Saban leaves indelible mark on game
Maybe we should have seen it coming when Nick Saban, the greatest college football coach who ever lived, bought a $17.5 million mansion in Florida last spring.
Or when he finally took that delayed 50th anniversary vacation in Italy and not only realized the world wasn’t going to end, but that he was capable of having a good time despite being thousands of miles and several time zones away from his office. Or when he jogged a victory lap around Bryant-Denny Stadium this October, waving to fans after Alabama beat Tennessee.
All along, the signs were hidden in plain sight. Saban, at age 72 and understanding how rapidly college athletics were changing, finally had enough.
Congratulations to him on a job more than well-done. Pity the rest of us who will never see his kind again.
There is an entire generation of young people old enough to drive cars who have never lived in a world without Saban churning out championships. They can’t conceive what college football was like as Alabama yawed aimlessly and embarrassingly from Dennis Franchione to Mike Price to Mike Shula. They will never be able to appreciate just how remarkable it was for Saban to figure it all out and build a Death Star within the span of a couple of years.
When then-Alabama athletics director Mal Moore convinced Saban to leave the Miami Dolphins and come back to college football, there was no doubt he was going to win. But the way he did it — efficiently, ruthlessly and with the notoriously fractious Alabama boosters all falling in line — was a revelation. And that was just the beginning. He didn’t merely win football games, he changed the entire paradigm of the university. During Saban’s tenure, the school’s enrollment doubled, its endowment exploded and more than half of its freshmen now come from out of state.
His innovations and search for every conceivable advantage forced the SEC to adapt or get run over, which it mostly did anyway. The old-guard coaches like Steve Spurrier sneered at pouring millions of dollars into fancy facilities and armies of analysts, but once Saban started winning, the competition had no choice but to try and copy his blueprint.
Eventually, everyone who could was trying to recruit like Saban, spend on football like Saban and pay coaching salaries like Saban. Just like PGA Tour golfers owe their private jets to Tiger Woods, an entire industry owes generational wealth to a man who never wanted to coach until Don James talked him into it back at Kent State. And then, when the game evolved beyond the so-called “murderball” style that won Saban his first three championships, he turned around and embraced the spread offense and won three more.
Whatever it was — name, image and likeness, transfer portal, the creation of the College Football Playoff — Saban adapted and won. He was always thinking, always pushing, always innovating to create an edge. When COVID-19 hit and football stopped, his first impulse was to get Apple Watches sent to the players so that their individual workouts could be monitored.
Alabama cruised to the national title later that year.
“I think it was because of the way we managed all the challenges that COVID created,” Saban said just days ago, prior to the Rose Bowl. “That kind of made me realize, wow, when something comes up, you better be one step ahead of the problem so you can adapt to those situations.”
His brain just worked differently, but he never lost sight of the most important factor in his success. Being the best football mind wasn’t worth much if you didn’t have the players. So when Saban got to Alabama, he recruited and recruited and recruited some more. By his third year, he made sure he never had to coach a game with inferior talent.
There will be plenty of talk in the coming days about whether all of the changes in college sports — more in the last three years than in the previous 50, he said in one of his final press conferences — chased Saban into retirement. While these developments had an obvious impact on college football, spreading out the talent and eroding Alabama’s advantages to some degree, there was little doubt Saban could have won at the highest level for several more years.
If anyone thought the game was passing him by, the coaching job he did to get his final team to the College Football Playoff with a sub-standard offensive line and an erratic quarterback was one for the ages.
All you needed to see was how Alabama played its best game of the season against unbeaten Georgia in the SEC championship game to understand that Saban was still on top of his game.
The question now becomes what happens at Alabama. It’s not going to be the same, even under Kalen DeBoer.
DeBoer is coming off a run to the national title game at Washington and is clearly one of the game’s top offensive minds, but there would be a major question mark about whether a guy who was Indiana’s offensive coordinator a mere four years ago would be comfortable swimming in the shark-infested waters of the SEC.
The secret of Saban’s success at Alabama wasn’t really a secret. As told in Monte Burke’s book “Saban: The Making of a Coach,” Saban once asked then-athletics director Mal Moore if he thought Alabama had just hired the best coach in college football. When Moore responded that he did, Saban famously shot back: “Well, you didn’t — I’m nothing without my players. But you did just hire a helluva recruiter.”
Is DeBoer a “helluva recruiter?” He’s never had a job in Div. I football long enough for anyone to be able to tell. Even at Washington, the players who mattered were mostly there already when he got the job in 2022. Even Michael Penix, the excellent quarterback who made it all go, transferred there because of a prior relationship with DeBoer.
To put it mildly, he’s never done the kind of recruiting it takes to navigate tthe South. The closest place to SEC territory DeBoer has ever worked is Southern Illinois. Does he even know you aren’t supposed to put sugar in your grits?
This isn’t merely going to be culture shock for DeBoer; it’s going to be a jolt the size of Tuscaloosa’s electrical grid. Can he handle it?
It won’t take long before national titles are expected. Just ask Bill Curry, who allegedly got a brick thrown through his office window after losing to Ole Miss in 1988 and was summarily run out of town after winning the SEC title in 1989 because he was 0-3 against Auburn. DeBoer will have the toughest job in the history of college football.
But this was always going to be how it would go at the end, something the university and its fan base have been dreading for years. He couldn’t go on forever. Given all the factors, this was as sensible a time as any to stop.
If there’s one regret, it will be Saban’s final game. Alabama almost had Michigan beat on Jan. 1, needing to stop just one fourth-down play at the end of the Rose Bowl to have yet another shot at a championship. The Crimson Tide couldn’t do it.
After his press conference, Saban hopped on a golf cart and headed back toward the Alabama locker room. On the way, he passed a group of reporters waiting to talk to the winning team. Saban gave us a little smile and a wave.
We didn’t know it was goodbye.