Nick Saban, Lane Kiffin and the year that changed Alabama football forever
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Chris Low
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ESPN Senior Writer- College football reporter
- Joined ESPN.com in 2007
- Graduate of the University of Tennessee
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Alex Scarborough
TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — Former Alabama quarterback Blake Sims can still remember the feeling of that November night back in 2014, when he and the offense were standing on the field in overtime at LSU. With his mind and heart racing, and the roar of the Tiger Stadium crowd ringing in his ears, he shot a glance toward the sideline and Coach Nick Saban.
Less than 24 hours earlier, first-year offensive coordinator Lane Kiffin had come up with the play Sims was about to run — a daring empty set formation in which the offensive tackle, Cam Robinson, would split out wide as a receiver and a 305-pound reserve tight end, Brandon Greene, would masquerade as an offensive lineman.
The play’s name doubled as a sort of warning: Oh S—.
“Oh s—,” Kiffin had warned Sims and the rest of the offense in their team meeting the night before, “if this doesn’t work guys, Coach Saban is going to kill me on national TV.”
No blood was shed. LSU didn’t pick up on the fact that Greene was actually an eligible receiver as he took off down the middle of the field after the snap and hauled in a 24-yard reception on the first play of overtime, leading to a 20-13 Alabama victory.
“We all would have gotten our asses ripped if that play would have gone bad, not just Coach Kiffin,” said Sims. “But that’s the way Coach Kiffin rolls. He wasn’t afraid to take chances, and Coach Saban wasn’t afraid to take a chance on him … and you see what that’s led to.”
Much like that play, the pairing of Saban and Kiffin was high-risk at the time and genius in hindsight. And it has now come full circle, as Kiffin returns to Bryant-Denny Stadium to lead his No. 12 Ole Miss Rebels against Saban’s No. 1 Crimson Tide on Saturday.
But for the full story of how Alabama transitioned from ground-and-pound, game-manager-QB Alabama to high-flying, first-round-QBs-and-Heisman-winning-receiver Alabama, you have to start at the beginning, when the sport’s most accomplished head coach took a chance on the game’s most controversial.
“I remember him saying, ‘I feel like our offense is a Lamborghini, but it’s headed off a cliff,’ meaning we’ve got these great players, but are behind the times in what we’re doing,” said Kiffin, recalling their first meeting after he was hired. “So we needed to change directions.”
When Auburn‘s Chris Davis caught a missed field goal and returned it more than 100 yards for a game-winning score against Alabama in the 2013 Iron Bowl, it did more than dash any hope the Crimson Tide had of winning a third straight national title. It was the final signal to Saban that his program, despite its massive success, was beginning to grow outdated offensively.
While Auburn, Ole Miss and Texas A&M were using tempo and spreading the field with multiple receivers, Alabama was still putting the quarterback under center and still utilizing a mostly pro-style playbook.
Saban, after years of complaining about how the rules were tilted in favor of spread and hurry-up offenses, was eager to play catch-up with what he called the “fastball guys.”
So two weeks after losing to Auburn, an unlikely visitor started popping up at the Alabama practice field.
Center Ryan Kelly barely noticed Kiffin hanging around those few days in mid-December. Former coaches were always coming and going, Kelly explained.
Speaking to reporters, Saban brushed off the importance of Kiffin’s visit. Never mind that Kiffin was one of the most eccentric and divisive figures in college football. The 38-year-old had recently been fired by USC and was only four years removed from bailing on Tennessee after just one season.
Saban said hosting Kiffin was an opportunity for “professional development.”
“Obviously,” Kelly said, “that was the precursor to what was coming.”
Sims, who was a backup at the time but knew Kiffin from his recruitment by Tennessee, was one of the few players who put two and two together.
“I said, ‘We’re about to be deadly, so cold, because I knew what he would do with our offense,” Sims said. “It was the perfect combination, Coach Saban’s structure and Coach Kiffin’s creative mind.”
In the ensuing days, everything came together. Offensive coordinator Doug Nussmeier told Sims and the rest of the offense that the Sugar Bowl would be his last game at Alabama. He would eventually land the same job at Michigan.
During a recruiting visit, Saban pulled linebackers coach Lance Thompson into a bathroom for a private conversation. Thompson said Saban told him he had three candidates in mind to replace Nussmeier. One of them was Kiffin, whom Thompson had worked for at Tennessee.
Saban asked Thompson, now the inside linebackers coach at Florida Atlantic, what he thought.
“I’d hire Lane, Coach,” he said. “He’s a special playcaller.”
Thompson then paused for a moment. “But I’m going to tell you,” he said, “he’s different.”
Saban didn’t miss a beat.
“I ain’t never had a problem handling an assistant coach,” he said.
Saban would ultimately hire Kiffin and test his confidence about wrangling wayward assistants. Their personalities were so far apart, Thompson said, “It was like Earth and Neptune.”
Their collision caused fireworks at times, but more importantly, it led to the total re-imagining of Alabama’s offense and the resurrection of Kiffin’s career.
