Greg Byrne reveals how he approached hiring process for Alabama head coach

Greg Byrne acted immediately to begin the search for the next Alabama coach after Nick Saban announced his retirement. The Crimson Tide athletic director spoke with the team before leaving on a flight out of town and began making calls.

He spoke with several former players about feedback on potential candidates to replace arguably the greatest coach in college football history. Byrne had been prepared for this moment, as rumors regarding Saban’s retirement had been circulating for a few years now as the coach got older.

That enabled him to quickly come to a decision, hiring Washington coach Kalen DeBoer just two days after Saban’s announcement.

“I called some of our former players who had played for coach Saban,” Byrne said on The Paul Finebaum Show on Wednesday. “Some in the past. I talked to Joe Namath and many others just to get some feedback and see if they had any thoughts that they’d like to give me. They’ve got great perspective. I talked to a few key contributors of ours. I told them, ‘after this point, it’s gonna be boots to the ground for me and I’m gonna be very focused on the task at hand.’

“We had been looking and being prepared for a long time. The old saying that the AD’s got a list in his top drawer, which I’ve never had, but what I’ve had is something that’s a fluid list that changes in time. We had vetted probably a couple dozen coaches over the years that we thought, ‘OK could they make sense?’ Some made a lot more sense than others. We had criteria that we were looking for. The reality is, none of them fit. There’s not a perfect candidate that checked every single box. Except for probably Nick Saban. Unfortunately, he didn’t interview for the job this time. Tongue-in-cheek when I say that.”

Byrne then began the process of sifting through potential candidates. As he did so, he kept an open mind when going into interviews and didn’t necessarily have a top target or even an order of preference.

The Alabama AD explained that he wanted a coach who simply wasn’t afraid to follow in the footsteps of Saban. He found that in DeBoer, who had just led the Huskies to a national championship game appearance this past season.

He flew to Seattle and spoke with the coach and was immediately sure he was up to the task.

“As you can imagine, we had great interest in the job,” Byrne said. “It’s a premier job. But one of the thing I was looking for somebody — because your would hear the line ‘who wants to replace Nick Saban?’ — and that’s an easy narrative to create. I wanted it to be a different thought process. One who would embrace the challenge, who would embrace and honor coach Saban and Miss Terry as well.

“Regina, my wife, and I were in a hotel room with them in Seattle and immediately I could tell coach DeBoer was very comfortable in his skin and who he is as a coach and looked at this as a challenge and as an opportunity and not as a detriment. I really believe thoroughly that type of attitude was gonna be something that would give us the best opportunity to have success based on what happened in our program in the last 17 years under coach Saban’s leadership.”

It hasn’t even been a week since the hiring, but Byrne is already convinced he’s made the right decision. He’s been impressed with the way DeBoer has worked and the conversations they’ve had that Alabama football can continue the winning tradition that Saban started in 2007.

It’s definitely going to feel different in the first year without Saban, but there’s confidence in the new era moving forward.

I feel very confident watching coach DeBoer over the last few days and working with him closely,” Byrne said. “…Putting the staff together, working on the roster, meeting with kids. Part of our plan that we had put together is I met with about seven staff members from our football staff. People like Jeff Allen, Denzel Devall, Ashley Campbell, Ellis Ponder. I asked them, I said, ‘we are going to proactively divide up our current roster. We need to get you boots on the ground actively engaged with them on a daily basis. Not waiting for them to call you, but going to them.’ All of those people deserve a ton of credit.

“I did a video that went out to all the players’ parents so they could hear from me directly. I obviously couldn’t pick up the phone and call all of them. So we had plans in place of things we were gonna try to do to manage the situation where we were with today’s environment. That’s what we’ve been doing and that’s what we’ve been continuing to do right now.”