Alabama Football: Gandalf the Wizard, seven seconds and the Saban Process

A connection between Alabama football, Nick Saban and a key character from the J.R.R. Tolkien trilogy seems absurd but it is not fantasy.

No one should go through life without reading Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy or at least The Hobbit. If reading books is not your thing, at least watch the movies. Alabama football fans, we promise you will not be disappointed.

One of Tolkien’s main characters is a good wizard named Gandalf. Nick Saban may be a wizard but we are not suggesting he is Gandalf. But Nick knows a Gandalf, a real life friend who is also something of a wizard. The friend is Lionel Rosen, Professor of Psychiatry at Michigan State University.

Click on this Michigan State profile and you will see why some students call Rosen, Gandalf. There is an undeniable resemblance to the actor playing Gandalf in the photo above.

The Saban-Rosen friendship goes back to 1998. Before we tell that story, take a look at the video below. The purpose of the Saban Process is teaching habits that are pathways to greatness.

Saban’s Alabama Football Mental Coaching Team

Saban has a trio of ‘mental coaches’ assisting Alabama football players. Rosen has been involved with Nick the longest. Kevin Elko and Trevor Moawad have also been involved for several years. All of them are teachers in the sense they don’t tell players what to do. They teach players the mental habits necessary to excel

Rosen teaches a simple process,

"Rather than just focusing on the long term, and seeing a huge gap between the present and your desired future … Rosen suggests thinking as if we’re on a road – one that’s about committing to finishing each small step in the best way we possibly can along the way … one moment at a time, followed by the next one."

Rosen’s insight is applicable to any of life’s challenges but he astutely realized it was also well suited to football. Rosen’s football guidance attends to the seven-second duration of the average football play. Using Rosen’s knowledge, Saban taught players to focus solely on those seven seconds and nothing else. Forget the score, discard any future thoughts about the game’s outcome. Focus only on the present for seven seconds, then rest and do it again and again until the game ends.

As Nick said in the video, normal people are not good at the required, repetitive mindfulness essential to great achievement. They must be taught. They must be taught so well that the focus becomes a habit, executed every step on the road to greatness.

This mental approach to the game of football is really quite extraordinary. Of course, Rosen and Saban don’t have the mental game market cornered. Other coaches have caught on. Jimbo Fisher is one of them and Trevor Moawad helps the Seminoles as well.

Not Gimmickery or Wizardry

For those who see the mental stuff as a gimmick to brainwash players, consider how Saban follows the same approach in his life. He lives it as explained in this Business Insider story.

"He’s found that keeping an eye on the past or future either creates anxiety or dangerous comfort, and so he spends as little time as possible caught in the emotion of a win or a loss."

To Saban, this is not just football but a daily philosophy of life. Terry Saban said this about their marriage partnership.

"‘We don’t look back, we don’t look to the future or have expectations about it, rather we live in the moment of every day.’"

All of this is no psychological ‘mumbo-jumbo.’ And it is no wizardry. Before we learned about Professor Rosen, we wrote two months ago the Saban Process is mostly a quest for clarity. Rosen was talking about football when he said,

"“Nobody has enough brainpower or motivation to consistently manage all the variables going on in the course of a season, let alone a game. They think they do—but realistically, they don’t.”"

Next: 30 Great Tide Players who were 3-Star Recruits

Rosen could easily have been talking the complexities and challenges of normal life. The Saban Process learned from Lionel Rosen, is applicable to life and football. It is mastering little habits over and over and over. It is also a path to greatness for Alabama football.