“People think you go there because it’s coaching rehab and you get a head job somewhere else,” Kiffin told ESPN earlier this week. “I guess that’s one way to approach it, and some people do. But for me, I look back at all of the things I learned under [Saban] that made me a better coach despite everything that’s been said about our time together and any differences we might have had.”
There were plenty of skeptics when Saban brought Kiffin on board.
“A lot of people might have been surprised when I brought Lane in as coordinator, probably even here in the building,” Saban told ESPN. “But I wanted to grow on offense. We needed to grow, and I felt like he was the best guy at that time to help us do that.”
But this wouldn’t be a simple course correction. Because while Saban wanted to implement the spread and use more tempo, Kiffin had very little history of doing either. At Tennessee and USC, he had run a similar pro-style attack as Alabama.
“He researched all that stuff and we’d go over it,” Saban said. “… So I was kinda learning it from him, and he was learning it from other people.”
For much of the next two years, Kiffin did his homework on those coaches and teams running up-tempo offenses with run-pass elements (RPOs). He paid careful attention to what his former USC brethren Steve Sarkisian was doing as head coach at Washington, racking up more than 600 total yards of offense in a game five times during the 2013 season.
There were also talks with Tom Herman when he was the offensive coordinator at Ohio State and Doug Meacham at TCU. Kiffin said he remained in touch with Chip Kelly, who was then in the NFL with the Philadelphia Eagles after coaching against Kiffin while at Oregon.
That April, during Kiffin’s first spring at Alabama, the Crimson Tide hosted their annual coaching clinic. There were a few usual suspects, such as former Alabama coaches Gene Stallings and Sylvester Croom, but among the headliners was someone with no ties to the school or Saban: Baylor coach and hurry-up offensive guru Art Briles, who was later fired in response to a review of the school’s handling of sexual assault allegations against students, including several football players.
Thompson said Briles’ attendance was no coincidence.
“There’s not a coach that comes to a clinic that Nick doesn’t sit down with individually and talk to and the coaches on the offensive and defensive side of the ball talk to those guys, too,” Thompson said. “Every coach from another program, every coach that’s brought in for an interview, is brought in for a purpose.”
That purpose: “To gain new information.”
Saban and Kiffin left no stone unturned. In their second year together, no-huddle guru Eric Kiesau was brought in on staff as an offensive analyst. Kiesau, now the receivers coach at Auburn, worked under Sarkisian at Washington and was previously the offensive coordinator at Colorado and passing game coordinator at Cal. He was a valuable sounding board for Kiffin on such things as using the sideline boards that help teams go faster on offense.
Alabama ran what was then a school-record 1,088 offensive plays in 2015 after running 1,018 the year before. The Tide had not run more than 898 plays in a season the previous four years.
“Everybody says that I go through so many guys on offense,” Saban said. “Look, I learn from all of them. We went through a transformation when Lane was here … intentionally. It was intentional. I wanted to, and he wanted to, too, and we’ve continued to build.”
The transition wasn’t seamless, though.
For instance: Kelly remembers how frustrated he was when he found out Kiffin wanted to scrap the traditional way quarterbacks signaled for the snap with a voice command like “hike” in favor of clapping. Kelly said he let it be known to his coaches, “How does this make sense? Like, anybody could be clapping, right?”
“There was give and take,” explained Kelly, who’s in his sixth season with the Indianapolis Colts.
That applied to the staff’s interaction with Kiffin, too.
One time, Kelly recalled, he thought offensive line coach Mario Cristobal was going to lose it on Kiffin.
“He was so close to walking into Lane’s office and strangling him,” Kelly said. “Because they were going out to practice and there were five new plays we hadn’t installed and no one could find Lane.”
Over time, Saban grew increasingly frustrated with what he said was a lack of organization on Kiffin’s part.
“I wanted things done a certain way,” Saban said. “I wanted the coaches to meet. I wanted everybody to have input, and that was not his style. Some of the other coaches complained to me about it, and I always said that Lane would be a much better head coach than an assistant because when you’re a head coach and you know what you want to do and you’ve got organized people around you, you really don’t need to be that organized.”
One assistant on that staff joked: “Lane Kiffin and Nick Saban were a match. It just wasn’t a match made in heaven.”
When Kiffin arrived in Tuscaloosa, Blake Sims was no one’s idea of a record-setting SEC quarterback.
AJ McCarron had just left for the NFL and former Florida State quarterback Jake Coker had transferred in, becoming the odds-on favorite to start.
The coaching staff loved Sims, but if they’re being honest, Thompson said, they were surprised he beat out Coker and started a single game. Even Sims admits he was recruited to Alabama by Kirby Smart to play free safety.
“He’d been Scout Team Player of the Week more than anybody in the history of Alabama football,” Thompson said. “He had played running back, safety, quarterback, wide receiver, fullback, tight end. The kid had played everything. He was such a wonderful kid. And then Lane comes and does a great job giving him stuff that he can do.”
Overnight, Sims transformed into a deft distributor of the football, making the kind of quick decisions that allowed All-America receiver Amari Cooper and others to shine.
That was no accident. Thompson said that during the lead up to the season, Kiffin shortened the terminology of plays, cutting 10-word calls in half in order to make things easier for everyone to understand, and Sims responded by passing for more yards (3,487) than anybody in the history of Alabama football had passed for to that point.
