Coming out of high school in Amite, Louisiana, WR DeVonta Smith was a 4-star prospect and the No. 9 receiver in the 2017 class, so he was far from an unheralded recruit.

However, he was small, weighing in at only 159 pounds. For a team like Alabama, which routinely brings in the top players in the nation, though, adding Smith to the class was somewhat strange.

During an appearance on Mike Krzyzewski’s SiriusXM show “Basketball and Beyond with Coach K,” Saban explained to the legendary Duke men’s basketball coach what exactly drew him to Smith in high school:

“Smitty weighed 159 pounds in high school,” Saban said. “Typically, we look at size and speed as a part of the criteria for recruiting guys at every position. Obviously, we were concerned — not only did he weigh 159 pounds, he was very slight built, even though he had good length.

“But we had him in camp and the guy had tremendous hands. He was fast. He could come out of a break. All the other factors were really high-end. On top of that, he was a great person, great work ethic, very disciplined in the way he did everything. I said, ‘This is really the kind of guy we want in our program.’ If we’re going to take a chance on a guy gaining a little weight, getting a little bigger and stronger, this is the kind of guy we want to do it with. He was a great player here when he was a freshman, sophomore, all the way through. He decided to come back for his senior year because he thought getting bigger and stronger would help him and I think he’s a great example of a guy who may have gotten picked in the second round last year if he’d come out early and made $6-$8 million. Now, he’s probably going to be a top-5 pick and make $30 million. … He approached it the right way and worked hard and did all the things he needed to do to improve.”

Obviously, Smith became one of the best receivers in college football history in 2020, becoming the first receiver to win a Heisman since Michigan’s Desmond Howard in 1991. Now, we’ll see if he can keep making big plays on Sundays and where he goes in the 2021 NFL Draft in April.