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Ultimately, it won’t matter. This is a task that is impossible to successfully complete. The first time Alabama’s next coach loses his third game of a season — an inevitable occurrence over a long enough timespan, even at top programs — the world will end according to one of college football’s most devoted fan bases because that happened only once in the 16 years following Saban’s initial 7-6 rebuilding campaign in 2007. And Saban followed that three-loss season in 2010 by winning the next two national championships.
Imagine if any of Alabama’s rivals sought out and secured a coach who wins an average of nine games over the next five seasons and wins a national championship in that span. That would be considered an unarguable success anywhere, except in comparison to Saban’s time at Alabama. In Tuscaloosa, a nine-win average would fall more than three games below Saban’s (12.1 wins per season from 2007 to 2023), and one national championship in five years would lag well behind the unthinkable pace that Saban set of one national title every 2.83 seasons. If you throw in national championship appearances, Alabama made the final game of the season every 1.89 seasons of the 17 campaigns Saban led. That is a mark of dominance that almost certainly will never be seen again.
Saban’s retirement is larger than any other in the history of American team sports because no other sport’s modern identity was developed by a single man. College football, as we accept and understand its value today, is the result of Nick Saban. Since Saban first overhauled a woefully mismanaged LSU program into a title-winning power in the early 2000s, nothing occurred in this sport that wasn’t an attempt to replicate or respond to him.
Simply put, there was no competing against a Saban-led organization in personnel or systems management. The identification, recruitment and development of elite talent by Saban modernized the idea of personnel in college football. When Saban’s process endured a rejoinder, it was usually schematic — for instance, the proliferation of mobile quarterback play (Auburn’s Cam Newton, Texas A&M’s Johnny Manziel) and accelerated tempo foiled Alabama’s heavier linebacking corps in the early 2010s. Saban’s solution was to absorb those ideas, implement what made sense and beat opponents at their own game, usually with better personnel. By the end of the decade, Alabama was churning out the exact same type of quarterbacks — Jalen Hurts, Tua Tagovailoa and Bryce Young — who previously foiled them.
Far more common than trying to beat Alabama was the idea of trying to replicate Alabama, specifically in coaching. Saban’s indirect influence on the sport ballooned as rival programs assumed that any polo shirt privy to Alabama’s staff meetings could re-create his success elsewhere. This was a woefully misguided evaluation and resulted in scores of lackluster hires, usually at nearby programs such as Tennessee and Florida. To date, the only Saban assistant who has shown proof of concept in the all-categories consistency of Alabama is former defensive coordinator Kirby Smart, who has won two national titles with Georgia, and even that success pales in the context of Saban’s timeline.
There is a theory that a post-Saban Alabama is too big to fail solely by virtue of the cascading benefits of Saban’s success. The university is bigger, richer, better marketed, infinitely calmer and better organized since Saban arrived, but this idea ultimately misunderstands the how and why of Saban’s singular success.
There’s a story I have heard in the coaching community for the better part of a decade. It’s a campfire tale; accordingly, facts such as specific dates and people have been rounded off over the years. But it’s true: Saban’s first and greatest victory in Tuscaloosa occurred when he brought its famously meddlesome, fractious booster corps to heel. This sounds like a logical first step when taking over a Tiffany brand such as Alabama, but it proved impossible to accomplish for the coaches who preceded him.
The gist of the famous meeting, as the story goes, was that Saban assembled every check-writing, cash-funneling, self-anointed important person in the orbit of Alabama football and broke their sense of self-importance with totality. From then on, Alabama would function, full stop. No one group of boosters, no region of the state or greater Southeastern area, was more or less important by its own estimation. Saban was, from then on until he was no longer the coach, the tip of the spear.
If you love or hate what college football is, Nick Saban is responsible. He modernized, fundraised and organized the sport into its most efficient and successful iteration yet while simultaneously excising whole portions of provincialism, character and emotion.
You can name plays and players and games that turned Alabama into the greatest college football dynasty, but I assure you, none were as important as that mythical booster meeting. That’s why while others see a pristine, moneyed war machine set to be inherited by a new coach in the very near future, I still see an eventual implosion.
Maybe DeBoer can average fewer wins and fewer championships and not implode under the weight of the expectations. He is a great schematic mind, but no one except Saban has shown an ability to synthesize basic emotion out of the process, to the point that winning is more of a burden than losing. Saban famously seized upon rare losses to refocus his machine, whereas big wins (such as championships) created burdensome distractions.
I have never met another coach so willing to mortgage any measure of catharsis success provides to ensure more success.
Maybe I’m wrong. But history isn’t, and Alabama has achieved its own standards only when a despot made its congregation trade everything — including joy — for success.
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