LIVINGSTON, Ala. – One hour away from the place that made him famous, Scott Cochran gets the news from his athletic trainer that it’s too hot to wear pads at practice today.
It’s an unfortunate reality of the blazing Alabama sun this morning, but he has no choice but to adapt and move on. He knows it won’t go over well with his young staff — full of former Alabama stars like Blake Sims, O.J. Howard and Bo Scarbrough. They are eager for another opportunity to improve with the season opener looming. Cochran was once the same — ringleader of those then-Alabama players running 110s in the punishing heat that helped shape Crimson Tide teams that never backed down.
But when you’ve lived the life Cochran has over the last five years, you gain perspective on what really matters.
Inside Homer Field House as Division-II West Alabama’s new head coach, Cochran is 60 miles and a lifetime away from Bryant-Denny Stadium, where he played a critical role on Nick Saban’s Alabama staff that won five national championships. There are none of Tuscaloosa’s waterfalls or ostentatious displays of wealth here. The facilities are akin to what you’d see at a large high school in this state.
When Cochran was flying high as the nation’s most famous and highly paid strength coach — famous for his loud “YEAH, YEAH, YEAH,” — this wasn’t what he envisioned when he dreamed of being a head coach. You have to hustle for everything here, and while he’s extremely thankful for the paycheck and belief in him, he says it’s about a quarter of what he last made at Georgia.
He used his first three paychecks to get his players essentials like new cleats, gloves, and sweatshirts, so they don’t have to keep wearing their high school gear. There were no big Nike marketing sponsorship deals to outfit everyone in the building head-to-toe in free gear.
A loud, booming voice and a contagious spirit, Cochran had somehow become famous in a role that was typically behind the scenes and out of sight. How many other strength and conditioning coaches do you know who appeared on “60 Minutes”? Or in bank commercials? Or shown over and over again on massive videoboards before 101,821 screaming fans.
Fame went to his head, and when he saw friends like Smart and Lane Kiffin get head coaching jobs, he thought he deserved one, too. He wanted the role for all the wrong reasons – money, power, ego.
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Starting over
Life has humbled him since then.
It was a long, winding journey to reach this point — from NBA assistant strength coach, to Saban’s right-hand man in strength and conditioning, to Georgia’s special teams coordinator, to being out of football and unsure if he would ever get another shot. For much of that journey, Cochran carried a dangerous secret: He was addicted to drugs. Not Saban, not Kirby Smart, not even his family knew.
After leaving Georgia in February 2024, Cochran spent more than a year telling his story across the country, including in front of plenty of college football teams. He founded a nonprofit organization called American Addiction Recovery Association and was considering starting a rehab facility when he got a call gauging his interest in becoming West Alabama’s head coach.
“I get a daily or weekly reminder that God wants me here,” Cochran told CBS Sports. “Like weekly, something will happen, whether it’s a kid really struggling or whether it’s something with family, it’s like I’m supposed to be here. So I’m not gonna live in fear. I’m just going to take it one step at a time, and if it gets too much, I have a great staff. They could step up.”
It’s, in part, what makes this juncture of life so interesting for Cochran. He’s preparing for his first game as a head coach against Fort Valley State on Aug. 30, while trying to maintain his sobriety and keep his family as the top priority. On this day, he’s even going to miss a team meeting that night so he can go to his son’s football game — a decision he admits he never would have made at Alabama or Georgia, where he always put the job above all else. And while he’s been open about his struggles, he’s readying to show the most unvarnished version of his story yet in a new book, written alongside Ivan Maisel, which came out Tuesday.
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Sharing his story
In “Skull Sessions: Mastering the Mental Game in Sports, Work and Life,” Cochran details the leadership lessons he learned and deployed working alongside two of the game’s best in Saban and Smart. There are plenty of entertaining anecdotes that Alabama and general college football fans will enjoy, including one of Saban dancing and working with future NFL stars like Jalen Hurts.
