Starkville Daily News

CHAMPIONSH­IP

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for New England coach Bill Belichick, the winner of a record five Super Bowls.

Add a BCS championsh­ip Saban won while the head coach at LSU, and his five poll-era 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 that President Trump is expected to attend.

Relentless­ly driven and motivated by competitio­n for competitio­n's sake, Saban has engineered a complacenc­y-proof program in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. 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 Sunday. "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 taking over as head coach at his alma mater in 2016. The two shared the stage Sunday with the tall, gold championsh­ip trophy for a final news conference before Monday night's game. Smart was part of those basketball games for years, usually on Saban's team because, as Saban said, they both hated to lose.

Smart, 42, has taken Saban's "process" to Athens, Georgia, a title hungry town that has not celebrated a Bulldogs' championsh­ip since Herschel Walker was a freshman in 1980. Asked what the most important lesson he learned from Saban, Smart had a well-prepared response.

"Well, this is not the first time I've answered this question this week, so I'll be happy to answer it again," Smart said. "But probably the single greatest thing is just the level of commitment to the organizati­on, holding everybody in the organizati­on to a standard that he kind of embraced himself. 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."

With Smart only in year two at Georgia, it is too soon to say this game represents a potential paradigm shift in the SEC. But 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.

The only downside — if there is one — to living under the Saban Standard is anything less than the best can seem like the worst. A second straight championsh­ip game loss after last season's thriller against Clemson would mean "just" one national title for Saban and Alabama in the last five seasons.

"That's a career for most coaches, but for him it's an abject failure," longtime Alabama and national radio show host Paul Finebaum said.

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