Whereas the year before the playbook was the size of a novel, Kelly said, it was suddenly condensed into a single chapter.
“To see a guy who really before that played kind of a utility role turn into that,” Kelly said of Sims, “that was obviously a lot of Lane’s doing. He figured out, ‘What’s this guy’s strengths and weaknesses? And let’s play those advantages.’ And that’s ultimately what he did the entire time I was there my last two years.”
Sims, who’s now playing for the Spokane Shock in the Indoor Football League, would watch tape with Cooper and running back Kenyan Drake of those Matt Leinart and Reggie Bush USC teams when Kiffin was the Trojans’ offensive coordinator.
“It was always amazing to me how he could see one play on film and know immediately how to attack the defense,” Sims said. “He could be standing on the field and see things nobody else could.”
In the Florida game that 2014 season, Kiffin pulled Sims and Drake aside before the game and devised a play for Drake to split out wide as a receiver and Sims to line up in the shotgun in an empty backfield. On the first play from scrimmage, Drake found himself matched against a linebacker and ran a slant-and-go route for an easy 75-yard touchdown reception.
Kiffin said they had never practiced that “sluggo” route with Drake, but that he had this “weird feeling” that Florida would be in man coverage.
“I thought about it at the last minute and we put it in in the locker room,” said Kiffin, adding that Bush ran that similar play for a long touchdown against Notre Dame in 2004.
Sims said: “You just didn’t see Alabama doing that kind of stuff before, but Coach Kiffin was great at getting those matchups and finding ways to get his best players the ball.”
As a playcaller, Saban said Kiffin is the best he’s ever been around.
“He sees how the defense is playing something and immediately knows,” Saban said, snapping his fingers for emphasis, “what he wants to run against it.”
Saban said it’s overblown how much he and Kiffin sparred that first season when it came to football, and even Kiffin said his former boss is a much better listener than people give him credit for, at least in certain areas.
“On scheme, yes. But not when it comes to the structure of his program,” Kiffin said. “It’s hard to argue that, though. Look at his success.”
Much like the “Oh S—” play against LSU, Kiffin was renowned for coming up with plays, even on the day of the game, which made it seem like sandlot football at times. And yes, he felt the wrath of Saban, but it usually was worth it.
“Some people when you get into a very structured environment like that, and you’re a little bit more of a color-outside-the-lines guy, just sort of conform because they can’t handle the pressure if it doesn’t work,” said one former assistant coach. “But Lane would color outside the lines, and if two things worked and two things didn’t work, it wouldn’t faze him mentally.”
One of the areas where Kiffin and Saban clashed most often that first season came on resting players, especially during practice, and cutting down on their reps later in the season.
“I didn’t win many of those battles,” Kiffin said. “Maybe the only one was with Amari Cooper. He was like a running back that year. He caught 124 passes [a school record]. I just wanted to make sure he still had his legs at the end of the season.”
Saban admits that he’s old-school, but not to the point of being stubborn.
“I’m old-school when it comes to doing things right and being disciplined, all that,” Saban said. “I’m not old-school in the technical aspects of playing the game. There are differences, and I don’t think people get that sometimes.
“So I do listen. I listen a lot, listened to Lane [on Cooper]. That’s how you learn. Now, there are some things I’m just not willing to compromise.”
While there might have been some concession on Cooper and his reps that season, a coach on that staff said Saban is unwavering when it comes to practice.
“That wasn’t going to change, and it hasn’t changed,” the coach said. “And anybody who tells you it has changed is lying. The process is the process, and the way [Saban] develops his football team with practice reps is not changing. It wasn’t Lane’s call. It wasn’t my call. It was Coach Saban’s call.
“Now, do you have the ability to get him to expand what his intent is? Yes. Lane got him to expand his thinking on certain things. But change? No.”
In retrospect, Kiffin admits he might have pressed too hard, too fast, on some things.
“Like a lot of people do with a previous marriage, I look back on my time now with Coach Saban differently,” Kiffin said. “I could have done much better with just, ‘Yes sir,’ no matter what he said. That’s the majority of that building. They say, ‘Yes sir,’ no matter what. I guess my issue was that I wasn’t trained that way. I’d been a head coach and an assistant coach to Pete Carroll for six years. Pete Carroll was not a ‘yes sir’ environment at all. It was more, ‘Bring up whatever ideas you want.'”
The two coaches stood at midfield inside Vaught-Hemingway Stadium after one of the most exciting games last season, Kiffin wearing an Ole Miss powder blue face covering and shaking hands with his former boss, Saban, who was decked out in head-to-toe Alabama gear.
For three-and-a-half quarters, they’d gone back and forth in an old fashioned shootout. The final score: Alabama 63, Ole Miss 48.
“That damn Lane, he said it after they played us last year: ‘Everything I told him for three years, he wrote it down,'” Saban would later say. “He said after the game, ‘I did every one of those things in the game.’
“He had a whole notepad of s— that I said was a problem to defend when we were together, and he said, ‘I did every one of them.'”
The two teams combined for an SEC-record 1,370 yards, and the 647 yards the Rebels churned out were the most ever against the Tide.
