How close did Texas get to hiring Nick Saban in 2013? Depends on whom you ask |Opinion

What if Craig Curry had never fumbled that punt against Georgia in the Cotton Bowl that may have cost Texas the 1983 national championship? 

How about if Colt McCoy hadn’t gotten hurt against Alabama in the first quarter of 2009 BCS title game?

Would Texas have repeated if Vince Young had come back in 2006?

Of all the what-ifs, those are among the splashiest hypotheticals surrounding the Texas football program, but one might always loom above all the rest:

What if Nick Saban had taken the Texas job in 2013?

The cloak-and-dagger scenario is as much urban myth as it is factual, but the truth has always been hard to pin down. But conversations with many sources at Texas and beyond in the days before the Longhorns play Alabama at Royal-Memorial Stadium lead me to believe the following:

Saban was very interested in coming to Texas but didn’t care for the heavy influence of boosters and regents.

Texas was never going to hire Saban because then-Texas president Bill Powers didn’t want him and couldn't stand him.

But Texas should have moved heaven and earth to hire Saban.

ESPN broadcaster Paul Finebaum, who wrote about that 2013 flirtation with Texas in a book he co-authored with Gene Wojciechowski called "My Conference Can Beat Your Conference: Why the SEC Still Rules College Football," said in an interview this week on the "On Second Thought" podcast that Saban clearly considered the Longhorns job and admitted as much to him on a plane ride from ESPN’s home in Bristol, Connecticut, to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, after taping a profile of Saban for "Outside the Lines."

Asked Wednesday if he thought Saban would have taken the Texas job in 2013 had it been offered, Finebaum said, "I think he would have. He’s a wanderer. Or he was. I think around that point, they were feeling maybe they weren’t being respected enough. ... But a (contract) extension was what that was all about. It was typical (agent Jimmy) Sexton shenanigans. He was playing everybody against everybody else."

Then-Texas athletic director Steve Patterson buys that premise and called it "a con job" that was intended only to be used as leverage to sweeten Saban’s pot at Alabama. He said he wasn’t sure if Powers’ resistance to Saban could be overcome – another huge sticking point – because Powers was not a fan.

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But if the seven-time national champion head coach had been offered and accepted the Texas job and replaced Mack Brown, Texas wouldn’t be in the position it finds itself in now nine years and three head coaches later and almost certainly would have won its fifth national title if not more. Saban’s that good, the best in the history of college football, if not all team sports.

Instead, Texas is coming off a 5-7 year – its fourth losing season in the past eight years – and hasn’t won the Big 12 since 2009 or had an all-conference quarterback since then.

While Alabama has posted a 104-10 record since Saban's flirtation with Texas and won three more national titles, the Longhorns have struggled with a 54-46 record and have not sniffed a playoff berth.

Louisville’s Charlie Strong, whom Patterson hired even though Powers, who died in 2019, actually preferred then-Vanderbilt coach James Franklin, suffered three losing seasons in Austin. Tom Herman succeeded him and won four bowl games but couldn’t win the Big 12 or get over the hump.

It’s Steve Sarkisian’s task now to restore the Longhorns to prominence and win a benchmark game like this weekend’s against No. 1 Alabama to give some substance to Sam Ehlinger’s premature vow after the 2019 Sugar Bowl that Texas was back. Since that win over Georgia, the Horns are a pedestrian 21-15. Not back.

Sarkisian made it a point Thursday to remind that Texas is hardly the only big-time program with boosters and donors and regents who are heavily involved.

"How you deal with them and the relationships your forge with them, I think, is important," said Sarkisian, Saban’s former offensive coordinator, whose record at Texas is 6-7. "Coach Saban handled it beautifully and gave me a road map on how to deal with those things."

Clearly, Saban could have changed all that in Austin because he’s capable of keeping those factions at arm’s length.

"It’s hard to look back, but there would have been a much higher probability of winning a national championship (with Saban here) than with the two coaches who came after Mack," a high-ranking Texas official said this week. "I think Sarkisian has the potential with his organizational ability and the foundation he’s laid, but it’s not going to happen anytime soon."

Finebaum agreed, saying Saban told him on that flight back to Alabama, "That thing (with Texas) got pretty crazy. Sexton’s talking to this guy and that guy. At the end, there were just too many (Texas) people to deal with. He said, ‘I was not going to deal with all the boosters who think they run the show.’ But he’d just told me on national television he never talked to them."

The well-chronicled dalliance with Saban never got truly serious enough to progress beyond calls between Sexton and Powers and Patterson and talks between Sexton and Texas donors/regents trying to work out a deal behind the scenes without any authority to do so.

