West Virginia daily

"I mean, the Beatles. . . . Christ, he had every album they ever made," Steve Belichick said. "Before we had air conditioning, the windows would be open, and the neighbors — five, six houses down the street — could hear it."

Don't let Saban near your subwoofer, either. He's always up for a concert with his buddy Bill, who has a longtime friendship with New Jersey rocker Jon Bon Jovi.

"Well, they're pretty intense," Terry Saban said. "They're singing and clapping — they get into their music. That's part of their thing."

But don't expect to see their heads bouncing to the blaring music today when Saban's Dolphins play Belichick's New England Patriots at Dolphins Stadium.

It's mostly business for these two, and it has been that way since their relationship began nearly 25 years ago. They might clench a fist about a successful corner blitz, but that's about it for public viewing.

Terry remembers when Belichick got his first NFL head-coaching gig, taking over the Cleveland Browns in 1991. One of the first calls he made for assistants was to Saban, who was the head coach at Toledo.

Saban arrived, and for a few weeks sat in a big meeting room with a grim-faced Belichick and a few other coaches, mulling other additions to the staff and charting a course for the struggling franchise.

"Bill never was a guy that would come home and say, 'Hey, dad, I heard a good joke last night.' " the elder Belichick said. "Nick was pretty much the same way."

Saban joined the staff at Navy in 1982, when Steve Belichick, one of the great scouts and coaches of his era, was in the midst of his 33-year run with the Midshipmen.

Bill Belichick was busy coaching the linebackers for the New York Giants, so he rarely had time to visit his parents in Annapolis. No problem. His father had a new brain to feed and pick.

"They wouldn't let us stay in those dorm rooms when I was there," said Terry Saban, who has an oil painting by Steve Belichick on a wall in the Saban's South Florida home. "They're wonderful people. We just admired them so much that we couldn't wait to get to know their son better."

When Saban became an assistant coach at Michigan State, Bill Belichick made it a point to head to East Lansing to get to know the guy who impressed his father.

"The first year or so, Bill spent a lot of time teaching the defense," said Chris Landry, a scouting assistant on that Cleveland staff. "Once Nick got it, Bill felt supremely confident in just handing over the defense to Nick. So much so that Bill actually spent more time on the offensive side of the ball, because Nick really took over that defense and really made a big difference."

By 1994, the Browns had the NFL's top-rated defense and gave up the second-fewest points in the league on their way to an 11-5 mark. Saban parlayed that success into the coaching job at Michigan State.

Saban was so hands-on with the Spartans' program that he even instructed the youngest players at the school's summer football camp. Among the participants was a kid named Stephen Belichick.

"I think that meant a lot to Nick, that of all the camps in the country, Bill sent Stephen to Nick," Terry Saban said. "Bill would come and stay with us for a few days and they'd chat quite a bit."

Belichick's off-season trips to visit his friend continued in Bayou Country, where Saban coached LSU. Belichick was now coaching the Patriots and would head south in February.

Each day started and ended pretty much the same way. Belichick and Saban would retreat to the offices at Tiger Stadium and wear out the chalkboard and video room, coming up with innovative defensive schemes.

One strategy, which Belichick gives Saban most of the credit for devising, is the Cover-4 alignment the Patriots employed to beat Peyton Manning and the Colts in last season's AFC championship game. The Cover-4 looks like the Patriots' familiar Cover-2 until the snap.

"He knows the game inside and out," Belichick said of Saban. "He knows X's and O's. He knows techniques. He really understands how to put things together schematically because he understands so well what the other side of the ball is doing."

After the stadium strategy sessions, Belichick and Saban would head to Saban's lakeside home, where Terry would have dinner ready for her not-so-dynamic dining duo.

"Let's put it this way," she said, "I always left them and went to bed. With Nick and Bill, the passion and the focus that the two of them have — and it is truly their love — I don't think the talk ever deviated from the subject of football into the wee hours."

Both hail from coal-mining regions, Belichick from western Pennsylvania and Saban from the foothills of West Virginia. Both have Croatian heritage. "Hard-headed," Saban said of that ancestry. Saban is 54, six months older than the 53-year-old Belichick.

"Both are real grinders," said University of Virginia coach Al Groh, who coached linebackers for Belichick at Cleveland. "They had a lot of similarities in their passion for football, in their insights and their ability to look at an opponent and measure what the opponent does against the skills that their team has, and come up with the best way that our team can play this particular opponent."

"Nick was a very nervous person. He couldn't sit down to take a phone call," Steve Belichick said. "Didn't matter who the hell it was from, he had to pace or chew on his fingernails. Bill was never a nervous person. He pretty well camouflages his emotion."

Not that Saban is afraid to show his emotions on the field. Michael Dean Perry, who played defensive tackle for the Browns, calls Saban "fiery."

Patriots defensive lineman Jarvis Green, who played for Saban at LSU, said his former coach is "aggressive" and his present coach isn't as vocal.

"It's more of a professional friendship with a lot of trust," she said. "We may not socialize a lot or go out to dinner, but he's somebody who Nick respects to the point where if it were a critical situation he would call Bill, and Bill would call Nick."

David Halberstam, who spent nearly three months interviewing and researching Belichick for the recently released biography, The Education of a Coach, was struck by Belichick's admiration for Saban.

"When Bill talked about coaches, it was very clear to me that he put Nick Saban at an almost different level than everyone else," Halberstam said. "He didn't come out and say, 'I really respect Saban.' It was the way his name kept popping up. It was just a constant part of the undertow of these conversations, that his name would come up."

This is cache, read story here