National Football League

Book about Nick Saban will infuriate Dolphins fans again

Published Jul. 18, 2015 5:46 p.m. ET

foxsports

As the 2006 NFL season was coming to a close, then-Miami Dolphins head coach Nick Saban made a passionate statement about how he was not going to leave the team and become the head coach of the Alabama Crimson Tide.

At the beginning of the 2007 college football season, Nick Saban was the head coach of the Alabama Crimson Tide. Needless to say, he’s not a popular person in South Florida. And a new book's release won’t make him or his wife any more popular.

"The Making Of A Coach" is an unauthorized biography of Saban’s return and rise to the top of college football. The Palm Beach Post released some details from the book:

“During the last few weeks of the 2006 Dolphins season, despite his very public denials, Saban had called Chuck Moore (nephew of late Alabama AD Mal Moore) a few times to tell him that he was possibly interested in the Alabama job, knowing full well whom Chuck would call the minute they hung up the phone,” Monte Burke writes.

“I told the pilots when they dropped me off in Miami that if I didn’t come back to this plane with Nick Saban, they should go on and take me to Cuba,” Burke quotes Mal Moore as saying.

Moore quickly hit it off with Terry Saban and was told by Jimmy Sexton, Saban’s agent, that if Saban ever wanted to return to coaching college football, Alabama would be a choice destination.

As Moore and Terry Saban talked at Saban’s home in Fort Lauderdale, Nick Saban met with then-Dolphins owner Wayne Huizenga in Davie. There, an apparent decision was reached: Saban wasn’t going anywhere. But when he called Terry and said he still had no desire to meet with Moore, it was Terry who informed her husband that she’d already invited Moore over for dinner that night.

“She made it clear to Moore that Saban was miserable in the NFL and dearly missed coaching in college,” Burke writes. “She also made it clear that she wanted out.”

The next day, when Huizenga checked in with Saban, the tone he heard had changed. That’s when Huizenga told Saban to follow his heart, even though the owner knew Saban’s heart no longer was in Miami.

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