College Football

Alabama Football: So What's It Like Being a 5 Star Recruited By Nick Saban?

Updated Mar. 4, 2020 10:52 p.m. ET

Fansided, Bobby Wesson/FanSided via Bama Hammer

This is an inside look at what it’s like to be a 5 star recruit courted by Alabama Football and visiting Nick Saban in his home.

Imagine telling Michigan Head Coach Jim Harbaugh that letting him go because Nick Saban is calling on the other line. Imagine the Alabama Football Head Coach flying into your school on a helicopter just to make sure you still liked him.

Top recruits don’t have to imagine what it’s like to see Nick Saban sitting across their kitchen table eating nachos or what it’s like playing piano with Miss Terry Saban at Christmas. It’s the life of a 5 star recruit. Jeremy Willis at ESPN did an amazing report on that 5 star life and what an in home visit with Nick Saban is like. I’m going to hit the high points for you.

At home with Alabama Football’s Nick Saban

The house is a massive almost 9,000 square feet and the security guards are almost as big.

This is Nick Saban’s other house on the lake. Can you believe he affords all that on a government paycheck?

“It was kind of like a movie,” said ESPN 300 Alabama offensive line commit Jedrick Wills in the report Jeremy Willis did for ESPN. This is where Nick and Miss Terry Saban live but they both live Alabama Football too. That’s why the house is just another weapon in the recruiting arsenal that Nick Saban aims at the rest of the league every year.

John David Mercer-USA TODAY Sports

The goal of it the same as any first strike weapon – shock and awe. You want the recruits to feel comfortable in the space but you want them to be impressed with it first. You want to draw the line for them in their minds from commitment to getting a place like this for themselves because of it.

The Theme Is Bling

Saban sits across from you in a room that blings with more rings than Saturn to talk to you about your future. Everything about the environment is designed to lend weight to what he is saying about the heavy decision in front of you. Do you want to play with savages...or do you want to play against them?

Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports

The recruiting lounge is surrounded by pictures of the best players to ever suit up at Alabama Jeremy Willis reports. The walls are covered with Butkus Award Winners, Heisman Trophy Winners, SEC Champions, National Champions and savages.

The players that recruits have grown up looking up to come to life in crimson and white before their eyes – and there’s Saban, surrounded by diamonds, asking to put that recruits name beside their childhood heroes on that wall.

How Can You Say No?

How can you say no to that? Most recruits don’t. Alabama Football just brought in it’s 7th #1 recruiting class in a row signing a record breaking 21 ESPN top 100 commits.

This is Saban meeting with 5 Star Jarez Parks. Yeah. That’s a helicopter.

Saban’s car is impressive too. It has more horses than the set of “Tombstone” and more class than a doctoral candidate earning a PHD. Nick Saban has his hands in a Mercedes deal or two but his two hands on the wheel in real life is what counts to recruits choosing between classic Alabama coke and some tepid off brand cola.

Video courtesy of The Buzzer

“He got in it for us and gassed it up and that thing sounded like a lion,” said 2016 ESPN 300 offensive line commit Jedrick Willis in the report by Jeremy Willis for ESPN. The theme is bling and that theme is big for the biggest athletes making big decisions about which school will get them to the big leagues.

That’s why Alabama Football has all the bling and championship rings right out front – but it’s what’s in the back that makes others see the light at the end of Alabama’s game day tunnel.

Mark J. Rebilas-USA TODAY Sports

The Lake

There’s a lake behind the 2 acres of property that recruits race to on one of the golf carts in the fleet parked around the house. That ride down to the water gives Nick Saban the opportunity for some one on one time with future Alabama stars thinking about signing.

Jason Getz-USA TODAY Sports

It was on a golf cart ride like that one when Baton Rouge native and 5 star recruit Dylan Moses first told the Alabama Football Head Coach that he was thinking about committing to the Tide according to the report by Jeremy Willis.

Dylan Moses was one of six 5 stars that committed to Alabama in the 2017 recruiting class and one of 5 big time athletes from Louisiana that are coming to Tuscaloosa.

So what’s it like to be a 5 star recruited by Nick Saban? Awesome.

Source: Jeremy Willis in a report for ESPN read more here.

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