Greg McElroy recalls Nick Saban's first days at Alabama, rebuild of football program
Greg McElroy took a time machine back to the first days of Nick Saban at Alabama, and how much change took place in a short period of time.
During an appearance on 3 and Out with John Middlekauff, McElroy harkened back to the days of Mike Shula leading the Crimson Tide, and the adjustment it took to get used to Saban’s demanding coaching style.
“It was like polar opposites, you over-correct, right? So, Mike Shula was like the ultimate, NFL, positive, everything’s great, let’s not work too hard, like, players coach. Like, we’re going to take care of everybody, we need everyone to feel good when they go into the game on Saturday. Coach Saban was basically like, if you survive this you’re going to be great, but you might not survive this,” began McElroy. “That’s how hard this off-season program is going to be. I mean, so we do the fourth quarter program.
“The fourth quarter program is notoriously one of the most difficult off-season programs anywhere. Everyone’s doing some variation of it now, I mean it’s all pretty similar. It’s basically mat drills, but it’s basically that on steroids. Where you’re having to run like two 100-yard dashes and it’s ludicrous. It really is. A difficult stretch of fourth quarter workouts is like three weeks. It’s like, that is nose to the grindstone, if you can make it through three weeks like, alright you’re good. Let’s go into spring ball, we’re in great shape. First spring was six weeks of fourth quarter workouts. Six weeks. And it was to the point like, guys were quitting everyday. Like, this is the worst, worst grind I’ve ever been through. We started February 1, we finished the middle of March. To this day, that was by far the hardest six week period of my life in a football uniform. Absolutely miserable.
“I mean, our legs did not recover the rest of the year. We lost our last four games of the regular season. One of which came against Louisiana-Monroe. The off-season was so impossible, and we just never really recovered.”
Nevertheless, McElroy was thankful for Saban putting the team through the wringer, and believes it’s what helped reestablish Alabama as a premier power in college football.
“We learned quickly like, who was going to be with us. It was one of those like hey man, junction boys. Like, you survive, we’re going to go and do some special things here. But there’s no guarantees here,” added McElroy. “And hey, if you guys want out of your scholarship, please come to my office asap because we will use that scholarship on a better player, more than likely.
“So, it was really hard. The transition was really difficult. But you could tell quickly that we were going to have a really tough team. We were going to have a team that was totally bought in. Prior to his arrival, we were everything but that.”
While Nick Saban put his team to the test at the onset of his Alabama tenure, we’re willing to bet that Greg McElory and company would do it over and over again after seeing the amount of success they had.