Nick Saban has some recruiting stories. He’s been Alabama football’s head coach since 2007 and held the same job at LSU, Michigan State and Toledo before that.

He took his first job in coaching in 1973, fresh out of school at Kent State. The anecdotes have accumulated.

During his weekly radio show on Thursday, Saban told one of the best.

“Andre Rison was a pretty good NFL player,” Saban said. “Most people would recognize that name.”

It’s true. Rison played in the league for more than a decade, winning a super bowl in 1996 with the Green Bay Packers and making five Pro Bowls along the way

But on Christmas Eve 1984, Rison was a high school prospect out of Flint Northwestern, and as the Michigan State defensive coordinator, Saban was recruiting him. He and his wife Terry were on the way home to West Virginia when he got a call from his Monongah High School classmate and current U.S. senator Joe Manchin, then a member of the West Virginia House of Delegates.

“Joe calls and says ‘Alberta Brown wants to talk to you,’” Saban said.

Alberta Brown was in the garbage business in their West Virginia hometown. According to her 2016 obituary in the Times West Virginian, she ran Brown’s Sanitation Inc.

Saban questioned what Brown wanted with him.

“That’s Andre Rison’s grandma,” the coach said Manchin told him.

Brown offered to tell Saban how to recruit Rison.

“We weren’t getting him, he was gonna go to another school,” Saban said. “I won’t mention any names. It wasn’t Michigan but it was another school in the Big Ten. And she told me all the stuff that they were doing and exactly what we needed to do to get him.”

She also told him to come see her. One problem.

“I had to go see her on Christmas Eve,” Saban said. “And Miss Terry’s mom had her Christmas party on Christmas Eve. That’s when the family came over. And Miss Alberta liked to have a taste or two so I stayed there a little too long and got really in lots of trouble for missing some of the Christmas party. Damn near all of it.”

Saban might have been in the doghouse but there was a silver lining.

“But we got Andre,” Saban said, breaking into a grin.

Rison helped the Spartans to a Rose Bowl win in 1987, Saban’s final year with MSU. He went on to be picked in the first round of the 1989 NFL Draft.