Nick Saban and his players getting stranded on a boat is extremely un-Bama

Nick Saban’s success as a college football coach all boils down to one thing; his never-ending attention to detail. He can’t say the same about his work as a boat captain.

Saban’s skiff — or at least one he was on — briefly stranded a handful of his players out on a southern lake Thursday when it ran out of gas. The issue didn’t seem to phase anyone; a video captured on quarterback Tua Tagovailoa’s Snapchat showed the athletes cracking jokes about the situation and idling floating around on inner tubes on a hot May afternoon. Even Saban himself laughed off the situation.

While the video didn’t mention just where the team got stranded, it’s likely either Lake Tuscaloosa in Alabama or Lake Burton in the north Georgia mountains. The latter is where Saban owns a vacation home, sidled up next to the Appalachian-fed water the six-time national champion bathes in after a vigorous round of golf, according to ESPN analyst Marty Smith:

Him telling me that he takes a bath in that lake ... His daily routine is to go play golf and then he comes down off the hill and he jumps into the lake with a bar of soap and starts scrubbing himself.

The 66-year-old coach sweats the small stuff, applying a “military-ish” attention to detail and delegation that runs from the top-down. That ethic doesn’t take a day off, even when Saban does. When he was defensive coordinator of the Cleveland Browns, he made his younger assistants take care of his waterfront home in northeast Ohio.

“We had a house in Cleveland that had a pond,” Saban told NFL Films. “One side of the pond had to be landscaped. So I got [future Browns general manager] George Kokinas, and [future Browns GM] Phil Savage, and Schwartzy [current Eagles defensive coordinator Jim Schwartz], and these guys were all young guys, right out of college. Great, great labor, you know — and cheap.”

That means there’s probably some poor graduate assistant out there in northern Georgia who received an absolutely awful “ass chewing” when Saban got back to the docks Thursday. It’ll all be worth it in 15 years when that unnamed assistant gets to take his turn running the Browns into the ground.

UPDATE: Saban couldn’t have been too mad — the incident made it all the way to Alabama Football’s official Twitter account. Everyone seems to be pretty OK with the brief stranding.