TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – As he sat on a South Florida runway aboard a donated private jet, Mal Moore turned to pilot Bud Darby and in his inimitable charm and through a nervous grin said, “If I don’t get him, fly me to Cuba.”
It was New Year’s Day 2007 and the University of Alabama athletic director was in pursuit of Nick Saban, the Miami Dolphins head coach who refused to meet with him about the Crimson Tide’s head coaching vacancy. Moore hadn’t yet spoken with Saban, and he wasn’t even guaranteed a face-to-face meeting as he checked into a Fort Lauderdale hotel not far from the Sabans’ home. Just by getting on that plane, Moore risked further humiliation.
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Under pressure from Alabama power brokers weeks before, he’d given in to anxious jitters and retreated in his initial inquiries with Saban’s representative, Jimmy Sexton, and turned his attention to West Virginia coach Rich Rodriguez. The Tide influencers feared that if Moore waited until after the NFL season to speak with Saban, he risked missing out on other candidates with whom he had a more realistic chance. That decision backfired when Rodriguez publicly spurned the Tide.
Yet even if it meant professional embarrassment, being seen as a love-struck boy chasing his crush only to have that love unrequited, he was willing to risk his reputation in a dogged chase of the one man he was convinced could return Alabama to, in his view, its rightful place atop college football.
It’s been nearly 16 years since Moore took the pivotal flight that changed college football, delivering arguably the most important hire in the history of the sport. To pull it off took a colorful cast of characters, from the likeliest (Saban’s wife, Terry), to the unlikeliest (a home contractor, an international businessman and an MLB owner). Here’s that story from those who lived it.
In Mike Shula’s fourth season as head coach, the Alabama football program was unrecognizable to the dynasty that exists today. The Crimson Tide were 6-3 and the only power conference wins on their resume were Vanderbilt, Duke and Ole Miss. Shula had delivered an outstanding 10-2 2005 season, but the program did not sustain any momentum. The two biggest blemishes? He went 0-8 versus LSU and Auburn. Never beating Auburn was a stain nothing could cleanse.
As the calendar turned to November 2006, Moore reluctantly resolved that should Alabama lose the final three games — a slate that consisted of Mississippi State, LSU and Auburn — he would have little choice but to fire the affable 41-year-old Shula. So when the Crimson Tide lost to Auburn 22-15, Moore started the defining decisions of his career the following morning. He relieved Shula of his duties.
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“He said, ‘I tried. I talked to him and tried to get him to make (staff) changes, but nothing really worked,’” longtime Moore executive assistant Judy Tanner says. “Honestly, it broke his heart.”
The Alabama job was open again for the fifth time in a little over a decade. Moore had one name in mind, but no one — including Moore himself — thought there was a chance that Saban would leave the Dolphins to come to an on-hard-times collegiate program only two years removed from building a national championship program at LSU.
But Moore, who died in 2013 at age 73, never gave up the dream.
His inner circle had received word through back channels that Saban would not entertain any communication until the Dolphins’ season concluded on Dec. 31.
“I knew that was going to be problematic, because I was under pressure to get a deal done quickly,” he wrote in his autobiography.
The next month was a chaotic swirl of phone calls, secret meetings with potential coaches, cover-of-night strategy sessions with a hand-picked inner circle, paranoia, broken words and sleepless nights.
One of Moore’s first calls was to Steve Spurrier, who had just completed his second season at South Carolina. Moore respected what Spurrier did at Florida — winning a national championship and six SEC titles in his 12 seasons there — and what he was trying to do in Columbia, so he reached out to gauge his interest. It went nowhere.
“No, no, not really,” Spurrier told The Athletic about whether or not he had any interest. “I had already coached at Florida, and at South Carolina I felt like there was nowhere to go but up. I said, ‘If I were you, I’d go back and talk to Nick Saban. I guarantee you I don’t think he likes pro football. I didn’t like it very much. And I think he’d love to be your coach.’”
But Moore couldn’t talk to Saban. At best, he could talk to Saban’s agent, but there were only so many times he could be rebuffed before he had to pursue other candidates. But there were secret weapons behind the scenes in his nephew, Chuck Moore, who built and renovated luxury homes, and former UA standout and NFL general manager Ozzie Newsome, who had worked with Saban with the Cleveland Browns in the 1990s. They would be instrumental when and if Saban agreed to speak to Moore.
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The search started in earnest in New York, where a variety of coaches were in town for the National Football Foundation dinner. There Moore met with Rutgers head coach Greg Schiano and West Virginia’s Rodriguez.
A suite at the Waldorf Towers hosted the meetings, which were informal, a chance to gauge candidates’ interest, talk about the job and see if either was a good fit. Moore made one more run at Spurrier, who again gave him a firm no, and also met with Sexton to gain an understanding of what a potential chase of Saban would entail.
