Three Great Football Coaches Crossed Paths for Years, and Now They’re Leaving Together Pete Carroll, Bill

Belichick and Nick Saban worked for, learned from, and competed against one another, changing the way that the game is played. In 1979, Pete Carroll, then twenty-eight years old, was a secondary coach at Ohio State. One former colleague remembered how he’d sit at his desk, listening to the Beach Boys with a smile on his face. But behind the smile was a ruthless competitor, a student of aggressive defensive schemes, and the next year, he left to become the defensive coordinator at North Carolina State. His replacement was another twenty-eight-year-old, Nick Saban, who’d been the defensive-backs coach at West Virginia. Saban was different from Carroll; he was more punctilious but no less competitive or curious about defenses, with an unusually keen eye for identifying talent. Even so, two years later, Saban was fired, along with most of Ohio State’s defensive staff. He moved to the Navy for a year, where he worked alongside a scout named Steve Belichick. At Belichick’s house for dinner one day, Saban began a friendship with Steve’s son, Bill, who was also a football coach and roughly the same age. The relationship deepened a few years later, when Saban and Bill met up in West Point to discuss the complexities of the Cover Two defense. By then, Saban was on the staff of the Houston Oilers, and Belichick was the defensive coordinator for the New York Giants. The meeting was covert; fraternizing with the enemy was not allowed. But when Belichick became the head coach of the Cleveland Browns in 1991, he hired Saban to be his defensive coordinator. During their first three seasons together, the Browns were a losing team. Then, in 1994, the defense was among the league’s best, and the team went 11-5 and won a wild-card playoff game before being blown out by the Steelers. Saban left to become the head coach of Michigan State. Belichick and Saban respected each other and knew enough to learn from each other, even though they clashed. Belichick was notoriously stony and hard-driving, with a conservative play-calling approach; Saban was dynamic and fiery. Saban later called his time in Cleveland “the most difficult four years I ever had in my life.” But he also said that he learned how to run a team there from observing Belichick’s obsession with detail, his clear expectations, and his organizational control. While Saban and Belichick were in Cleveland, Pete Carroll was also in the N.F.L., serving as the defensive coordinator for the New York Jets. In 1994, he was named the team’s head coach. He was in his early forties, but still seemed boyish—he was known for picnics and bowling with players and for a basketball court that he installed next to the practice field. The Jets started his first season 6–5 and were leading the Miami Dolphins, 24–6, in the third quarter before the Dolphins’ legendary quarterback, Dan Marino, pulled off a stunning comeback, capped by one of the great sucker tricks in sports history: he fooled the Jets into thinking he would spike the ball to stop the clock with seconds left and instead tossed a touchdown. The Jets didn’t win another game. Carroll was fired. Two years later, after the coach who replaced Carroll left, the Jets named Bill Belichick interim head coach while they negotiated with the New England Patriots to release their head coach, Bill Parcells, from his contract. When Parcells was hired by the Jets a week later, Belichick became his defensive coordinator. Parcells stepped down after the 1999 season, and Belichick took his place—for a day. Before meeting with the media, he famously wrote a resignation letter on a napkin: “I resign as HC of the NYJ.” He went to the Patriots instead. The coach he replaced there was Pete Carroll. Carroll’s next coaching job was at the University of Southern California. He was not the school’s first choice, nor its second or third—and he was not a popular choice with the team’s fans, particularly after the team began his first season 2–5. But then, suddenly, he turned the program around. He was not only a terrific tactician, particularly on defense, but a brilliant and tireless recruiter who leaned into the school’s proximity to Hollywood. Movie stars showed up on the sidelines at practice, and Carroll seemed to fit in among them. He had a relentless sunniness, buoyant hair, a charismatic smile, and a cartoonish jaw. During his nine years at U.S.C., he led the program to two Orange Bowl victories, four Rose Bowl wins, seven Pac-10 titles, and two national championships. In 2003, at the end of the season, U.S.C. was ranked first in polls of both the A.P. and college-football coaches, ahead of Louisiana State University. But the Bowl Championship Series computer system picked L.S.U. to play Oklahoma for the title. L.S.U. won that game for its first national championship. Its coach was Nick Saban. Saban left L.S.U. a year later to become the head coach of the Dolphins. After two mostly disappointing seasons, he went to the University of Alabama, where, facing the stiffest competition in college football, he would win nine S.E.C. championships and six national championships. He became synonymous with a terrifying kind of excellence. His aspect was almost devilish—hard stare, bouffant hair, sideline scowl, and the occasional sinuous smile. His control of the team and of college football was complete. He was more tight-lipped than Carroll, more passionate than Belichick, and more willing to project darkness along with light. His defensive schemes were complex, but his emphasis on player development was straightforward, and he had a rare ability to adapt. He was happy to take what others did and do it better. On the offensive side, he had some notable help—especially from Lane Kiffin and Steve Sarkisian, two offensive coordinators who had come to prominence as young assistants to Carroll at U.S.C. Saban’s team made the College Football Playoff in eight of its first ten seasons. By his own standards, this past season was a failure, but it might have been his most impressive: after a rough start to the season, Alabama beat top-ranked Georgia to win the S.E.C. title, and the team lost on the final play against Michigan in the College Football Playoff, just missing a spot in the championship game. VIDEO FROM THE NEW YORKER Could Overtime Larry Change the Game of Teen Hoops?