It’s the day before New Year’s Eve in Memphis, Tennessee, and no one from Ohio State wants what’s about to happen. The team that tied for the Big Ten championship and is ranked 15th in the AP Poll has somehow wound up stuck in the 1981 Liberty Bowl. The matchup against unranked Navy isn’t inspiring. The weather isn’t even nice: 30 degrees at kickoff with rain on the way. The coaching staff can see it in some of the players’ eyes that they don’t want to be there, struggling to find their footing, slipping on the turf as well as their pride.
A long season is about to get longer. Ohio State is supposed to beat Navy handily, but it doesn’t work out that way. The Buckeyes’ struggling young secondary hits a new low, allowing an offense that couldn’t muster more than 50 passing yards per game during the regular season to amass 240 yards and two touchdowns through the air. A blocked punt and three fumbles save the Buckeyes from embarrassment. Final score: Ohio State 31, Navy 28.
Coach Earle Bruce is already fuming over his team’s sloppy play as he leaves the field when he sees that his defensive coordinator, Dennis Fryzel, is speaking with reporters. Defensive line coach Steve Szabo would later call it the straw the broke the camel’s back. Bruce storms into the locker room, throwing things, yelling, “That’s it! It’s over! It’s done!”
It’s sometime around 2 a.m. when the team makes it back to Columbus. Only the coaches are summoned back to the office at 8 a.m. for a meeting. Thirty seconds in, Bruce breaks the news: the entire defensive staff is through. Everyone is stunned. After all, as linebackers coach Bob Tucker put it, “We’d just won a bowl game” and finished 9-3.
Nick Saban has just been fired for the first time in his career. He’s suddenly a 30-year-old, unemployed defensive backs coach. He has a tireless work ethic, a mind for complex coverages and an eye for evaluating talent, yet he has nowhere to use it.
It won’t stay that way for long. The greatest college football coach of his generation will never face the chopping block again.
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Nick Saban was already on his fourth coaching stop by the time he arrived at Ohio State in 1980. Defensive coordinator Dennis Fryzel, an old friend from their Syracuse days, and offensive coordinator Glen Mason, whom he had gotten to know on the recruiting trail, had pitched coach Earle Bruce to bring him on. He was bright, they told Bruce, and an excellent recruiter, the perfect man to replace Pete Carroll, who had just left to become defensive coordinator at N.C. State.
Defensive line coach Steve Szabo remembers Saban well. Back then, all the defensive assistants shared an office. Saban wasn’t very outgoing, Szabo said, but he could see that he took coaching seriously. He and linebackers coach Bob Tucker would joke that while they spoke to Saban they could feel he was “calculating something else.” He was constantly working the phones, calling NFL buddies to talk shop. One such friend was Bill Belichick, an assistant with the New York Giants.
Mason still marvels at how Saban was on the cutting edge. The Cover 2 was the craze and Saban was installing multiple looks within the defense that gave Mason fits. What looked like a blitz wasn’t. Cover 2 would turn into a Cover 3 in the blink of an eye. But what Mason valued most was Saban’s ability to spot talent. Firing up the old 60mm film, he’d say, “Nick, take a look at this guy and tell me what you think.” Saban would study the tape and Mason would always follow his recommendation. “And he was always right,” Mason said. “To be quite honest with you, it was things I didn’t think of, didn’t see or didn’t evaluate.”
Although Ohio State went 9-3 in 1980 and the defense gave up a respectable 162 passing yards per game, the ground was shifting. The middle and bottom of the Big Ten was becoming more of a passing league. During a 49-42 win over Illinois, the Buckeyes allowed 621 yards through the air.
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