Sexton reiterated that Saban had no intention of speaking to Moore before the end of the season. But he also intimated that Saban wasn’t enamored with coaching in the NFL and that Alabama would be a place he would entertain should he ever decide to return to college coaching. Sexton told Moore he’d call him at a specific time the next week after a conversation with Saban to let him know whether he would meet with him or not. In the interim, Moore spoke with Schiano and Rodriguez.
Moore was under pressure from the board of trustees and influential decision-makers that time couldn’t be wasted waiting on Saban. “Most of those people didn’t think Nick would take the job,” Moore wrote. “The prevailing theme from them to me was, ‘If we don’t hire someone quickly then we will fail to hire a championship-caliber coach.’”
When the promised call from Sexton didn’t materialize, Moore reluctantly moved forward with the search. He offered the job to Rodriguez, who, according to Moore in his autobiography, accepted the job. Rodriguez has contended that he never gave a definitive answer. Both parties agree there was no official agreement and no signed deal.
On Dec. 8 at his home in Tuscaloosa, Moore met with one of Rodriguez’s representatives and UA executive associate athletic director Finus Gaston to negotiate the contract. That’s when things went haywire.
“He got a phone call that Rodriguez was going to pull out of the deal,” Tanner, Moore’s assistant, said.
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What really happened in the time between Rodriguez telling Moore he would take the job to deciding to stay in Morgantown is a subject of great debate. Multiple news outlets had reported Rodriguez had accepted the job; the news crawled across ESPN during the college football awards show in Orlando, Fla., and that had a radiating negative effect in Alabama’s effort to hire Rodriguez. That gave West Virginia a chance to formulate a plan to keep him.
In a weird twist of fate, it’s long been believed that then-West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin played a role in Rodriguez staying. Manchin and Saban are childhood friends. However, Rodriguez says he didn’t interact with Manchin during that time period. His discussions were with the West Virginia athletic director, the president and Ken Kendrick, owner of the Arizona Diamondbacks and a longtime Mountaineers supporter.
Those conversations convinced Rodriguez to stay at West Virginia, which the next season would come painfully close to a spot in the BCS championship game.
Moore was dumbfounded that the deal fell through but viewed it as a reprieve to make a full go for his first choice. He would wait until the Dolphins finished their season. “It would be a long three and a half weeks,” he wrote.
He knew financially Alabama would have to make a substantial commitment to lure Saban away from the pros. Saban was on a five-year contract that paid him approximately $5 million a year. To be taken seriously, Alabama was going to have to up its game. Armed with that knowledge, Moore went to university president Robert Witt and trustee Paul Bryant Jr. to get their blessings to do what it took financially to secure Saban. At the time, FBS head coaches earned an average of $1.36 million, according to the Knight Commission. Nine coaches earned more than $2 million per season, including Auburn coach Tommy Tuberville.
Moore welcomed Sexton into his Tuscaloosa home, having a driver pick him up where he stashed his car in Northport. Only a select few people knew of the meeting. Together, Moore and Sexton negotiated the framework of what it would take to get Saban to be Alabama’s coach. The only thing that stood in the way was actually getting Saban to meet with him.
Meanwhile, Moore formulated backup options, meeting with Mike Sherman, then the associate head coach of the Houston Texans, and David Cutcliffe, an Alabama alumnus who had been on Bear Bryant’s staff as a student in the 1970s. And after the Dolphins’ 22-17 loss to the Indianapolis Colts on New Year’s Eve, Moore was ready to go all-in.
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Though he didn’t have a computer on his office desk, Moore knew his every move was being tracked. FlightAware was all the rage for enterprising reporters attempting to track planes coming and going from college towns. Taking the university’s private jet was out of the question. So he called in a favor.
Terry and Nick Saban celebrate after Alabama defeated Georgia, 26-23 in overtime, to win the national championship on Jan. 8, 2018, in Atlanta. (Jamie Squire / Getty Images)Enter Farid Rafiee, an international businessman and big Crimson Tide fan and donor whose success afforded him a private jet — one he lent his friend Moore for the specialized flight plan of bringing Nick Saban to Tuscaloosa.
On Jan. 1, Moore flew to South Florida with no assurance from Saban that he’d meet with him. Rafiee’s pilot, whom he lent for the flight, was Bud Darby, coincidentally the brother-in-law of former Alabama quarterback Richard Todd.
Saban had been doing his homework, though. Chuck Moore, Mal’s nephew, had done work on the Sabans’ Lake Burton, Ga., home. Saban picked his brain. He also spoke with Newsome, who understood the ins and outs of the Alabama program and what it would take to make it rise again. Both Chuck Moore and Newsome greased the wheels that kept Moore’s hopes alive.
It was a stressful time for Saban, who in the weeks leading up to Moore’s arrival was asked often about his interest in being Alabama’s head coach. Because of the regularity of the questions and Saban’s defiant answers, with each question and answer he slowly backed himself into a corner.
It started with, “I’m flattered that they may have been interested in me,” to, “I guess I have to say it. I’m not going to be the Alabama coach.”
