Another Saban disciple has shot at ’Bama
ATLANTA — Nick Saban’s greatest rival, his most persistent foe, is human nature. So far, Saban is winning.
Alabama’s coach has his Crimson Tide back in the College Football Playoff national championship game for the third straight season. Alabama has won four national titles since Saban took over in 2007, and played for another. Only once since 2008 has Alabama lost more than a single regularseason game.
The Crimson Tide have been the college equivalent of the Patriots during Saban’s time, fitting since he once worked for Bill Belichick.
Add a BCS championship Saban won at LSU, and his five pollera national championships leave him one short of a record held by the man who coached Alabama’s first dynasty, Paul “Bear” Bryant. Saban can match the Bear tonight when No.4 Alabama faces No.3 Georgia in an all-Southeastern Conference national championship game.
Relentlessly driven and motivated by competition for competition’s sake, Saban has engineered a complacency-proof program in Tuscaloosa. Whether it is lunchtime basketball with the assistant coaches or what has become Alabama’s annual appearance in the national title game, the 66-year-old Saban only knows one approach.
“Well, I think that I’m always looking for the next challenge,” he said yesterday. “I don’t know if it’s the way I was raised or whatever, that you’re kind of only as good as your last play, as your last game. I think everyone has heard me talk a lot about the fact that success is not a continuum, it’s momentary, and it’s human nature to get satisfied and get a little complacent when you have success.
“But in a competitive business like we’re in where there’s always a next challenge, there’s always a next game, there’s always a better team to play, if you have that mindset, you’re not going to be able to play with any consistency. And if you can’t play with consistency in performance, you’re not going to really have a lot of success long term.”
Saban’s latest challenge comes from a former protege.
Georgia coach Kirby Smart spent nine seasons with Saban at Alabama, the last eight as defensive coordinator, before jumping to coach his alma mater in 2016. The 42-year-old Smart was part of those basketball games for years, usually on Saban’s team because, as Saban said, they both hated to lose.
Asked what the most important lesson he learned from Saban, the 42-year-old Smart had a well-prepared response.
“Just the level of commitment to the organization, holding everybody in the organization to a standard that he kind of embraced himself,” Smart said. “He never asked anybody in the organization to work any harder than he did. He held every person on the staff — and I’m not talking about just the coaching staff, I’m talking about the entire organization, to be at their best.”
A few weeks removed from the Bulldogs signing the top recruiting class in the country, there are signs that this is just the beginning of a high-stakes rivalry between mentor and mentee. In 11 games, Saban has never lost to a head coach who once worked for him.