This is Nick Saban from a different time and place — before he won six national championships, or even one; before he rivaled Bear Bryant as the greatest coach of college football’s modern era; before he resuscitated Alabama and made it into the dynasty it once was.

It’s Nick Saban in an analog world, where he uses overhead projectors to diagram coverages, where he becomes ensnared by wires and where his lectures are captured on grainy, standard-definition video tape.

It’s a universe that seems to fit a man who doesn’t have a Twitter account and is reluctant to text in this digital age.

To that point, vintage Nick Saban, circa 1996, isn’t any different than the 2019 version of the coach who is now his sport’s most prominent figure. They both wear a crewneck sweater over an Oxford shirt and punctuate sentences with, “Aight.”

Go see for yourself. It’s right there on YouTube, thanks to a former Louisiana high school defensive coach who moonlights as an amateur archivist and historian. Ray Butler, now an assistant principal at Fort Necessity Junior High in Franklin Parish and the creator of 14-0productions.com, uploaded a pair of coaching clinic videos on Jan. 19, 2017, featuring Saban from his days at Michigan State. More than two years later, they are still there in cyberspace, free to view by anyone willing to invest close to two hours digesting Saban’s coverage principles.

“I have never had anybody call and say they wanted something taken down,” Butler says.

It’s a surprising admission, considering how guarded Saban is with proprietary information about his program. At various times, he has mocked the media when they have asked him about game strategy or personnel changes, sarcastically telling reporters he’ll call the opposing coach and reveal to him Alabama’s plan. In January, two days before Clemson trounced Alabama in the national championship game, Saban acknowledged, “I am one of those guys who likes secrets. I don’t like for people to know what we do, how we do it and what the best way to improve it.”

He appeared serious, with no hint he was teasing.

Saban later added that, despite his lofty place in the game, he didn’t feel he had an obligation to share his institutional knowledge to advance the sport, explaining, “I give a lot of speeches about motivation and success — not specific technical football things. I don’t feel like it’s my responsibility to help other people beat us.”

But more than 20 years ago, Saban wasn’t as reluctant to share information. In the two YouTube videos exhumed from the past by Butler and posted on the Internet for the world to see, Saban provides in exacting detail the mechanisms of his pass defense. He discusses the absolute importance of safeguarding the seams and rerouting receivers. He also explains body positioning, leverage and the rules of his intricate pattern-matching system that has become an integral part of his coaching legacy. He scribbles on the acetate sheets to such a degree that the finished product looks like a colorless Jackson Pollock painting. He even offers up lingo like “Robot,” a call that is meant for a linebacker to roll and run to find a tight end in the seam. It’s an unusually exhaustive look at the beautiful mind of Saban, a man who leaves nothing for chance, accounts for every possible scenario and is obsessive about the smallest technicalities.

And the information dispensed is still relevant.

As current Alabama cornerbacks coach Karl Scott noted earlier this year, “Everything we do is based around the seams. We are always trying to protect the seams.”

That the present and past dovetail so harmoniously illustrates one of Saban’s most defining characteristics: Consistency.

The 111 minutes and 19 seconds of footage from a bygone period also offer the most compelling evidence of why Saban became as successful as he did and how he was uniquely suited to thrive in this current era when throwing the football is all the rage and good coverage is as valuable as ever.

In fact, in one of the lectures from 23 years ago, Saban unwittingly hints at the fact he’s ahead of the times.

“I don’t know if you can play that much split-safety coverage unless you’re playing a one-back, spread out, run-n-shoot type team because we can’t play it that much because we can’t stop the run and because people run the ball more in college,” he tells his audience of coaches.

The comment seems dated, adding to what Butler calls the “sentimental” value of “watching Nick Saban from ’96.”

All this time later, Butler marvels at what he considers the crown jewels of his YouTube page. They stand out in a batch of content that includes an Urban Meyer talk at a Mississippi State clinic and a full high school game played by Peyton Manning when he starred at Isidore Newman in New Orleans — the only of its kind.

“They’re gold nuggets,” he crows about the Saban lectures. “He’s the G.O.A.T. He’s the best that is. No doubt about it.”

In LSU country, in the northeast part of Louisiana, the 47-year-old Butler is an Alabama fan and football junkie. Coaching is in his blood. His father led Oak Grove High School to two state baseball championships. Butler himself played for one of Louisiana’s legendary football coaches, Vic Dalrymple, who won four state titles and more than 300 games. He then went on to serve as an assistant at Franklin Parish High, where one of his players was current Crimson Tide defensive lineman Phidarian Mathis.

Around 2011 or 2012, Butler estimates, the current head coach at Franklin Parish, Whitney McCartney, gave him a blocky external hard drive with the Saban videos and a bunch of other instructional tapes that had been ripped from VHS and transferred to digital form by another coach. The library was extensive but the files weren’t specifically labeled.

“When that guy put it all together and passed it along, it was just kind of generic names,” Butler says. “DB stuff, running back stuff.”

Years passed before Butler began poring over the content in the hard drive that stored several hundred hours of film. In 2016, after retiring from coaching, he filled the void by watching the videos he obtained as he sat in an in-school suspension room. That’s when he had his Eureka moment and came across the Saban lectures.

For Butler, it was like discovering treasure. He had traveled to Tuscaloosa four times to attend Saban’s Clinic of Champions, making the pilgrimage in 2012, ’13, ’16 and last year. Butler saw the Alabama coach on stage at Coleman Coliseum deliver talks on special teams and coverages. But the sessions weren’t nearly as extensive as the ones from the ’90s now at his fingertips.

“I am a big historian,” he says. “That’s why I like getting everything. Everything I come across I try to post it because that’s cool stuff. This was real good stuff.”

It’s also extremely rare. Nothing like it exists on YouTube save for some silent cutups of Saban’s defensive drills from his time with the Miami Dolphins.

Yet with a few clicks of the mouse, Butler brought the past to the present, offering an all-access glimpse at Saban before he ascended to the top of college football.

Commenting on Saban then versus Saban now, Butler says, “He hasn’t changed a bit.”

Of course, his status has, and that became apparent at the end of one of the videos.

In that different time and place, Saban grumbles as he’s given the hook and hastily wraps up his presentation, forced off stage like a student sharing the findings of his science project.

“Hey guys,” he tells the listeners in his midst. “I’m really sorry. But these guys that have these clinics…50 minutes. It’s not enough.”

But for those who now watch him on Butler’s YouTube page, it’s plenty. After all, it’s an extended up-close view of Saban that reveals how he became the greatest coach of his generation.

Rainer Sabin is an Alabama beat writer for the Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @RainerSabin