It was a brand of football that would have been unrecognizable to Saban and Kiffin when they first joined up.
“We used to recruit against Alabama at USC and Tennessee and would say, ‘You’re a great quarterback. Don’t go there. You’ll be a game manager. You’ll never put up big numbers,'” Kiffin said. “If you were a receiver, we would tell them not to go there. Here’s Julio Jones, one of the greatest of all time, and he never had more than 78 catches, but yet, Amari Cooper had 124.”
In Kiffin’s three years in Tuscaloosa, the Tide went 40-4 with three College Football Playoff appearances and one national title.
Of course, Kiffin didn’t make it to Alabama’s national title game that third year, having been dismissed by Saban earlier in the week. Kiffin had taken the head job with Florida Atlantic, and Saban felt he wasn’t paying enough attention to his Alabama job after the Tide scored just two offensive touchdowns and freshman quarterback Jalen Hurts threw for just 57 yards in a 24-7 national semifinal win over Washington.
“You look back and see where you were at fault and what I could have done better,” Kiffin said. “Now I find myself, which is like a kid saying and doing the same things his parents did, sounding a lot like Coach Saban.”
When Kiffin left, Alabama’s offense only got scarier under future offensive coordinators Mike Locksley and Sarkisian. The program produced first-round quarterbacks like Tua Tagovailoa and Mac Jones, who put up record-setting numbers when throwing to game-breaking, first-round receivers like Jerry Jeudy, Henry Ruggs III, Jaylen Waddle and last year’s Heisman winner, DeVonta Smith.
As one longtime staffer said, “There’s a narrative out there that the Alabama offense exploded under Lane, and he was a big part of where it is now. But the explosion came under Locks and Sark. Just look at the numbers over the last few years.”
Alabama has finished in the top three in scoring offense each of the past three years and sixth or better in both total offense and passing offense the past three years. Of course, it has done it with three straight quarterbacks drafted in the first round and nine running backs, receivers or tight ends selected in the first three rounds of the past four drafts.
Most in and around the program at that time also agree that Kiffin’s offenses helped to attract more elite skill people.
“I do feel like the numbers we put up and what we started to do on offense made it more attractive for offensive skill players to come from all over the country because they always got great defensive players,” Kiffin said.
Just look at Alabama’s current quarterback: Bryce Young, a former five-star prospect from California. Young’s father said they didn’t take Alabama seriously as a destination until they saw the offense begin to open up with Tagovailoa at quarterback. Young’s top receivers are John Metchie III, who is from Canada, and Jameson Williams, a Missouri native who transferred from Ohio State.
Kiffin enters Saturday’s matchup with another another California quarterback, Matt Corral, who is lighting up the scoreboards with 14 touchdowns in three games and is the new Heisman front-runner.
Ole Miss leads the country in scoring offense (52.7 points per game) and total offense (638.3 yards per game), while Alabama isn’t far behind with 46.5 points per game.
And now Kiffin has a chance to make good on an old promise when he returns to Tuscaloosa for the first time as an opposing head coach since 2009, his lone year at Tennessee. After the Vols pushed the Tide to the brink before losing, 12-10, the cocky young Kiffin met Saban at midfield.
“Good game, but we’ll get you the next time.”
THE WORLD IS loud and fast and demanding, and to combat this, Paul Skenes forages for silence. He relishes the moments where the chaos gives way to blissful nothingness, just him and dead air. Right now, they are fewer and farther between than they’ve ever been in the past decade — a decade spent working toward this moment, when he is arguably the best pitcher in the world and inarguably the most internet-famous, which is the sort of thing that tends to put a damper on his quest for quiet.
“You can’t master the noise until you master the silence,” Skenes says. A coach told him that this offseason, and it spoke to Skenes, whose mastery of his first season in Major League Baseball — and a two-month stretch in which he went from top prospect to All-Star Game starting pitcher — set him on a path that only upped his daily dose of cacophony. He had been enjoying partaking in sound-free workouts, a far cry from the weightlifting sessions in Pittsburgh’s weight room — a petri dish of decibels and testosterone, suffused with grunts and clanks, ringed with TVs whose visual clamor complements the music thumping out of speakers, a lizard-brained heavenscape.
As fast as Skenes throws a baseball — last summer, it was a half-mile per hour faster than any starter in the game’s century-and-a-half-long history — he thinks slowly, methodically. There are things he wants to do — real, substantive things. He seeks silence because in it he finds clarity. About how to extract the very best from his gilded right arm — but also about who he is and who he aspires to be.
“The times that I’ll figure stuff out is when I’m just sitting and not doing anything,” Skenes says. “I’ll figure some stuff out, on the mound or talking to people, but there will be times where I’m just sitting or lying in bed or something like that. Silence. And there’s nothing else to do but think. I wonder — and I’m not comparing myself to him by any stretch — but Newton discovered gravity because he was sitting under a tree and an apple fell. You figure stuff out because you’re sitting in silence. Compartmentalizing stuff, thinking about the game, doing a debrief of myself. That’s how I’ll get pitch grips. Just sitting around and imagining the feel of the baseball and like, oh, I’m going to try that. It works or it doesn’t work. If you do that enough, you’re going to figure stuff out.”
