About this series: This week, beat writer Nate Mink cracks open the wall for an exclusive multi-part series on three turning points in Babers’ pre-Orange life. | Part I: As young athlete, Babers found meaning of 'Ohana | Part II: How ‘the Triangle’ helped Babers in a time of crisis

Syracuse, N.Y. -- Dino Babers tapped the brakes and all hell broke loose.

His left front tire blew out while driving on a Texas freeway in November 2008. He turned the wheel, reversing into oncoming traffic with an 18-wheeler heading toward him.

“I can still see the blonde hair and the blue eyes today of the man that was driving that truck,” Babers said. “I saw the fear in his eyes that let me know I was in a bunch of trouble.”

The driver swerved, and the truck’s back cab barely missed striking Babers’ car. Another driver heading toward him jumped off an exit ramp.

Babers turned the wheel again, spinning 360 degrees before slamming the brakes and coming to rest white-knuckling the wheel.

A man ran toward Babers, knocked on his window, told him to put the car in park and kill the engine.

He looked Babers in the eye and asked him a question.

“Are you a Christian?”

“Yes, I am,” Babers said.

“I know you are because I’m a preacher, and based off of what I just saw, you should be dead.

“God must have great plans for you.”

***

This is a story about faith, Babers’ favorite word, and how it will help inform the answer to the most substantial question surrounding Syracuse football: Will he stay?

A new, long-term contract extension announced last December was a symbolic act of commitment by Babers and the university that has done little to distill the local worry. The most anticipated season here in two decades starts Saturday, yet a national conversation tethering Babers’ candidacy to a potential job opening at the University of Southern California has already started gathering like a wave that will cast a longer shadow the more Babers wins, until it harmlessly breaks or swallows the program like a tsunami.

If the time comes for Babers to make such a program-altering decision, the 2008 accident will help enlighten his choice because it fundamentally changed the way Babers thinks about his life and career.

Babers’ account of the accident in scrupulous detail came during a 2016 interview with Danny Yamashiro, a Harvard-educated minister who Babers first met during his playing days at the University of Hawaii when Yamashiro was a boy.

Yamashiro had his own near-death experience at 18 when he fell 400 feet off a cliff in Hawaii trying to rescue his girlfriend. He suffered brain injuries, skull fractures, a torn scalp and lost his sense of smell.

Their hour-long conversation recorded shortly after Babers took the Syracuse job is a window into a subject the coach rarely discusses in public. Yamashiro had heard about the accident but not with the painstaking detail Babers provided during the interview.

“I’m thinking this is a catalytic moment for Dino,” Yamashiro told the Post-Standard/Syracuse.com.

As incredible as it sounds, Babers said he heard a voice after his tire blew out telling him which direction to turn the wheel. The voice returned moments after the encounter with the preacher on the side of the road, leaving Babers with two words.

Don’t settle.

“That’s been my rallying cry ever since,” Babers told Yamashiro on the recording. One of the first speeches Babers gives to each new team he’s a part of is how it will not settle for being average.

Believing he had a second chance in life, he applied those two words to his marriage with his wife, Susan, their four daughters, his faith and his career.

He thought back to the time he fell to his knees to pray as a kid and heard the word coach as his life’s calling. He thought back to how that word drove him to shed the baby fat and transform into a chiseled specimen and Division I recruit. He thought back to how that word grew into an obsession, how he’d tried to manipulate his career arc until, finally, he’d reached the summit and become a head coach.

After the accident, Babers realized he added a second word. That voice he heard as a chubby kid simply said he’d be a coach. Never said anything about being a head coach.

So, Babers found a peace. He stopped worrying about becoming a head coach and focused on being the best assistant coach he could be.

“I wanted to leave an impression on the people that I meet, and I wanted to change lives,” Babers told his friend, Yamashiro. “Money was not an issue. That’s not what drives me. It’s still not what drives me.”

>> Timeline of Babers’ career

Three years after the accident, he took a six-figure pay cut to become the head coach at Eastern Illinois – the only job he ever accepted without first consulting Susan. He turned down more money from the University of Missouri to come to Syracuse, a move of faith, as he described it during his introductory press conference.

The specter of a job such as USC, one of college football’s most prestigious programs, brings personal connections any person would consider. His wife is from the Los Angeles area. His 80-year-old mother, Patsy Ann, is in Southern California. Some of his closest friends live on the West Coast.

But they insist any decision boils down to these things: faith, loyalty, commitment, stability.

“The Dino I know is going to make a decision to stay or go based on where he feels God is taking him,” said Duane Coleman, who roomed with Babers at Hawaii and is among his closest confidants.

“He does see the value of Syracuse. My God, he can build a dynasty.”

Coleman and others recognize how prophetic and superficial this can all seem. Everyone, Babers included, knows his marketability is trending up, that other schools may desire to have him lead their football program. There may be no convincing some that a voice is guiding Babers down his path, that this isn’t all a fairy tale to soften the pain if Babers left.

Just remember, more than any particular Bible verse or passage in a daily devotional, it’s the stories that have always stuck with Babers.

Like the one about the stubborn man who turned away from God to go off on his own path, only to wind up in the belly of a whale. And how, when the whale spat him out on dry land, the man, thankful his life had been spared, relinquished control to a higher power.

And if there’s anything Babers’ story reminds us, Yamashiro said, if there’s a lesson at all to extract, it’s this one.

Treasure the moments we have.