Tom Dienhart

Respected and revered ... reviled and repulsed. Welcome to Nick Saban's world.

Love him or hate him, no one will ignore Saban this fall. In fact, he'll be watched more closely than any coach as he tries to feed the Alabama football beast that has eaten up four coaches this decade.

Saban's marching orders are simple: Deliver the school's first national championship since 1992. Anything less will be considered a failure for a coach who was lured from the Miami Dolphins with an eight-year, $32 million guaranteed contract that shook the bricks of every ivory tower on every campus.

Days before the start of camp, Sporting News sat down with Saban in his Tuscaloosa office for an interview on topics including Alabama's clandestine courtship, his bruised image and expectations for this season.

Is Saban a monster, or is he misunderstood? You be the judge.

SN: Why has your image taken a beating?

SABAN: I take responsibility. I just think who I am is different than who I'm perceived to be. But I also think I'm responsible for that. How you think you are, and how everyone perceives you, is everyone's blind spot. It's what you don't know about yourself. My wife tells me that all of the time.

And for most of us who aren't in the public, you don't even realize how you're perceived. But in a public job, you realize it because you get feedback from the media and other people.

SN: When did you start getting a negative persona?

SABAN: The whole thing about coming here became such a national deal. The way I handled it, people questioned my integrity. But I was not trying to mislead anybody. I was trying to do a fair and honest thing for our team by being loyal to them, which I was. When the season was over, I turned and looked at our family and talked about what we were going to do next, if we were going to do something different.

SN: Do you think people are afraid of you?

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SABAN: I do sense it, and I don't like it. I have no idea why they're afraid of me. I think a lot of it is the image that has been created publicly. I'm not blaming anyone for that. I don't think it's really how I am. I think the people who know me and get to know me don't think I'm that way at all. I'm a shy kid from West Virginia who grew up in a coal mining town pumping gas, and I still feel the same way. I'm the same kind of person as that. I don't treat people any different, I don't talk any different.

SN: What's your biggest weakness?

SABAN: I'm a driven perfectionist who has a high expectation for what we want to try to accomplish. It's not easy. A lot of people look at what they are doing and don't expect it to be hard. And they get discouraged when things get difficult. But most things, in my opinion, that are significant to accomplish are hard. But that's what makes it great.

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Woody Hayes once said there can be no great victories in life without a tremendous amount of adversity. The war in the Pacific is the greatest military victory of all time because of Pearl Harbor and what we had to overcome. But if you're always seeking everything to be easy, then you aren't going to be happy being around me.

SN: How will you insulate yourself from the outside forces that seem to hamper Alabama coaches?

SABAN: Everything is about winning. Whether the coach was available to these people as much as they wanted him to be, whether they had the access to him that they wanted, they all got hired or fired based on winning and losing.

I don't want to sound glib, but I like people. And I like the public relations part of this job. I just know that you can't let it overwhelm you. And none of the parameters I have here are different from anywhere else. It just wasn't public. And I always did more than what I agreed to do.

SN: So your time is sacred?

SABAN: I try to protect the time I think you need to spend on coaching your players, developing your players and recruiting to have a chance to be successful. The people at LSU had a tremendous amount of respect for: That guy's the coach and that's what we want. They didn't care about you playing golf outings in Louisiana. I only played in two the whole time I was there. I've already played in six here and turned down 50 others, and no one seemed to get it. Well, how can I go recruit and do the things I need to do when you have me doing all of this stuff?