The irony of this exercise is that the more Skenes figures out on the mound, the shriller his world will get. As Skenes embarks on his first full season in MLB, he’s learning what comes with the commodification of an athlete. Alongside the demand for peak performance come requests for his time and his autograph, pictures taken by gawking fans and GQ photographers. He is pitcher and pitchman. His teammates sometimes wonder whether it’s too much too soon — when they’re not needling him for it.
“You guys doing an interview about our savior?” one said this spring as a reporter queried two others about Skenes. They were, in fact, though the 22-year-old Skenes is far more than just the player Pittsburgh is praying can liberate its woebegone baseball franchise from the dregs of the sport. He is a generational pitcher for a generation that doesn’t pitch like all the previous ones — but he is also still just a kid trying to navigate his way through a universe not built for him. He is happy to forgo the convenience of an apartment adjacent to the stadium for a soundless drive to the suburbs that feels almost meditative. He can ponder the questions he would like to answer — not the ones proffered by others. For instance: In this life so antithetical to the one he thought he would be living, who, exactly, is he?
“It’s funny,” Skenes says. “When you start thinking about stuff like this, you find that you don’t know a whole lot more than you thought while also learning about yourself. I know myself a lot better — and, in some ways, a lot less.”
IN JANUARY 2023 — six months after he’d left the only place he ever wanted to go, seven months before he started a career he never imagined he’d have — Skenes was chatting with LSU baseball coach Wes Johnson about the year ahead. The previous summer, he had transferred to the SEC power from the Air Force Academy, where he had played catcher and pitched. For all of Skenes’ power as a hitter, Johnson wasn’t interested in developing another Shohei Ohtani. This was big-time college baseball, and after a fall semester that for Skenes consisted of online courses and eight or nine hours a day of training for baseball, Johnson, the former pitching coach for the Minnesota Twins, understood before most the implications of Skenes’ move.
“For the next two to three years, you will have a new normal every single day,” Johnson said.
Growing up, there were no conversations about the pressures of major league stardom in Skenes’ household. His father, Craig, was a biochemistry major who works in the eye medication industry and topped out in JV baseball. His mother, Karen, teaches AP chemistry and was in the marching band. Skenes was not allowed to touch a baseball after school until he finished his homework.
“It was never the big leagues really,” Skenes says. “It was ‘Be a good person, do your homework, go to church’ and all that. There’s nothing in my family that says that, yeah, this guy was born to be a big leaguer.”
Skenes’ parents told him to find what he loved and work really hard at it, which had led him to the Air Force. Skenes found comfort in the academy’s structure and rigor; the academy embodied his values of discipline and routine and responsibility. Skenes wanted to fly fighter jets and took deep pride in being an airman. That’s why Skenes cried when he decided, at the behest of his coaches, to leave for LSU after his sophomore year: He’d found what he’d loved and worked really hard at it and gotten it, only for something else to find him and cajole him away.
A big SEC school didn’t feel like Skenes’ speed — not the random public approaches, not the fanfare, not the Geaux Tigers of it all — but he understood why he needed to be there. He is a nerd who happened to stand 6-foot-6, weigh 260 pounds and throw a baseball with more skill than anyone in the country, and to turtle from that would be wasteful. The Air Force years had prepared him for the transition, and he ingratiated himself in Baton Rouge with a Sahara-dry sense of humor. Skenes would regularly walk around the clubhouse, stop at each teammate’s locker and rib him: “I worked harder than you today.” It was in jest, but it was also the truth, and when teammate Cade Beloso recounted the practice to ESPN’s broadcast team during LSU’s run to a College World Series title in 2023, Skenes recalls, “I’m like, dude, everybody thinks I’m a douche now. So there is still some of that. I still am that way, just not with everybody.”
He grappled with his identity at LSU, a California kid dropped into the bayou and forced to find his way. Meeting Livvy Dunne only compounded his need to adapt. An LSU gymnast with an innate talent for making social media content that bewitched Gen Z, Dunne was introduced to Skenes by mutual friends and she was immediately smitten. If LSU raised a magnifying glass over Skenes’ life and career — he’d gone from a fringe first-round pick to the top of draft boards on the strength of a junior season in which he struck out 209 in 122⅔ innings — Dunne brought the Hubble telescope. He didn’t even have Instagram or TikTok on his phone.
“I’m not perfect by any means, but I think that you can get yourself in trouble really quickly now because if you do anything, someone’s filming it,” Skenes says. “It takes a whole lot more energy to go out anywhere and pretend to be someone else than it does to go out and just be yourself. If being yourself doesn’t get you in trouble, then great. So that’s kind of the life that I think I was geared to live just based on the whole path coming up.
“I don’t think anything’s really changed. When I look at famous people or celebrities, I see a lot of the time people that do whatever they can because they think they can do whatever they can. Why is that? We’re all people. What has gotten you there? What has gotten you to being famous, to being a movie star? Whatever it is, you’re very good at what you do. So why change? I respect the people that don’t change a whole lot more than the other people that are, ‘Hey, I’m a celebrity.'”
