With his retirement as football coach at the University of Alabama, Nick Saban has abruptly changed an inevitable situation and shocked the collegiate football community. More than two hours after ESPN first broke the story at 4:06 p.m., the university officially announced the retirement at 6:39 p.m. CT in a statement that included a remark from Saban.
This brings an end to what is maybe the greatest run in college football history, during which the once-famous vagabond Nick Saban established roots and revitalized a collapsing empire. Just over a week before he gave sports director Greg Byrne the job of succeeding him, Nick Saban announced his resignation as a collegiate football coach after his team lost to Michigan 27–20 in overtime in the Rose Bowl semifinal.
Saban cemented his legacy as one of the all-time greats by turning around a faltering Crimson Tide team, winning 80.6% of his games and six of his seven national titles. Paul “Bear” Bryant, the former coach of Alabama from 2006, is among them; Saban overtook him in 2020 in terms of national titles.
A collective sigh of relief may be heard from outside the state boundary, where there is understandable grief from Huntsville to Mobile. After leaving the Miami Dolphins in 2007, head coach Nick Saban reset the entire game. His meteoric rise—he was ranked No. 1 in Year 2 and took home the inaugural national title the following year—threw opponents for a loop and raised the bar for other struggling powerhouses.
Saban has had five different coaches at Auburn. There were six in Tennessee. And LSU, three.
Nearly everywhere, the expectation to become the next Saban became unattainable, and the statistics demonstrate why they were pursuing this achievement. Among Saban’s final totals are the following:
297 victories.
Four recipients of the Heisman Trophy
ten titles in the SEC
ten years after launch, eight postseason trips.
When all of this is considered, Saban is not only in the same league as Bryant but may perhaps have transcended the myth of a bygone age. Even in Bryant’s heyday, his teams were unparalleled in their steadiness. Following a 7–6 campaign in his debut year, Saban teams won ten or more games in each of the following sixteen years.
Alabama participated in the Independence Bowl in Year 1 but was never involved in
