When Alabama’s Nick Saban was coaching at LSU, he was sitting with athletics director Skip Bertman and some others waiting for a meeting to start when the talk turned to how bad traffic is in Baton Rouge.
“What are you guys talking about?” Saban asked incredulously. “I’ve never had a problem with traffic.”
“Of course you haven’t,” Bertman said with a laugh. “There’s not any traffic when you come to work at dawn and go home at midnight.”
This past spring, a reporter showed up for a noon interview with Florida coach Urban Meyer in Gainesville, only to be told by Meyer that there was an unexpected conflict.
“Can you come back tomorrow?” Meyer asked.
“Sure, I guess,” the reporter replied.
“Good. Let’s meet here at 6 a.m.”
That up-with-the-roosters, down-with-the-owls mentality is just one of many similarities the Alabama and Florida coaches share. Another is that they will be leading their respective teams into Saturday’s SEC championship game at the Georgia Dome.
Saban’s No. 1-ranked Alabama (12-0) team is a 9 1/2-point underdog to Meyer’s No. 4 Florida (11-1) team. It is essentially a BCS championship semifinal that is being billed as the greatest SEC title matchup in history.
CBS commentator Gary Danielson, who will call today’s game along with partner Verne Lundquist, compared it to the Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier fights of the 1970s.
“[In] the great matchups style makes the fight,” Danielson said. “I’ve been doing this for a long time. I’ve done two national championships and every big rivalry that can basically be done. This is the most intriguing matchup I’ve ever done and basically it’s because of the style. This is Frazier vs. Ali. This is ugly vs. pretty. This is new vs. old. This is spread out vs. tight.”
Indeed, Alabama wins by physically controlling the lines of scrimmage and pounding their foes into submission. Florida, by contrast, annihilates opponents with savvy, speed and athleticism.
On offense, the Tide aren’t tricky. They run Glen Coffee between All-America tackle Andre Smith and All-America center Antoine Caldwell, and then let quarterback John Parker Wilson use play-action fakes to throw to a variety of targets.
“We just feel like they’re not really secretive about what they’re trying to do,” Meyer said. ” They’re going to try to pound you and they have the personnel to do it. We’ve not faced anything like that this year.”
Defensively, ‘Bama attacks in typical Saban fashion by trying to make offenses “play left-handed,” which is to take away what they do best. Alabama owns the field between the hash marks, with 365-pound nose tackle Terrence Cody, 250-pound linebacker Rolando McClain and All-America free safety Rashad Johnson manning the middle.
Florida has been blowing up opponents since an inexplicable 31-30 loss to Ole Miss on Sept. 27. It has won the eight games since by an average margin of 39.6 points. Never mind hybrid wideout/running back Percy Harvin’s sprained ankle — anybody really believe he’ll miss this? — the Gators still have speedsters Jeffrey Demps, Chris Rainey and Brandon James in the backfield and Louis Murphy and Deonte Thompson out wide.
Oh, yes, and there’s Tim Tebow. With a better surrounding cast and less of a load to shoulder, he is actually playing better than last season when he won the Heisman Trophy.
“Well, anybody that has speed like that, they have to have great space players,” Saban said. “But they have a direct run/power game that is probably as good as anybody we played against all year.”
Don’t turn your head on the Gators’ defense, either. Led by linebacker Brandon Spikes, they’re comparable to Bama’s unit statistically, with a national rank of 12 or better in the four most important categories: total defense (7), scoring (4), rushing (12) and passing (7).
The tendency this week has been to talk about the differences between the teams. But it could be their similarities that make them great. Chief among those — their coaches.
Both Meyer and Saban are described as detail-oriented, intense and driven. “There’s a lot of Nick stories about his intensity and his attention to detail and his will to be successful, almost too many to count,” said Tech athletics director Dan Radakovich, to whom Saban reported while the two were at LSU. “As an administrator working with a coach, the thing you don’t want is a lot of gray. With Nick you don’t get that. I think that’s one of his greatest strengths.”
Each coach is considered a sort of mad scientist on their respective sides of the ball.
Meyer rose through the ranks as an offensive assistant who was known for diagraming plays through lunch. His offense is referred to as “the spread” but it is a mix of everything he encountered in stints at six colleges before arriving in Gainesville. He uses some option, single wing, misdirection and more pro-style than he gets credit for.
Saban is a defensive coordinator and secondary coach by nature. He attacks on defense and favors the NFL-preferred 3-4 alignment. He mixes coverages and blitzes from all over the field. He reportedly has more than 50 blitz packages. He used to name each one after a U.S. state. When he ran out of states, he switched to names like “Europe” and “Guam.”
“Both of them are outstanding coaches, proven winners,” said Georgia’s Mark Richt, who lost to them this season by the combined score of 90-40.
New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick knows them as well as anybody. In fact, he makes a point to visit both coaches’ campuses every spring.
“I’m trying to learn what they are doing,” Belichick told reporters on his weekly teleconference Wednesday. “They are both outstanding coaches and I feel privileged to have a good relationship with both of them.”
Belichick and Saban have known each other since the 1980s when Saban coached alongside Belichick’s father, Steve, at the Naval Academy. Later Saban worked under Belichick as defensive coordinator with the Cleveland Browns.
“Nick is a great secondary coach with both techniques and schemes,” Belichick said. “He motivates the players well. He really does everything well. He is a hell of a football coach, a great friend and a great recruiter.”
Belichick first met Meyer when Meyer was an assistant at Ohio State and has maintained a relationship since.
“Every time I have seen Florida play it looks like every guy who touches the ball is faster than the guy who had it the time before and has a better chance of scoring than the guy who just had it,” Belichick said. “So it looks like a great matchup between two great teams.”
Source: ajc.com
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