By season’s end, he’d essentially resigned himself to returning to the Dolphins for a third season. He’d made a commitment and wanted to see it through no matter how much his heart missed the college game.
Monday came and went for Moore with no meeting. He’d checked into a hotel near the Sabans’ home, but he might as well have been in Los Angeles — he was no closer to them there than he was in Tuscaloosa. On Tuesday after a prolonged wait, he decided to check out of the hotel and fly back to Tuscaloosa. But he took one more shot and asked to meet with Saban’s wife, Terry. During his South Florida stay he kept in constant contact with her, and though she may not take credit for it, she is one of the main reasons the two parties came together. Without Terry Saban, the greatest dynasty in the history of the sport likely never occurs.
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“There were quite a few calls that I took since Nick was not answering his phone,” Terry Saban wrote in an email to The Athletic. “Nick was torn by his loyalty to Wayne Huizenga and the realization that our whole family missed the college football experience, especially since one of Nick’s strengths is evaluating and recruiting talent, which is the mainstay of college.
“Nick flat-out refused to talk to Mal a couple of different times, but I would soften his response to something more like, ‘I can’t think about it right now.’ I felt bad that Mal was spending so much time in town on the chance that Nick would talk to him, but I also worried that if he left, the door would close on the opportunity to return to college.”
So Terry encouraged Moore to hang in there a little longer. “At the end of the week when Nick’s schedule lightened up, I invited Mal to come to dinner at our house, and I told them both, ‘You don’t even need to talk football if you don’t want to … just enjoy dinner.’”
And that’s how Mal Moore landed Nick Saban. He got his foot in the door. That’s all it took. Because, as those who knew him can attest, Moore had a way of endearing himself to people. His self-deprecating style and Southern charm were hard to resist.
“This was his gift of how he related to people,” former UA senior associate athletic director Kevin Almond said. “He would share stories that always made him the smallest man in the room. It was something about him that he did that would be extremely funny or humorous, but the way that he told them, I think it made people say, ‘This guy’s just like us.’”
Moore’s quality of character stood out to the Sabans. In Moore, they found an unwavering administrator, one who knew what it was like to coach, who knew how to take a vision from dream to reality in terms of capital campaign development and one who could keep the runway clear for Saban not to get caught up in the trappings that have doomed so many coaches in this state by giving him total autonomy. There would be no powerful boosters that called the shots for Saban.
Those were major selling points, but it was Moore’s charm that won them over.
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“Mal really convinced us with his simple honesty, his sincerity, his obvious love for his school,” Saban said at Moore’s memorial service. “This was a genuine person. At this station in my career, after spending two years in the NFL where things aren’t always about the team — there’s a lot of selfish play — it was very important to me to work for somebody that was the kind of man who was genuine and that you could trust. The honesty and integrity he had really made it difficult to say no.”
Moore had already convinced Terry before dinner ended.
“The best part about Mal’s demeanor was that he had no pitch, no gimmicks, no hard sell,” she wrote. “One could easily see the love he had for Alabama and how he thought that Nick would be a good fit. He simply presented an amazing opportunity which he hoped that Nick would accept. His simplicity, his honesty, and sincerity made it all the more intriguing.”
Dinner was Tuesday night and Moore left without an answer. On Wednesday, the Sabans met with Huizenga. It was in that meeting that they decided to go to Alabama.
Later that afternoon helicopters chased the crammed car on the way to the airport. Every second was much-watch TV in Alabama. Once on board, Rafiee’s jet headed north to Tuscaloosa Regional Airport, where a spontaneous throng of people converged to greet them.
When they landed, all on board were unified in their steadfast belief that, despite Saban having not spent one day on the job, the world of college football had tilted. Alabama had its man and Saban had a program desperate and willing to give him whatever he needed to build an organization never before seen.
The rest is college football history.
Moore had risked his professional reputation to get Saban. How would things have been different had he not succeeded? The domino effect is a fun and lengthy one to track. But for Moore’s career, one source in the Alabama administration at the time said, “It would have been hard to come back from that.”
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Moore loved the University of Alabama. He was a part of the program for five decades, as a backup quarterback for Bryant’s 1961 national championship team, an assistant coach to Bryant and Gene Stallings, an associate athletic director for five years and athletic director from 1999-2013. He had a hand in 10 of the Tide’s national championships as a player, coach or administrator. It devastated him when he wasn’t retained when Ray Perkins became coach. It crushed him when he wasn’t named athletic director earlier in his career.
“Kind of like Winston Churchill, he kind of had this second life,” said Tricia Stone, a friend of Moore’s. “Every decision he made came from his love of the University of Alabama. That’s why he got Saban. That love made his pitch pure.”
Editor’s note: This story is part of the 2022 edition of the Secrets of the Coaching Carousel series exploring unique aspects of college football coaching changes and more.
(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic; photos: Scott Donaldson, Wesley Hitt, Streeter Leak / Getty Images)
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