But what makes it more than just a leadership or football book is it is juxtaposed with Cochran’s deep plunge into drug addiction that derailed his career and almost killed him. In one particularly harrowing passage, Cochran details overdosing in April 2020 and his wife, Cissy, finding him slumped over and unresponsive in his chair after he completed a work Zoom call.
It gets dark, at times, and Cochran doesn’t spare himself the embarrassing details. The addiction to OxyContin, prescribed initially for debilitating migraines, got so bad that Cochran snorted drugs during Alabama football games in Saban’s private office.
This is what life was like for Cochran as a successful addict — doing everything he could to look normal while getting bolder and bolder about getting his fix. Years later, when he entered a drug rehabilitation facility for a second time, Cochran expected to test positive for Oxy, but was shocked when Chris Herren told him he had only fentanyl in his system.
The closest he came to getting caught was at the Capital One Bowl against Michigan in 2020. Cochran went into the coaches’ locker room at halftime and used a stall to snort his pills off the plastic shelf above the toilet paper dispenser.
The next day, Ellis Ponder, the director of football operations, asked Cochran, “Did you snort something in the stall? Someone heard a sound like you were snorting something.”
“It’s freeing to let go of that,” Cochran says. “To go into Coach Saban’s office during halftime, lock the door, and tell everybody I’m taking a deuce and snort pills. It’s freeing to let that go, to not have that in the back of my mind like God, that’s so shameful, that’s so gross and so ugly. You let it go, you let it go.”
He hopes his story will help others who might be in their own dark period — maybe even someone like him, too afraid to ask for help. In football, there’s pressure to be tough and strong for your players, often putting their needs ahead of your own. Multiple high-level coaches have told CBS Sports that the profession faces a little-discussed but serious epidemic: 100-hour work weeks where mental and physical wellness often fall by the wayside. Some self-medicate with alcohol. Cochran believes misuse of Adderall — a stimulant meant to treat ADHD — is another issue not getting enough attention. Maybe it will now, he thinks, when people hear his story.
When he overdosed, he had mixed a “speedball” of three 30-milligram Oxy pills with one Adderall and snorted them.”I’ve never seen Nick or Kirby (do it) but I’ve seen a lot of others that Adderall is their go-to, whether they are prescribed or not,” Cochran said.
He feels good about where he is but understands that he has to constantly work at it. He talked to his sponsor for an hour the previous night and feels like he has the support system in place now that he didn’t when previous attempts at sobriety failed while still coaching at Georgia.
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The CEO
With sobriety comes a new-look Cochran. Sitting across from him, Cochran is mellow, even slightly soft-spoken at times, in a way one never could have imagined when seeing him hopping around Alabama practices and yelling at the top of his lungs. That constant yelling, the need to always be full of enthusiasm and spirit, is what got him here in the first place. He was yelling so much it caused tortuous migraines he couldn’t ameliorate. He tried shoving his head in ice buckets and taking Tylenol but it was only a brief respite from pain that wouldn’t go away. It wasn’t until a doctor prescribed OxyContin that Cochran finally felt free of the pain’s intense grip on him.
Cochran’s story from there is a familiar one: His tolerance went up and he needed more and more pills to get relief. As he ran through his prescriptions, he started sourcing pills from drug dealers and blew through thousands of dollars to keep up with an addiction that worsened daily. The addiction pushed him to get bolder and less strident on where he got the pills, resulting in Cochran eventually becoming addicted to fentanyl.
Now as a head coach, Cochran uses a microphone to save his voice and avoid the headaches. There is still plenty of energy from “Coach Yeah” but he envisions himself as a program CEO and doesn’t have to — and shouldn’t — be the man he was back at Alabama.
“I don’t have to go out there and put on a show,” he says. “I can just go out there and coach. I don’t have to be the juice guy whereas I thought in the past they wouldn’t have juice if I didn’t bring it. I believed that; there’s no way they’ll be ready for practice unless I am.”