Going with the first overall pick tested his willingness to stand by that ethos. Every pitch he threw invited more eyeballs, his rapid ascent to Pittsburgh an inevitability. The Pirates are a proud franchise hamstrung by an owner, Bob Nutting, fundamentally opposed to using his wealth to bridge the game’s inherent inequity. Skenes was their golden ticket, the best pitching prospect in more than a decade, and the excitement for his arrival at LSU paled compared to what greeted him May 11, when the Pirates summoned him to the big leagues. He was Pittsburgh’s, yes, but everyone in the baseball ecosystem wanted a piece of Skenes.
Over the next two months and 11 starts, he so thoroughly dominated hitters that he earned the start for the National League in the All-Star Game. His only inning included showdowns with Juan Soto (a seven-pitch walk that ended on a 100 mph fastball painted on the inside corner but not called a strike) and Aaron Judge (a first-pitch groundout on a 99 mph challenge fastball). He rushed home to spend the rest of the break with Dunne and settle back into a life he was learning to enjoy.
Skenes’ first season could not have gone much better. He threw 133 innings, struck out more than five hitters for every one he walked and posted a 1.96 ERA. The last rookie to start at least 20 games with a sub-2.00 ERA was Scott Perry in 1918, the tail end of the dead ball era. When Hall of Famer Cal Ripken Jr. announced Skenes as NL Rookie of the Year winner, Dunne broke into a wide smile and rejoiced as Skenes sat stone-faced before mustering a toothless grin. Memelords pounced instantaneously and Skenes was immortalized as the picture of utter disinterest.
Which is fine by him. He was proud, but pride can manifest itself in manifold ways, and if LSU and his first big league season taught Skenes anything, it’s that he is not beholden to external whims and expectations. He’s going to figure out who he is his way. And that starts with seeking out the people whose opinions do matter to him.
IN THE FIRST inning of a July game against the Arizona Diamondbacks, Skenes left the Pirates’ dugout and beelined into the bowels of Chase Field. Randy Johnson had just been inducted as an inaugural member of the Diamondbacks Hall of Fame, and Skenes was not going to miss the opportunity to shake his hand and pick his brain.
For someone as polished and proficient as Skenes, he remains fundamentally curious. However exceptional his aptitude to pitch might be, he’s still enough of a neophyte that he’s got oodles to absorb, and he’s humble enough to know what he doesn’t know. Skenes is not shy about trying to learn, and over the past year he has sought advice from a wide array of players whose careers he would love to emulate.
Johnson’s would have ended 20 years earlier than his 2009 retirement had he not done the same. Like Skenes, he was an otherworldly talent. Unlike Skenes, he needed almost a decade to tame it. Johnson didn’t find success until Hall of Famers Nolan Ryan and Steve Carlton, as well as pitching guru Tom House, advised him. So he was glad to talk with Skenes and try to offer a sliver of the assistance he’d been afforded. First, though, he had a question.
“It all depends on what you’re looking for,” Johnson said. “Are you looking for a good game, a good season or a good career?”
Skenes’ answer was a no-brainer: a good career. The no-selling of his Rookie of the Year win is a perfect example. It’s an award. It’s nice. It’s also the reflection of a single great season among the many more he anticipates having. For Skenes, the goal is game-to-game excellence and longevity, the hallmarks of true greatness. Johnson fears that the modern usage of starting pitchers inhibits players’ ability to marry the two.
Over the past 25 years, the number of 100-plus-pitch games in MLB has dipped from 2,391 to 635 last season. There were 1,297 starts of 110 or more pitches in 2000 and 33 last year. Skenes — and Johnson — believe some of today’s starting pitchers are capable of more. For a pitcher like Skenes to be limited by strictures based more in fear of injury than data that supports their implementation gnaws at Johnson, who regularly ran up high pitch counts before retiring at 46.
The second a career begins, Johnson told Skenes, it is marching toward its end, and the truly special players use the time in between to defy expectations and limitations. If Skenes is as good as everyone believes — “He’s where I’m at six or seven years after I found my mechanics,” Johnson says — then he will either convince the Pirates to remove the restrictor plate or eventually find a team that will. Which is why Johnson’s ultimate advice to him was simple: “This is your career.”
“It will be a mental mission for him,” Johnson says. “I understood throughout the course of my career that if I can talk myself through a game, I will realize my mission. I trained myself to put me in those positions for success, get me through that. I know the pitchers can do these things I talk about, but they’re not allowed to. And that, to me, is mind-boggling. It makes no sense to me. You’re not going to see a pitcher grow mentally or physically if you take him out of situations.”
Longevity was on the mind of another subject from whom Skenes sought advice. When the Pirates went to New York last year, Skenes met with Gerrit Cole in the outfield at Yankee Stadium. Cole is perhaps the best modern analog for Skenes: born and raised in Southern California, big-bodied hard thrower. Both went to college and then were drafted No. 1 by the Pirates; both are thoughtful, diligent, dedicated. Amid the de-emphasis of starting pitching, Cole blossomed into the exception, a head-of-the-rotation stalwart on a Hall of Fame track who made at least 30 starts in seven seasons before undergoing season-ending elbow surgery this spring.
