Nate Oats recently wrapped up his fifth and most successful season yet as the head coach at Alabama. The 49-year-old has enjoyed his time in Tuscaloosa, in part because he has gotten to learn from one of the greatest coaches of all time in Nick Saban.
Not long after Oats was hired at Alabama, he reached out and asked if he could shadow Saban for a day and pick up tips on how to run a program.
“When I got here, I wanted to take advantage of being at the same place as him. So I asked if I could come over and shadow him for a day, which I did. The first road trip they ever took when I was here, they played Duke in Atlanta, I went on the plane, watched everything, sat in meetings. I’ve been to practices,” Nate Oats recently told Mark Gottfried on his podcast.
“So the first day I shadowed him from first of the morning, all the way through. I called over there, they checked with him, he said, ‘Hey, no problem.’ They start at 7:30, I get over there at like 7:15, get in the meeting room. I kind of follow him through the whole day. It’s fall camp. They’re on. It’s bang, bang, bang, bang.”
Finally, at around 5 p.m., Nick Saban had a few moments to talk. He called Nate Oats over and said that he would be happy to answer any questions Oats had.
Oats threw several Saban’s way, including one that was not about running a program but instead about being a head coach at Alabama.
“One of the questions I asked, I got hired in March and this is August, I don’t know how many different places they had me speak. … So I said, ‘How do you manage coaching the team and doing all of these different speaking engagements that they ask you to do?’” Oats recalled.
“He goes, ‘Coach, when they hired me, I told them they had nine days. That’s it. Pick Carefully. I’m going to do nine events. That’s it. That’s all you get.’”
Oats thought about it for a little bit and decided that he was going to try and take the same approach as Saban.
“I went home, I mulled that over. The day ends at like 10 o’clock at night. I’m like, ‘You know what, that’s a great idea. I’m going to walk into Greg Byrne, I can’t coach this team with the way they’ve got me running around here. I’m going to tell him he’s got nine days,'” Oats shared.
Nate Oats eventually thought better of it, though, deciding that his resume wasn’t quite on par with Saban’s. Oats joked that perhaps now, after he led Alabama to the Final 4 this past season, that might change.
“I slept on it and I woke up the next morning, and I was like, ‘You know what, I don’t have seven national championships to my name, or whatever he had at that point. They’re paying me a lot of money.’ And I figured out why I have to speak, because they either want the football coach or the basketball coach and they ain’t getting the football coach. So guess who’s gotta go speak?” Oats said with a laugh. “I never had that conversation with Greg. I just kept speaking and earned my money. But now that we’ve made a Final 4 maybe I can go in and tell him he’s got nine days.”
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