Nick Saban recalls taking secret interview for New York Giants job while at Michigan State
With a person of Nick Saban‘s storied coaching history, there are a ton of “what-if” moments that could have significantly altered the course of what was to come.
“So, George and I worked out a deal. He said, ‘Where do you think we can meet and nobody would know it?’ And I said, ‘The least obvious place you’d ever think – just come to my house in East Lansing, and nobody would ever know.’ That’s what he did.”
Russo then asked the most obvious follow-up question: Was Saban offered the Giants head coaching job?
“Yeah, they did offer me the job, actually,” Saban said with a smile.
The New York Daily News report from Jan. 16, 1997 — titled “JOBBED! GIANTS MADE SABAN OFFER; HE FEELS ‘USED’ — would seem to reveal his meeting wasn’t as secret as Saban would like to remember. But it nevertheless shows just how close he came to potentially becoming a multi-time Super Bowl winner as opposed to a perennial national champion in college.
After Saban passed on their offer, the Giants brass turned to then-Arizona Cardinals offensive coordinator Jim Fassel, who won NFL Coach of the Year in 1997 but finished just 58-53-1 across his six seasons (1997-2003) in East Rutherford, N.J. Meanwhile, Saban went 34-24-1 over his five seasons with the Spartans, including a 9-2 mark in 1999 before accepting the head coaching job at LSU that December.
Of course, once in Baton Rouge, Saban’s historic collegiate coaching career took off, including winning his first of his seven career NCAA national championships in 2003 with the Tigers. Two years later, following a 48-16 run across five seasons at LSU, Saban finally returned to the NFL when he infamously accepted the Miami Dolphins‘ head coaching job on Christmas Day in 2004.
And while his professional foray ultimately proved to be shortlived when Saban left the Dolphins after two difficult seasons and returned to the collegiate ranks at Alabama in early 2007, it’s memories like his secret meeting with the Giants a decade earlier that can make fans’ minds explode with possibilities.