The courtship of Saban began almost a year earlier, before the 2013 season, when Texas System regent Wallace Hall and former regent Tom Hicks had lunch with Sexton in January and were told, "I think my client would be interested in hearing a proposal," according to the Texas official.

When Hicks then ran it by Mack Brown, the coach bluntly opposed the idea, and most thought that was the end of it.

But a dreary 8-5 season turned the tide against Brown, and the whispers grew into roars that he would announce his retirement. The late Joe Jamail – Brown's personal lawyer and one of Texas’ most influential donors – was even drawing up such papers. However, Brown had a change of heart and told Powers at the football banquet on a Friday night after the season ended that he wanted to stay and said as much in his public comments.

"Bill told Mack, ‘OK,’ " said an influential Texas person closely tied to Texas athletics, "and Bill said, ‘You’re my man.’ But a regent called Bill and said, ‘If you don’t fire him, you’re gone.’ "

Powers was completely caught off guard by Brown’s switch and spent a sleepless night before notifying Patterson the next morning that Brown had to go. Rumors abounded that a regent or powerful booster had called Powers and told him to fire Brown or risk losing his own job, but that’s never been substantiated. But it's also entirely possible.

Patterson had just spent a morning session with Brown, visiting with him in the coach’s office about changes on his staff that he’d make. Shortly after he left, Powers called him and said Brown had to be fired. Patterson returned to Brown’s office and gave him the bad news, shoving out the door the second-best coach in Longhorns history. Brown’s spokesman at North Carolina said Mack declined to revisit the topic.

Patterson, however, has some strong opinions on the subject, and he was in the middle of it even though he had barely been the athletic director at Texas for a month.

He and others have reframed the picture at that time.

"Nick had no interest in leaving Alabama. Oh, God, no," Patterson said unequivocally this week from New York. "It was all a fraud. It was all to give him a raise and an extension. I don’t blame Jimmy Sexton. He was just doing his job."

Powers told me at that time that he was not interested in hiring Saban at all because he questioned Saban’s ethics, a stance that Texas A&M head coach and former Saban assistant Jimbo Fisher seemed to endorse this summer during their feud. Powers always thought cheating was rampant in the SEC.

"He certainly didn’t (want him)," Patterson said of Powers. "Me, I was willing to talk to anybody. I’ve known Jimmy for 40 years. It was a con, and I knew it. We literally got Jimmy on the phone in Bill’s office, and I put him on speaker phone. Jimmy was giving me the big sales pitch, gives me the whole rigmarole that Nick thinks Austin is wonderful."

Patterson said he played along and even offered to send a plane to Tuscaloosa to bring Saban and Sexton to Austin. Sexton told Patterson that it would take a 10-year, $100 million deal to lure Saban to Texas.

"I told Jimmy, ‘I want you to come down here; we’ll drink bourbon, eat barbecue," Patterson shared. "I know you’ve already got a two-year extension for $7.5 million from Alabama. We’ll hire Nick right now and sign you to that same deal. The president’s here in the room with me.’ Well, Jimmy stopped, cussed me up one way and down the other. I told him you have to convince our president that Nick’s not a cheater. Well, he hangs up on me."

A message left with Sexton’s office Thursday was not returned. Neither was a message to Saban’s sports information staff.

Bottom line: Saban was probably never coming to Texas, even if he showed interest through Sexton on more than one occasion.

And besides the overtures made to Saban by Hall and Hicks, people told me back then that two other extremely high-profile boosters also were trying to work Sexton and Saban to complete a deal and bring the coach to Austin.

"I don’t think your story is off," Patterson said. "Mack understood. The governor (Rick Perry) and the Board of Regents were all putting pressure on Bill, but at the end of the day, athletics has to serve the university, not the other way around."

Patterson echoed that alignment remains the key to turning around a program and getting it right. When Strong was hired as the school’s first Black head football coach, some were not on board and didn’t mind voicing it, including big-time benefactor Red McCombs, who questioned Strong’s aptitude to make Texas a winner and said he was better-suited to being a defensive coordinator.

"You have folks who didn’t want to support it, and they were vocal about it," Patterson said. "Until you get all the BBs in the box, as Darrell (Royal) used to say, and particularly a bunch of the big BBs, you ain’t going to do it."

And now? Will Texas ever be back?

"I hope so," Patterson said. "It’s a question of getting everybody aligned. Clearly the resources are there."

But is the right coach on hand?

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Texas chased Nick Saban at Alabama but pursuit was always 'fraud'