On January 10, 2024, Alabama football head coach Nick Saban announced his retirement. Widely considered one of, if not the greatest football coach of all time, Saban finished his 17-season tenure at Alabama with six national championship titles, winning 201 total games, and 11 SEC championships. ESPN also reports that Saban "had a team ranked No. 1 at least once during all but two of those seasons." Saban finishes his overall college coaching career with a 292-71-1 record, ranking him sixth all-time in wins in the FBS.
Saban first informed the Alabama team that he would be retiring in a meeting at 5 PM on January 10, before the news broke out to the rest of the world. His sudden retirement was a huge surprise for all within the Alabama football department, with ESPN stating, "He was interviewing potential assistant coaches via Zoom an hour before telling his players that he was retiring." Saban reportedly told his players that the time was right for him to retire with his frustrations of the advancements of the transfer portal, and NIL tampering.
"The University of Alabama has been a very special place to Terry and me," Saban said, in a statement reported by the University of Alabama. "We have enjoyed every minute of our 17 years being the head coach at Alabama as well as becoming a part of the Tuscaloosa community. It is not just about how many games we won and lost, but it's about the legacy and how we went about it. We always tried to do it the right way. The goal was always to help players create more value for their future, be the best player they could be and be more successful in life because they were part of the program. Hopefully, we have done that, and we will always consider Alabama our home."
Saban had an extensively long coaching career. Starting his career as a linebacker coach at his alma mater Kent State in 1975, he would serve various defensive coaching positions at Division I schools, namely Syracuse, West Virginia, Ohio State, Navy, and Michigan State. He would become the DB coach for the NFL's Houston Oilers in the 1988 and 1989 seasons. His first head coaching position was at the University of Toledo in 1990, leading them to a 9-2 record and a co-champion title of the Mid-American Conference. The NFL brought Saban back as a defensive coordinator for the Cleveland Browns from 1991 to 1994. Saban's 1994 Browns defense was best in the league for points allowed. Saban would return to head coaching in the NCAA, for Michigan State and LSU. Saban led LSU to win the SEC championship in 2001, the program's first title since 1986. The 2003 LSU Tigers would win the National Championship, beating the No. 1 ranked Oklahoma Sooners 21-14, as the Tigers finished the year 13-1.
Saban soon briefly became the head coach for the Miami Dolphins for the 2005 and 2006 seasons, going 15-17 during his tenure without a playoff appearance. Alabama would fire their head coach Mike Shula, and Saban met with Alabama officials on January 1, 2007, shortly after the Dolphins lost their final game of the 2006 season. And the rest is history.
Nick Saban seems to unanimously be considered the greatest coach ever due to his lasting legacy on the game, even years before his retirement. Ryan McGee, a senior writer at ESPN, would point out that Saban's career and everything after it split college football history into three sections. McGee wrote, "Before Saban, LSU hadn't won a national title since 1958. In 2003, he fixed that. After Saban, the Tigers have added two more. Before Saban, Bama hadn't won a national title since 1992 and only one since Bryant's sixth in 1979. After Saban, it has won six. Before Saban, no Tide player had ever won a Heisman Trophy. After Saban, they've brought home four stiff-armed awards."
"As the game increasingly sped up and spread out," McGee also pointed out. "He openly campaigned for rules that would keep offensive football slower and closer to his longtime pro-set, run-first beliefs. When he realized that was a losing battle, he not only embraced up-tempo offenses, he accelerated their development." Saban's biggest success was the fact that he always found a way to evolve with the game, instead of letting the game evolve without him and consume it with it.
Saban stayed consistent in his success since joining Alabama in 2007, and was able to revive its football program after years of silence after storied coach Bear Bryant's departure in 1982. ESPN states, "He led the Crimson Tide to undefeated national championship seasons in 2009 (14-0) and 2020 (13-0), the only head coach in the BCS/CFP era (since 1998) with multiple undefeated national championship seasons."
A lack of success in the NFL never harmed Saban's legacy, as he proved himself to be the ideal coach to play under to thrive in the NFL. An ESPN report claims, "Saban has had 49 players selected in the first round -- including 44 at Alabama -- the most of any coach in the common draft era." Besides NFL players, the Nick Saban coaching tree also stems back far. Two-time national champion-winning head coach for Georgia, Kirby Smart, served as a defensive coordinator under Saban from 2008 to 2015. Miami head coach Mario Cristobal, Georgia Tech's Brent Key, Ole Miss' Lane Kiffin, Oregon's Dan Lanning, amongst others, are also notable names in the Saban coaching tree.
Off the field, Saban's family runs the Nick's Kids Foundation, which benefits disadvantaged children. The University of Alabama claims, "Since Nick and Terry arrived in Tuscaloosa, over $12 million has been distributed to students, teachers and children's causes at over 150 charities through the Nick's Kids Foundation."
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