing from Georgia to Florida State to Texas A&M as part of the yearly upheaval many other college football programs experience, the New Orleans native decided it was time to return home.

“I just really wanted to work with someone that’d seen it done (the Alabama) way,” said Hocke, in his first season as Louisiana-Lafayette’s head strength coach under first-year head coach Billy Napier, whose own coaching roots also trace back to Crimson Tide head coach Nick Saban.

“I feel like a lot of times people hire you because you’ve worked there, they kind of want your secrets, but at the end of the day, you are who you are, and I feel like I’d run into that (opposition) at other places I’ve been. So now I wanted to link up with someone that understood kind of what I understood, experienced what I’d experienced.”

That someone was Napier, the 39-year-old former Alabama receivers coach who reset his coaching career path over four seasons under Saban — first as an analyst in 2011 following his dismissal as Clemson’s offensive coordinator, and then again as an on-field assistant between 2013-16 — during which he was a part of three of Alabama’s last five national championships.

It’s because of that experience that, for all the intent and purposes, Louisiana-Lafayette’s football program may as well be a “carbon copy” of what Saban has instituted in Tuscaloosa.

You can see the footprint of that Alabama-Nick Saban model throughout everything we do,” Hocke said. “Whether it’s your Sunday-through-Saturday plan on a weekly basis during in-season, which we’ve modeled a great deal after (what Alabama does), … every little detail from pregame meal to prayer service to one-reel or team meetings. … Every little detail is almost a carbon copy to a certain extent.

That’s especially true when it comes to practice structure, with both programs utilizing rep-based development plans that breaks practice up to allow both the offense and defense to practice simultaneously to maximize repetitions and avoid any standing around time. Louisiana has also implemented a similar offseason plan, including a near-identical conditioning program they’ve termed the “Identity Program,” as well as establishing similar player-led meetings and workouts during the coachless months of June and July.

The similarities carry over into something as minute as the preseason team-bonding trips to the movies, to the times of the team’s Friday walk-throughs, as well as the up-to-the-minute schedule for game days.

More: La.-Lafayette's Napier comes full circle Saturday returning to Alabama to face top-ranked Tide, Saban

“It’s hard not to, when you’ve had a chance to work for Coach Saban — who’s had so much success his way, and you get this opportunity — there’s no question that a lot of what you do at the core is going to be what I observed, and you believe in it,” Napier said last month. “There’s no question, a lot of the things that you learn over time become part of who you are. It’s a certain way of doing things that’s unique, and I’ve just got a lot of conviction about how to practice, how to evaluate, how to be time efficient, how to make the most of our entire year-round plan. … Make no bones about it, at the core of what we do here, you know, is what I learned when I was working at Alabama.”

Of course, if imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, Napier and Louisiana-Lafayette are hardly alone in their direct implementation of Saban’s “process.”

Napier, Louisiana's Ragin' Cajuns prepare for Alabama UL Lafayette's head coach Billy Napier buried his father a year ago after he battled ALS. Napier looks up to his dad and his former boss Nick Saban.

Spanning the nation

From Georgia to Oregon, Saban’s coaching footprint spans the college football world.

Even one of Alabama’s longest-running rivals and Saturday’s cross-divisional opponent — Tennessee — has adopted much of what first-year head coach Jeremy Pruitt learned over eight years working directly under Saban, the last two as the Crimson Tide’s defensive coordinator.

“Coach Saban has a plan, he has a plan for everything, whether it’s offseason or spring ball, recruiting, nutrition, the Fourth Quarter program, open weeks, hiring coaches, and he sticks to the plan,” Pruitt said Oct. 3. “He’s a very good teacher not only for the players but for the coaches. He’s resilient, he never stops, he’s got as good a work ethic as anybody I’ve ever been around. So he does a fantastic job of all areas of being the leader of an organization.”

According to USA Today research, there are currently 11 former Saban assistants running their own college football programs, including four in the SEC — Jimbo Fisher (Texas A&M), Will Muschamp (South Carolina), Kirby Smart (Georgia) and Pruitt (Tennessee). Others include Major Applewhite (Houston), Curt Cignetti (Elon), Mario Cristobal (Oregon), Mark Dantonio (Michigan State), Michael Haywood (Texas Southern), Lane Kiffin (Florida Atlantic), and Napier (Louisiana-Lafayette).

The guy’s the best coach in college football, his record speaks for itself, and I think obviously athletic directors look at that and see that blueprint and want to be a part of that,” Muschamp said. “(Of course), you’ve got to be yourself, you’ve got to do what’s comfortable for you and what you feel is right for you. But there’s no question having worked for Nick has provided me a lot of opportunities.

In fact, there are a few key attributes most former Saban assistants make sure to implement at their new organizations, beginning with the offseason conditioning program — known far and wide as Alabama’s Fourth Quarter program — to Saban’s NFL-style recruiting and evaluation model, which tends to differentiate prospects based on position-specific attributes.

“There’s a lot of carryover to the things I learned from (Saban), from managing a game to managing your football team, your staff, from a recruiting standpoint and an evaluation standpoint,” Muschamp said Oct. 3. “We did a really good job (of that) at LSU, but then going to the Miami Dolphins and being a part of the National Football League and the draft process, the evaluation part of it at all positions, the critical factors at each position that you’re looking for, we really apply that to high school (players) now as far as our recruiting is concerned.”

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For Pruitt, the most appealing but not-so-translatable part of Saban’s “process” is the way Alabama not only recruits elite prospects, but also develops them within a tried-and-true system.

“There’s probably lots of different areas (of similarities). I’d say probably the first thing is recruiting structure, how he goes about evaluating players and the process of recruiting,” Pruitt said. “Practice structure, I think that leads to player development, which is key (to winning consistently). You’ve got to get the players first, then you have to develop them. So I’d say those are two major areas.”

Of course, there are also the usual scheme similarities, especially when ex-coordinators like Pruitt and Smart utilize Saban’s traditional 3-4 front and Cover-3 pattern-matching coverage model on defense.

But as much as it might benefit Saban to have an intimate knowledge of an opposing team’s schematics, especially since he personally developed and refined the model over his last four decades in coaching, any advantage is negligible whenever he matches up against ex-Alabama assistants.

“It goes both ways. They kind of know what we do, too. So, I think it’s kind of a wash, in all honesty,” Saban said this week. “It’s no different when you play somebody that you know or they know you. But you never know when you’re going to do and what they’re going to it and when they’re going to do it. So, I don’t really know how much of an advantage it is one way or another.”

Still, since 2010, Saban and Alabama are 14-0 in games where the opposing head coach is a former Saban disciple, including multiple wins over Dantonio, McElwain, Muschamp, Fisher and ex-Tennessee head coach Derek Dooley, as well as a 26-23 overtime victory over Smart in last season’s national championship game and a 56-14 win earlier this season over Napier.

For his part, Saban downplayed any individual success he’s had to have against former assistants.

“Well, it’s really not me,” Saban said. “I mean, we have an established program (at Alabama), and we’ve been winning here for quite some time. And most of the time, when the assistants go other places (as a head coach), they’re building a program. So, it’s not a fair analysis.”

Fair or not, the tail of the tape reveals the simple fact that while many might try to imitate what Saban has accomplished over the last dozen years at Alabama, replicating his success isn’t nearly as simple.