GLENDALE, Arizona -- Birmingham artist Daniel Moore paints pictures of historic moments in Alabama football history and gives them names. These paintings are hung in dining rooms and family rooms and Bama rooms all over Alabama -- a piece of art that frames a moment in time to never forget.
Introducing: The Smile.
It was Nick Saban’s smile. It was a supremely unusual smile that came after one of the gutsiest calls you’ll ever see in college football history. It was made by the coach who can now be justifiably debated in the same breath with Bear Bryant as the greatest coach in college football history.
Here’s the thing about that smile and Adam Griffith’s onside kick that swung Alabama’s 45-40 victory over Clemson for the Crimson Tide's fourth national title in seven years. To Saban, it’s less about being gutsy to call an onside kick at 24-all with 10 minutes left in the game, and more about his beloved Process and innate feel that Alabama needed to steal a possession from Deshaun Watson.
Alabama saw the right look since the first quarter for a pooch kick opportunity. Alabama practiced the kick once a week all year. Alabama felt the game slipping away. And Alabama executed the play perfectly.
The Process worked. In the process, Saban brought his own guts and smiled at the result.
“I thought we had it in the game any time we wanted to do it,” Saban said. “I made the decision to do it because the score was (24-24) and we were tired on defense and weren’t doing a great job of getting them stopped, and I felt like if we didn’t do something or take a chance to change the momentum of the game that we wouldn’t have a chance to win.”
You know the rest. Two plays later, O.J. Howard caught a 51-yard touchdown pass on a bust by Clemson’s defense. The Crimson Tide never trailed again even as Clemson and Watson kept pressing for more points.
It was the ultimate sign of respect for Clemson that Saban felt he had to call the onside kick. It left Clemson dazed and confused and furious, with Dabo Swinney oddly arguing that the Tigers weren’t given an opportunity to catch the ball.
There was no opportunity to catch the ball because Clemson never saw it coming. Who did other than a handful of Alabama coaches?
They all had different vantage points of the onside kick that will live on in Alabama history.
When Crimson Tide special teams coach Bobby Williams heard Saban make the call on the headset, Williams clicked over to offensive coordinator Lane Kiffin. “Lane, we’re about to get the ball back,” Williams said.
Kiffin didn’t believe the call at first. He was so stunned when he heard Saban’s decision that he tried to be careful not to make a face that would give it away.
“Ninety-nine point nine percent of coaches don’t do that because if you don’t get it, you get killed by (the media),” said Kiffin, a former head coach who knows something about getting second-guessed. “Not one of you guys would have wrote, ‘Why did you kick it deep?’ if we lose the game. But if he doesn’t get that, every one of you would have written about it.
“It shows he’s going to do what he thinks is the best to win, whether that’s signing players, whether that’s hiring coaches that other people don’t think he should, whether that’s an onside kick. He’s going to do whatever he wants to win. That’s why he’s the best.”
Alabama cornerback Cyrus Jones was on the sideline starting to strap on his helmet for another defensive series. He took one peek away from the onside kick and became confused.
“I’m thinking, ‘Why is Marlon Humphrey catching the ball and running out of bounds?’” Jones said. “It was a gutsy call. It takes a special kind of guy to make that kind of call, and we rode that spark for the rest of the game to close it out.”
The onside kick was specially designed for Humphrey, an Alabama redshirt freshman cornerback. He is the son of former Alabama and NFL running back Bobby Humphrey and Barbara Humphrey, a track star at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
There’s a good reason why the play is for Humphrey: He may be a freshman, but he’s a freak athlete. He’s one of the best track-and-field athletes at his age in America. He won the 110-meter hurdles and the 400-meter hurdles at the 2013 World Youth Track and Field Trials. If you want one guy jumping up to get an onside kick, Humphrey is your guy.
But there’s one problem with designing the play for Humphrey: In practice, he usually dropped the ball.
“We practiced it this past Thursday and I actually dropped it,” Humphrey said. “I definitely did not think there was any chance they would call it.”
How unprepared was Humphrey for the call? He’s usually the safety man on kickoffs and wasn’t initially in the huddle listening to the call. Someone called him over to the huddle to inform him of the pop kick.
“They said, ‘Don’t be offsides and you’ll catch it,’” Humphrey said.
Alabama coaches noticed all night that Clemson’s kick return alignment was really tight. Clemson redshirt freshman wide receiver Trevion Thompson was positioned inside the hash and Alabama figured out Thompson often opened up and didn’t look to see if the ball was kicked or not, leaving so much space on the outside for a recovery with a pooch kick.
“They lined up closest to the hash on the sideline so boom, perfect,” Griffith said.
What happened next was as rare as an onside kick during the fourth quarter of a tie game in the national championship. Saban smiled.
“No, he’s got the same expression,” Williams argued. “He has a rule: No smiling during the game.”
No, seriously, Bobby. Saban smiled. A huge, big, devilish grin after he brought his own guts.
“OK,” Williams allowed, “he may have had a little smirk.”
Swinney complained to the officials. In his mind, Swinney remembered that Clemson had a similar onside kick taken away from it last year against South Carolina because the Tigers didn’t give the receiver a chance to catch the ball. In the Clemson locker room, teary-eyed safety Jayron Kearse kept saying it was the “wrong call” by the officials.
There was nothing wrong about the call. Even Swinney recognized the brilliance of the play.
“Hey, great play by them,” Swinney said. “It was a great kick. First of all, he put it right in a good spot, and their kid did a great job of going up and getting it. It was a huge play.”
Keep in mind, Saban has made bold calls before. There was a failed fake punt against Texas in the 2010 BCS Championship Game during Saban’s first national championship season at Alabama, a play Saban later said was “probably a mistake because it didn’t work.” There was a successful fake punt a couple years ago against LSU. There was an unsuccessful onside kick to open the Auburn game in 2014.
Saban’s brilliance isn’t just that he can beat you so many different ways with so many talented players. It’s that he has studied the ways to beat you and he’s willing to go for the jugular when the game may be slipping away.
“But let me say this,” Saban told a reporter. “You don’t look like the type that would do this to me, but if we wouldn’t have got that, y’all would be killing me now.”
Instead, college football has Saban with five national championships in his past 11 years as a college coach. Instead, the Saban vs. Bryant debate is very real.
Coming soon to an Alabama store near you: The Smile that college football will never forget.
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