Nick Saban reacts to viral Jalen Hurts benching clip

Nick Saban reacts to viral Jalen Hurts benching clip

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Nick Saban reacts to viral Jalen Hurts benching clip
Credit: ESPN

For nearly nine years, college football fans could only imagine what was said behind closed doors in the Alabama locker room at halftime of the 2018 national championship game, but thanks to ESPN, that mystery has finally been laid bare.

Saban, the six-part ESPN Original docuseries on the seven-time national champion, premiered Thursday with never-before-seen footage of the coach telling Jalen Hurts that true freshman Tua Tagovailoa would replace him for the second half against Georgia. Alabama trailed 13-0, and Hurts was a 26-2 starter who had led the Crimson Tide to consecutive national title games, which is why Saban says in the series that his own assistants looked at him like he was crazy when he proposed the switch.

The scene has become the most widely shared clip from the series, and on College GameDay Saturday morning ahead of No. 6 Alabama’s showdown with No. 2 Georgia, Saban was asked how he felt about Hurts’ response. Nearly a decade later, Saban called it one of the hardest decisions he ever made as a coach.

“Well, first of all, this was one of the most difficult decisions I ever had to make as a coach because of the respect, love, and admiration I had for Jalen Hurts, who was 26-2 as a starter,” Saban said. “We were struggling a little bit on offense, had really, really good receivers, like four or five first-round draft picks on the team. And I thought Tua could do a better job of getting them the ball.”

As far as Saban is concerned, though, the most impressive chapter of the story belongs to the quarterback he benched.

“The thing that’s understated about all this is how Jalen Hurts managed and handled the adversity and the difficult circumstance that he was put in,” Saban said. “You know, he stayed here at Alabama. He graduated. He worked on becoming a better passer, a better processor, getting rid of the ball, comes in the SEC championship game the next year and wins the game, and we win the SEC championship because of him.

“Most people would have cut and run and been disappointed and not tried to do what they had to do to overcome adversity and the circumstance that they were in. This guy’s character in that situation has been just understated, and I think people should recognize how much character he really has, and that’s what has propelled him to be a great player in the NFL and winning a Super Bowl. So I’m as proud of the way he handled that, and it made him better. It actually made him better. So sometimes when bad things happen, it makes you better.”

That kind of openness is in short supply throughout the series. As our Sean Keeley wrote in his review, Saban borrows the storytelling framework of The Last Dance, using the coach’s 17 years at Alabama as the hub from which the rest of his life and career branch out. Even after sitting for seven interviews, Saban largely frames his career in the analytical language of “The Process,” and at several points he visibly fights back tears rather than let his emotions show. Keeley counted the Hurts benching among the most insightful moments in the series, alongside footage from Alabama’s national title runs and the infamous Kick-Six loss to Auburn.

Saban, who retired in January 2024, arrived at the project far more eager to talk than his guarded public persona might suggest. Director Russell Dinallo told Awful Announcing he sensed it immediately during their first interview that summer, when Saban spoke candidly about how heavily the decision to retire had weighed on him for years. Saban’s wife, Terry, signed on as an executive producer and granted the crew rare access to the family’s home, while Dinallo’s team mined what he described as terabytes of archival footage from ESPN and Alabama.

Among the material that made the final cut was Saban’s halftime conversation with Hurts, which has since become the defining scene of the series. Its arrival during the same week Alabama hosts Georgia, the very opponent from that title game, was no coincidence. Lindsay Rovegno, ESPN Originals’ vice president of production, told AA that the network built the release around this weekend, when Saban would already be in Tuscaloosa for GameDay.

Whether Saturday’s Alabama-Georgia game produces a moment worth revisiting nine years from now remains to be seen, but it’ll be hard to top the last one.

The post Nick Saban reacts to viral Jalen Hurts benching clip appeared first on Awful Announcing.

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