Unlike Johnson, who is now 61, Cole speaks the language of a modern pitcher. He is fluent in Trackman data, the benefit of good sleep habits and the influence diet can have on success.
“In the true pursuit of maximum human performance, these tools are providing an avenue for people to achieve that quicker,” Cole said earlier this month. “With the avenue out there to reach those maximum potentials quicker, the industry demands — the teams demand — almost a higher level of performance and, to a certain extent, an unsustainable level of performance. We’ve used the technology to maximize human performance. We haven’t used the technology quite well enough to maximize human sustainability.”
Cole is acutely aware of this. After more than 2,000 innings and 339 career starts, his right elbow blew out during spring training and will sideline him for the remainder of 2025. The correlation between fastball velocity and higher risk of arm injuries is established to the point that most in the industry regard it as causative. Johnson was the exception, not the rule, and Skenes knows enough math to know the fool’s errand of banking on outlier outcomes.
“My focus is on volume and durability,” Cole continued. “In order to give myself a chance to pitch for a long time to pitch for championship-contending teams, I have to be healthy. There’s a lot of incentives — as a competitor, financial — to make durability and sustainability the main goal.
“Skenes has the foundation to match that — and exceed it. He’s got more horsepower than me. He’s asking better questions early — questions about diet and sleep. He’s asking questions about mechanics. He’s tracking his throws. He has his own process with people that he surrounds himself with that are not only looking out for his performance right now but his performance long term. That’s important for guys to have advocates in their corner, not looking out just for this year. It’s really tough to find the right people.”
With Justin Verlander, Clayton Kershaw and Max Scherzer on the precipice of retirement, and Cole and Zack Wheeler in their mid-30s, a baton-passing is afoot. Because Skenes is best positioned to be the one grabbing it, Cole says, his advice runs the gamut. They spoke about pitching game theory, and Cole pointed out that the approach of Verlander, with whom he was teammates in Houston, runs counter to the max-effort philosophies espoused by starters who know that regardless of their ability to go deep into games, they’re not throwing much more than 100 pitches anyway.
Piece by piece, Skenes learns from those who have been what he intends to be. Pitchers, old and young, fill in some blanks, but he looks beyond the players who share his craft, too. He plans to spend more time talking with Corbin Carroll, the Diamondbacks’ star outfielder he met on a Zoom call for a rookie immersion program, and ask him: “What do you have that I need?” He reads books like “Relentless” and “Winning” by Michael Jordan’s longtime trainer, Tim Grover, and “Talent Is Overrated,” which has particular appeal for someone whose talent didn’t manage to attract draft interest from a single team out of high school despite playing in arguably the most talent-rich area in America.
“I don’t know if I’m going to get anything out of talking to anybody,” Skenes says, but at the same time he sees no harm in asking. Considering how much the game asks him to give, he’s owed a rebalancing.
THE FIRST TIME Toronto Blue Jays starter Chris Bassitt met Skenes, he introduced himself with a proposition: “I’m gonna nominate you for the union board.”
The executive subcommittee of the Major League Baseball Players Association consists of eight players who help guide the union, particularly during collective bargaining. And with the current basic agreement set to expire following the 2026 season, labor discord has left people across the sport fearful of an extended work stoppage. The board is expected to wield even more power in the next round of negotiations, so the eight members are paramount in helping shape the game’s future.
Bassitt knew Skenes by reputation: that he was thoughtful, even-tempered, judicious — the kind of guy whose poker face on the mound would translate to a board room. He knows, too, the history of the union, that it’s at its strongest when the game’s most influential players serve as voices during the bargaining process. With the encouragement of veteran starter Nick Pivetta and former executive board head Andrew Miller, Skenes accepted his nomination and became the youngest player ever selected to the executive subcommittee.
“If we’re thinking about the future of the game,” Skenes says, “I think it’d be stupid to not have someone at least my age in there.”
Labor work is taxing. The game’s best players today often avoid the hassle. It did not have to be Skenes. But he harkened back to his years at the Air Force Academy in which cadets are taught the PITO model of leadership: personal, interpersonal, team and organization. In their first year, they focus on personal responsibility. Year 2 calls for them to take responsibility for another cadet. Skenes left before experiencing of team and organizational leadership at the academy, but the principles he learned apply enough that he felt a duty to serve as a voice for more than 1,200 other big leaguers, even if his service time pales compared to many of theirs.
The union and its rank and file are far from the only ones in the baseball world leaning on Skenes. MLB has struggled for years to create stars, and Skenes entered the big leagues with a Q score higher than 99% of players. Dunne’s presence alone invites a younger generation reared on the idea that baseball is boring to reconsider. Going forward, every marketing campaign MLB launches is almost guaranteed to include four players. One plays in Los Angeles (Ohtani). Two are in New York (Judge and Soto). The fourth resides in Pittsburgh.
More than anyone, the Pirates and their forlorn fan base regard Skenes as the fulcrum of their rebirth. They last won a division championship in 1992, when Barry Bonds still wore black and yellow. Their most recent playoff appearance was 2015, the last of three consecutive seasons with a wild-card spot (and losing the single game) when Cole was pitching for the franchise. Since then, they’ve finished fourth or fifth in the National League Central the past eight years and currently occupy the basement.
