Nick Saban has spent a career answering football’s biggest questions with titles, but one of the biggest what-ifs in his own story came all the way back in East Lansing.
While he was coaching Michigan State, Saban said the New York Giants tried to hire him as their head coach. He told SiriusXM’s Chris “Mad Dog” Russo on Thursday that the conversation turned into a private meeting at his home. “Yeah, they did offer me the job, actually,” Saban said.
Saban explained that he and then-Giants general manager George Young had to keep the whole thing quiet because a college coach can’t afford to look like he’s shopping himself around while still running a program.
“In some of these cases, it's very difficult in college,” Saban said. “You have an opportunity to go to the NFL.
You're still coaching. You're still recruiting.
If you stay in college, you don't want it to upset your coaching, recruiting and all that. So you don't want to say that I'm going to go interview for the Giants job.”
That led to an unusual setup. The Giants had fired Dan Reeves after the 1996 season, and Saban had just finished his second year with the Spartans. Rather than meet somewhere obvious, Young asked Saban where they could talk without anyone finding out.
“So George and I worked out a deal,” Saban said. “He said, 'Well, where do you think we can meet and nobody would know it?'
And I said, 'The least obvious place you would ever think. Just come to my house in East Lansing and nobody will ever know it.'
That's what he did.”
The Giants’ interest wasn’t some forgotten rumor, either. A Jan. 16, 1997, New York Daily News report had already surfaced the story, and Giants co-owner John Mara confirmed it in 2015.
“We were very impressed with him,” Mara said. “We offered him the job.”
Young told Mara and Wellington Mara that Saban was “the best candidate” he had ever interviewed. But the deal unraveled because Saban wanted more authority than the Giants were willing to hand over. He wanted control of personnel and the coaching staff, and New York wasn’t prepared to give a head coach that kind of power.
Instead, the Giants hired Jim Fassel, who later guided them to the Super Bowl after the 2000 season.
“I would have loved to have had you,” Russo told Saban. “Fassel did a good job, and he wanted to get the quarterback going and everything else. You would have been really good there.”
Saban stayed at Michigan State through 1999 before winning a national title at LSU. He then spent two seasons with the Dolphins, going 15-17, and eventually returned to college at Alabama in 2007.
The 74-year-old shared the story while promoting “Saban,” a six-part ESPN docuseries on his career. The first episode airs Oct. 8 at 6 p.m. ET on ESPN, and all six episodes will be available the same day on the ESPN app.
The series looks at his 17 seasons and six national championships at Alabama, along with his time at LSU and with the Dolphins. More than 70 people were interviewed, including Bill Belichick and Kirby Smart.
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