As the conversation wraps up, Cochran grabs a Cowboy hat to protect his shaved head against the Alabama heat and gets ready to guide his team through another practice. He’s calm as he starts the walk to meet his team
With his team in shorts and shells, it wasn’t what he had planned for but in a small way emblematic of where he is in life now. After an almost-deadly detour, Cochran is back where he belongs, at peace with his calling of helping young men.
Three noteworthy anecdotes from Cochran’s book
With the clothes on his back
While working as the New Orleans Hornets’ assistant weight coach, Cochran got tipped off that Saban was going to call him about joining his new Alabama staff. Saban told him he wanted to interview him for his head strength coach position and to be in Tuscaloosa the following morning.
Only one problem for Cochran: All he had on him were Hornets velour warm-up suits and the rest of his clothes were in Oklahoma City after Hurricane Katrina displaced the team out of New Orleans. Could he go back to Oklahoma City and get some real clothes, Cochran asked Saban.
“I’m not hiring you to be a f—— banker,” Saban told him. “Be here in the morning.”
The rest was history.
Rat poison
After Alabama lost to LSU in the “Game of the Century” in 2011, the Crimson Tide needed help to get into the BCS Championship Game. No. 1 Baylor losing helped Alabama move up to No. 3 in the rankings, but No. 2 Oklahoma State still stood in the Tide’s rematch with LSU.
That was until the No. 2 Cowboys lost to Iowa State in a wild double overtime game Friday night. When Oklahoma State lost and the path opened up for Alabama, players wildly celebrated in their hotel the night before a game against Georgia Southern.
Saban, sensing his team looking ahead of its opponent, unloaded on his staff that morning and did the same for the team later that day.
“He went nuts, absolutely crazy on us,” Cochran wrote. “He told us we weren’t in the playoff yet, and that we were taking our eye off the ball. You name it, he accused us of it.”
Not long after Saban let everyone on the team have it, Cochran bumped into Saban’s uncle, Sid Popovich, on the field before the game.
Sid told Cochran: “Man, you should have seen Coach last night. After Oklahoma State lost, oh my God! He was so happy! He was standing on his chair; he was dancing. I’ve never seen him so happy! It was the best. He was in such a good mood.”
If only we could get footage of Saban dancing on a chair after Oklahoma State lost. But him turning off his internal feelings for the greater good is what made him so great as a leader. He also proved to be right that Georgia Southern was not to be taken lightly as the opponent rushed for 302 yards against a defense that only allowed 938 rushing yards the entire season. Saban would later famously say “Georgia Southern ran through our defense like shit through a tin horn.”
Trapped between Saban and Smart
Cochran confirms what I and others reported at the time: He was going to follow Kirby Smart to Athens back in 2016 before Saban made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.
When Smart, Alabama’s then-defensive coordinator, got the Georgia job, he wanted to bring Cochran with him as his strength and conditioning coach. Cochran was on board, writing that he “shook his hand and told him I would come with him.” But he had to eventually call Kirby and renege on his promise after Saban’s offer came through.
When Cochran eventually left for Georgia in 2020, Saban wasn’t thrilled that his top lieutenant would leave for his biggest competition in the SEC.
“Once I told him I intended to leave, what Coach Saban saw is that I intended to leave to go work for Alabama’s rival for SEC and national supremacy. He held me to the buyout clause in my contract.”
Cochran owed Alabama $600,000 when he left, though his lawyers were eventually able to get that negotiated down to $300,000. Cochran paid $100,000 of that before Saban forgave the remainder when his former right-hand man had to take a leave of absence from Georgia to go to a rehab facility.
Cochran’s wife, Cissy, called Saban and told him they would honor their buyout payments but asked for an extension so he could pay for rehab. The next day Saban called Cochran and told him, “Hey, you’ve paid enough of the buyout. Get healthy.”
This news was originally published on this post .
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