Nutting’s frugality hamstrings the Pirates perpetually. Never have they carried a nine-figure payroll. (This year’s on Opening Day: $91.3 million.) Since he bought the team in 2007, it has been in the bottom five 14 of 18 seasons. The Pirates’ revenue, according to Forbes, is almost identical to that of the Arizona Diamondbacks (2025 Opening Day payroll: $188.5 million), Minnesota Twins ($147.4 million), Kansas City Royals ($131.6 million), Washington Nationals ($115.6 million) and Cincinnati Reds ($114.5 million). Other owners privately peg Nutting as among the game’s worst.
Which only reinforces the fear among Pirates fans that Skenes is bound to follow Cole out the door via trade within a few years of his debut, lest the team lose him following the 2029 season to free agency. Rooting for the Pirates is among the cruelest fates in sports, with the combination of unserious owner and revenue disparities leaving general manager Ben Cherington to crank up a player-development machine in hopes of competing. Their free agent signings this winter were longtime Pirate Andrew McCutchen, left-hander Andrew Heaney, outfielder Tommy Pham, second baseman Adam Frazier and left-handed relievers Caleb Ferguson and Tim Mayza, all on one-year deals totaling $19.95 million. The last multiyear free agent contract Nutting handed out was to Ivan Nova in 2016.
“We’re going to create it from within the locker room, and it’s not going to be an ownership thing,” Skenes says. “Having a group of fans that are putting some pressure on the ownership and Ben and all that — it’s not a bad thing, but we have to go out there and do it. I kind of feel like we owe it to the city.”
Skenes had never been to Pittsburgh before he was drafted. “I do love it,” he said, and those who know him confirm Skenes’ sincerity. He wants nothing more at this point in his career than for his roommate and close friend Jared Jones, who’s on the injured list with elbow issues, to get healthy, and for Bubba Chandler, the Triple-A right-hander who’s topping out at 102 mph, to arrive, and for the Pirates’ farm system to churn out position players as regularly as it does pitchers. A couple more bats, a few relief arms, a free agent signing that’s more than a short-term plug, and you can squint and see a contender.
So much is out of Skenes’ control, though. All he can do is be the best version of himself. And bit by bit, he’s figuring out what that looks like.
SKENES IS ALWAYS looking for new ways to occupy himself when he’s away from the mound. In the back of his truck lays a compound bow. He shot it all of four times before abandoning it. In his bedroom sits a guitar gathering dust, $200 down the drain. He’s getting into golf these days, but he’s not sure it’s going to last.
“I get bored easily,” Skenes says. “I had a coach tell me that, and I was like, ‘I don’t think so. I think you’re wrong.’ And I’ve been thinking about that lately, and I think he’s right, because I’ve tried plenty of different hobbies and none of them have stuck.”
Similarly, Skenes wonders if the places his mind goes during his periods of silence are a function of boredom with baseball. “Not in a bad way,” he clarifies, but in the manner that behooves a player — that “there’s always something to be better at.”
In his most recent start Monday — a typical Skenes outing in which he allowed one earned run, struck out six and didn’t walk anyone over six innings — he threw six pitches: four-seam fastball, splinker, slider, sweeper, changeup, and curveball and splinker, the hybrid sinker-splitter he throws in the mid-90s to devastating effect. He toyed around with a cutter and two-seam fastball during spring training and could break them out at any moment. He waited until the fourth or fifth week of his season at LSU to unleash his curveball.
“I absolutely don’t believe that just because it’s the season, all right, this is what you got,” he says. “There’s no difference between spring training and the regular season in terms of getting better every day.”
This is his career, Skenes says, echoing Johnson, and he’s learning that he must wrangle control of it. He needs to chat with others who are what he wants to be, and he needs to find the silence to find himself, and he needs to set stratospheric expectations. Of all the aphorisms Skenes repeats, his favorite might be one he read in a book: “How you do anything is how you do everything.”
“There’s no option to not do the work that I need to do,” Skenes says. “… If I didn’t want to get in the cold tub a couple years ago or whatever it is, I wouldn’t. Now I do know whether I want to do it or not, it’s a nonnegotiable.”
If he keeps doing the work, Skenes believes, everything is there for the taking. The wins will come, and the success will follow, and the search for advice will give way to the dispensing of it. In the same way his training at the Air Force Academy readied him to handle the pressure cooker at LSU, it’s likewise destined to propel him into a role as leader and elder statesman in baseball.
For now, though, Skenes is trying to focus on today, tomorrow, this week. Even if the clock on his career is ticking, the hour hand has barely moved, and he doesn’t want this charmed life to fly by without taking the time to appreciate it. Earlier this spring, Pirates pitching coach Oscar Marin asked Skenes: “What motivates you?”
Skenes considered the question and gave variations on the same answer: winning and getting better every day. Winning a baseball game is in his hands once every fifth day. But those are not the only wins within his control. Hard work is a win. Learning is a win. Leading is a win. Growing is a win. And in a life that’s only getting louder and faster and more demanding, silence is the sort of win that will help remind him who he is.
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