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00:00What was the building like when Mike Shula was out and Nick Saban got tired?
00:07Do you remember where you were?
00:09What was the sentiment from the team?
00:11Was everybody like, I guess this is awesome?
00:13We're all popping champagne bottles or were you like, oh gosh, are we safe?
00:17We were fired up.
00:19We were super fired up.
00:20What's funny though is that Coach Saban was at LSU and I was very early in the recruiting
00:26process starting to hear from LSU and I'm like, heck yeah.
00:31Coach Saban, Matt Mock was the quarterback.
00:34I'm kind of similar in skill set, similar in style, like former baseball player, like
00:39all right, yeah.
00:41This place would make a lot of sense for me and then Coach Saban left, it's like all right,
00:44well that ship sailed.
00:46Les Miles came in, I'm like yeah, not a good fit.
00:50So I ended up going to Bama with Mike Shula who was a quarterback coach who had just won
00:5710 games the year before, had just won the Cotton Bowl, felt like Alabama had some momentum.
01:03Our recruiting class was like a top 10 class in the country.
01:06In our recruiting class there, the 06 class, we had a couple guys that went on to become
01:10great players.
01:11Javier Arenas and Andre Smith who was a top prospect at a high school, a tackle, yeah.
01:18A handful of others and fast forward, we had a terrible year and then Coach Shula gets
01:24fired and we're like, well damn, like what are we going to do?
01:27You know what I mean?
01:28Like is it going to be Rich Roderiguez?
01:29Greg went back to the SAE house is what he did.
01:32Yeah, I was not an SAE at that point, that was a second year pledge.
01:36I didn't know what the deal was like with the frat thing, like that was a foreign concept
01:41and I got to Bama, I was like, hang on, you're not in a frat?
01:43I'm like, no.
01:44They're like, well you should be.
01:45I'm like, oh, okay.
01:46I didn't know that that was like a thing.
01:49That's amazing.
01:50Yeah.
01:51All right.
01:52Starting quarterback at Alabama, also in SAE, how you doing?
01:55Greg McElroy.
01:56You know, I wasn't the starting quarterback when I pledged and I'll be honest with you,
01:59my pledge ship basically was like, Hey, you want to come over and throw passes to the
02:03new boys?
02:04Like, yeah, it sounds like a good deal.
02:07Like I wasn't doing bows and toes, bro.
02:09Like it was pretty, I always told him, I'm like, dude, my pledge ship is, my pledge ship
02:15is at the football facility.
02:17All right.
02:18Like I go through four years of pledge ship, dude, and I still see some of my pledge brothers
02:22around town now, but long story short, like, yeah, pledge ship was football.
02:27But looking at, looking at coach, coach Shula getting fired, it's like, this thing could
02:31go a lot of different ways, man.
02:32He was fired at like around Thanksgiving and coach Saban did not get hired until January
02:383rd.
02:39When Nick Saban retired and Kaelin DeBoer was hired, it was like 72 hours, maybe less.
02:44It was like 58 hours and people were freaking out.
02:48Imagine going like 58 days is about what it felt like feeling as though that search would
02:54never come to an end.
02:56And finally we found out it was coach Saban and we're all jacked, dude.
02:58I mean, we were so fired up.
03:00We knew it was going to be miserable though.
03:01I mean, it was, it was awful.
03:03Like, I mean, the, the first year was awful.
03:06Uh, he was basically just testing us like, all right, we're going to basically go through
03:11a process that was be comparable to military training to see whether or not you're going
03:19to be up to the task.
03:20Like, we're going to put you through things that you never thought you could handle.
03:23And if you survive, uh, and you're with us, it's going to be worth it.
03:26Cause we're going to win a lot of games, but it's going to be awful here for this first
03:29calendar year.
03:30And it was, but, um, we came out the other side as a pretty cohesive unit.
03:33We, those that weren't all in were cast away and all of a sudden, you know, we became a
03:39pretty good group a couple of years later.