Matt Hayes

It always comes back to the story of the brick. Doesn't matter who's preaching or pontificating, who's venting or fuming. It's the brick that begins and ends every coaching story at Alabama 25 years A.B. (After Bear).

Yet there's this nagging detail in the anecdote as it grows larger and looms heavier with every dissertation on the obstacles facing each new coach who follows legendary Paul "Bear" Bryant: It wasn't that big of a deal.

Hey, no self-respecting Alabama man can put up with a loss to Mississippi, especially on homecoming weekend. Bill Curry — the coach in the barrel when the brick crashed through his office window nearly 20 years ago — was lucky he didn't get worse.

"Strange things happen to coaches everywhere," Curry says. "That was the least of it at Alabama, I can assure you."

Which is why the brick itself was no big thing.

So it is here that we introduce Nick Saban, No. 8 A.B., and a guy who, frankly, doesn't give a flip what Alabama people think. And that's exactly what the tunnel-visioned, meddling, unrealistic, undying, unwavering, thisclose to the edge Tide Nation needs.

Someone to tell them to shut their yaps and hop on the ride.

"Nick's personality, the way he's wired," one of Saban's friends says, "he won't put up with all that crap."

As spring practice unfolds on the Capstone, a new era begins yet again in Tuscaloosa. Another coach has preached about championships, about returning the Tide to the nation's elite and reaching the bar The Bear cemented so high. They all talk a big game during the early rush of love, when bizarre and bewildering tales of the past are overlooked because, really, this time it will be different.

If only it were that easy.

This much we know: Nick Saban will win at Alabama. He's too good a coach not to. He will win a Southeastern Conference championship, maybe even a national title. But the issue isn't what goes on between the white lines — it's the nonstop carnival of fan and booster intrusion outside them. It's draining and deflating, overbearing and overwhelming, and eventually it overruns anyone or anything in its path.

Only one coach A.B. has lasted more than four seasons — one barely lasted four months. Some can talk about their time in Tuscaloosa, others can't — or, in the case of recently fired Mike Shula, won't. Yet the insight and anecdotes gleaned from detailed conversations with former coaches and those close to the situation provide a clear and dangerous road map that Saban must navigate if he is to go where no other coach A.B. has gone.

"The people of this state are incredibly passionate about their football," Saban says. "I don't see how that can't be a good thing."

Let us show the way.

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College football inspires passion — it's a breeding ground for loopy, lunatic fans whose obsession not only carries this regional sport but also sustains and strengthens it year after year. Now take all of those typical crazies — whose lives consist of the regular season, recruiting season, spring practice and four excruciatingly painful summer months of waiting — and their combined energy powers no more than a light bulb compared with the nuclear output from the 24/7/365 Alabama fans.

Early on a Monday in 1997, two days after his team had lost to Kentucky for the second time in the history of the program, Mike DuBose was jogging around town in the dark to clear his head and refocus. It was 5 a.m. when he was flagged down by an elderly man.

"He had to have been in his late 70s," DuBose says.

The man proceeded to tell DuBose that Alabama fans didn't like losing. And they sure as hell didn't like losing to Kentucky, whose worth to SEC football is slightly more than "who cares?" — and only because The Bear spent eight seasons in Lexington in the 1940s and '50s.

"When he was finished," DuBose says, "He told me, 'You should be in your office fixing what's wrong instead of fooling around out here.' "

It has taken more than six years for DuBose to open up about his four tumultuous seasons in Tuscaloosa, to embrace what he had and what he lost. He pauses for a moment while discussing the jogging story, stares into the clear spring sky on a peaceful day in Jackson, Miss. — a lifetime removed from the madness that ended in 2000 — and continues in a measured tone: "I played at Alabama. I was an assistant coach at Alabama. I don't think anyone has any idea what they're getting into until they sit in that big seat. Nick absolutely cannot understand the enormity of it."