Nick Saban says he was offered Giants job in 1997

Nick Saban’s two-year stint as an NFL head coach began in 2005. It could have started eight years earlier.

In a Thursday interview with Chris “Mad Dog” Russo of SiriusXM Mad Dog Radio, Saban admitted — eventually — that the Giants had offered him the head-coaching job after the Giants fired Dan Reeves, when Saban was the head coach at Michigan State.

“It’s very difficult in college, you know, and the NFL, you have an opportunity to go to the NFL, you’re still coaching, you’re still recruiting,” Saban said. “If you stay in college, you don’t want it to upset your coaching and recruiting and all that. So you don’t wanna say that I’m gonna go interview for the Giants job. So [G.M.] George [Young] and I worked out a deal. He said, ‘Well, where do you think we can meet and nobody would know it?’ And I said, ‘The least obvious place you would ever think. Just come to my house in East Lansing and nobody will ever know it.’ That’s what he did.”

In other words, Saban (like plenty of other college coaches over the years) had made various promises that he didn’t want anyone to know he was thinking about breaking, until the moment he decided to do so.

So did the Giants offer him the job in 1997?

“You know, I can’t really remember what we talked about and how we ended up there, but I think Ernie [Accorsi] was assistant general manager then,” Saban said. “And I love Ernie. He was at the Browns when I was there with Belichick. Yeah, they did offer me the job actually.”

Saban obviously didn’t take it. The Giants hired Jim Fassel, who took them to the Super Bowl in 2000.

It’s unclear whether the Giants made another run at Saban after Fassel was fired, after the 2003 season. A year later, Saban took the Dolphins job.

If he’d jumped to the NFL in 1997, Saban would have faced the same issues he did in Miami. The salary cap is the great equalizer, and there’s no way to recruit an annual flock of players who are the equivalent of NFL first-round picks. Saban learned that, at the college level, it’s a lot easier to stack the deck in his favor.