Bill Belichick is out in New England, Nick Saban will no longer lead Alabama, Pete Carroll has taken his last steps on the Seattle sideline, and there’s no way around it, things are going to look different from now on.
Has there ever been a football week quite like this one?
The three departures led to an avalanche of analysis and no shortage of nostalgia, but as Belichick’s announcement and somewhat awkward press conference completed the trio of changes Thursday, talk of a unicorn arose online.
One man, so the story goes, played for each of those three coaching megastars. He’s Chris Baker, a tight end who was recruited by Saban at Michigan State, then spent several years with the New York Jets before closing his pro career with a season each at Belichick’s Patriots and Carroll’s Seahawks.
(Baker is the only player taken in the NFL Draft since 2000 to play for all three coaching greats.)
We set out to find him.
As it turned out, seeking football unicorns isn’t quite as difficult as locating mythical ones, and a couple of hours of social media outreach and the helpful intervention of Baker’s wife, Yadira, led us to the happily retired 44-year-old, who, like everyone else, was slightly startled at how quickly the coaching dominoes fell across Wednesday and Thursday.
“One after the other, after the other,” Baker told me via telephone from his Parkland, Fla., home. “And suddenly they’re all gone.”
They might resurface, of course. Belichick popping up at another NFL franchise at age 71 seems inevitable. Carroll is a year older but carries the energy of a teenager. Saban, also 72, has “retired” and yeah, we’ll see if and how temptation might bring him back at some point.
Saban has seven national titles, Belichick six Super Bowls and Carroll two college championships plus one (and so nearly another) NFL ring.
Chris Baker wasn’t highly recruited to Michigan State, but under Nick Saban’s coaching, he became a third-round draft pick in 2002.
Baker’s career was remarkable in itself.
When he moved to Saline, Mich., from New York as a high school sophomore, he had size but had never played organized football. He only dressed for three games in his junior year due to injury and 12 in total, the last of which was as a 16-year-old senior, due to a quirk in how his birthday lined up with the school system’s cutoff dates.
His recruitment to Saban’s Michigan State program in 1997 came late, and after redshirting a year, he went on to start 46 games and amass 1,705 receiving yards. Saban went to LSU after Baker’s redshirt sophomore year, wound up at Alabama seven years later, and the rest is college football history.
“I was an unusual prospect but coach Saban could see the big picture,” Baker said. “I was so unsure of myself because of my limited experience in high school, but he had it all in his mind. He could see things I was capable of that I couldn’t see myself. He would tell me I could do this, or use my strength this way, or knock this guy down. He laid out this map for me, and he turned out to be right.”
To Baker, that’s what unites Saban, Belichick and Carroll — despite the drastic differences in the personalities of the three men. Their genius is multi-faceted, but part of it is the capacity to spot talent no one else sees, coming from a reading of the game that explores deeper levels than their contemporaries.
“They couldn’t be any more different as people,” Baker said. “Belichick and coach Carroll are literally polar opposites. They all have completely different styles, but what is so interesting about it is that it produces the same kind of effect.
“Coach Belichick isn’t the same as you see in the media. He actually does have a personality,” Baker continued, remembering his shock when the coach was persuaded by Randy Moss to turn up for a Halloween party as a pirate and skate laps around a roller-skating rink. “But he is also the guy who you are walking in a hallway beside, and he doesn’t say a word.
“When we had wins in New England, there was no celebration, that was just what was expected. In Seattle, with coach Carroll, we would be celebrating if there was a good snap in practice, and there was that kind of energy and vibe. And the coach would run over to you in the building, ‘How you doing? How’s the family? What can we do for you?'”
Baker has some regret that Saban left Michigan State when he did, believing that Spartans squad had national championship potential. Ultimately, he counts himself lucky to have played for that coaching group, and thrived during seven seasons with the Jets, where he formed such a strong bond with Eric Mangini that the coach attended his son’s first birthday party.
“What they all taught me is that however you come at it, there is no substitute for attention to detail,” he said of the three coaching legends. “If you have someone who is committed to every little thing being the best it can be, you have something. Add to that such a deep understanding and instinct for the game, that’s how you get great coaching. It’s not impossible, but it is really hard to do that over that period of time.”
In his one season with the Patriots, Baker caught Tom Brady’s 200th career touchdown pass in 2009.
Baker was with the Patriots in the aftermath of Spygate and was there during Tom Brady’s comeback season from injury. He even caught Brady’s 200th career touchdown pass, although his own injury issues were starting to mount at that point.
He remembers seeing players such as Julian Edelman and Matthew Slater arrive with the Pats and not regard them as special talents, only for Belichick’s vision to later help each blossom into bona-fide standouts.
In Seattle, in 2010, he was there for the run that got things going for Carroll and the Seahawks, as the team won the NFC West with a record of just 7-9, but then knocked off the defending Super Bowl champion New Orleans Saints with the “Beastquake” run and built the belief that would lead to consecutive Super Bowl appearances.
Part of being a unicorn involves fortune, landing in the right place at the right time. To have caught those coaches before their legend was fully etched is something Baker holds dear.
Baker’s final NFL season came in 2010, Pete Carroll’s first with the Seahawks.
“I feel lucky to have not just played for them but to have seen them at a time before they sort of became these legends, when they were in the process, but it hadn’t fully paid off yet.
“I guess I’m in a select category. It’s pretty cool.”
