Nick Saban stood out like a strobe in the high-wattage world of college football

Nick Saban isn’t the first coach to demand greatness. But only a handful of men in the 154-year history of the sport achieved what Saban achieved game after game, season after season. Saban won more at Alabama than at LSU, more at LSU than at Michigan State. Father Time remains undefeated, but the 72-year-old Saban made him leave his starters in until the end.

There is no how-to book that reveals why Saban won seven national championships, more than any other coach ever; no elevator pitch that describes how his winning percentage at Alabama (.877) is basically one win short of matching Knute Rockne at Notre Dame (.881), damn that Kick Six. The alchemy of Saban’s success is no more easily understood than organic chemistry.

But over the course of three decades of interviewing Saban and writing about him for Sports Illustrated, ESPN, and On3, you learn a few things. 

Saban, like his old boss and longtime friend, Bill Belichick, made it clear that he has no time for people who worry about outcomes. Saban demanded that his players do their jobs, focus on details, eliminate distractions. That’s hard for adults to master, much less physically talented young men with iPhones and dreams, NFL aspirations and NIL money burning a hole in their pocket.

His seven national championship rings sat on a coffee table in his office, a conversation starter with starry-eyed recruits, yes. But the closest those rings ever got to Saban’s fingers is when he set his lunch down on the table next to them.

He joked about them being the size of ashtrays, and perhaps not his style. But the rings also represented the past.

“To me, it doesn’t make any difference how many (of) Michael Jordan’s game-winning shots he made. The only one that matters is the next one. So there doesn’t seem to be any purpose to me (of the rings). I have them. They’re there.”

There is one sideline moment that captures how Saban drove Alabama to the unparalleled success that it achieved in his 17 seasons in Tuscaloosa, what enabled him to take over a program that had drifted for a decade and ascend to heights reached by no one at Alabama, not Wallace Wade or Frank Thomas or even Bear Bryant.

Go back 12 years. It is late in the fourth quarter of the BCS Championship Game. Alabama is ahead of LSU, 21-0, in the Louisiana Superdome. The Tigers would fail to gain 100 yards of total offense. And Saban is throwing an absolute tantrum on the sideline. Alabama had just committed its first penalty. 

“What do you think?” Saban bristled after the game. “When a guy jumps offside with three minutes to go in a game and you still coach your team like it’s the first game of the season, what do you think?”

I remember Greg McElroy, Saban’s first national-title-winning quarterback at Alabama, explaining how he came to understand that the contents of the package Saban delivered mattered way more than the way the coach delivered it.

“He wants to teach us the game,” said McElroy, now an ESPN analyst. “It is not so much about trying to make you feel bad or anything like that. That’s why Coach Saban is so impactful when he speaks to you, because he wants to teach you.”

Saban arrived in Tuscaloosa 17 years and one week ago to a reception typically reserved for rock stars. Alabama was three stops past desperate. The Crimson Tide had lost to Northern Illinois and Mississippi State, South Carolina and Arkansas. They had lost five straight to Auburn, for God’s sake.

“We couldn’t hire someone who had to learn how to do it,” the late athletic director Mal Moore once told me. “We needed someone who had done it.”

Saban did it only once before arriving at Alabama. One national championship put him in a category with Danny Ford and Larry Coker, Bill McCartney and a subset of other names that long ago faded from the headlines. But he found in Alabama a home ideal for him and his wife Terry after they fled from the NFL. He found a collegiate community that prized football success above all else and was willing, eager even, to fall in line behind him while he ran the show.

The results speak loudly for themselves: Six national championships and nine Southeastern Conference championships and 206 victories in only 17 years. That’s an average of 12 wins a season with the Crimson Tide.

He won four BCS national championships (one at LSU, three at Alabama) and three College Football Playoffs. He won playing NFL-style offenses. He complained about the pace of the no-huddle spread, famously asking, “Is that what we want college football to be?” When he didn’t get a satisfactory answer, he installed no-huddle spread elements into his offense and won more. He won his last national championship during COVID; he made the playoff in the NIL/portal era. 

He maintained his success as he defied the ravages of the calendar, succeeding well past 70 in an industry that used up his colleagues long before they heard from Medicare. 

Scott Cochran, Saban’s longtime strength coach, told me eight years ago that he couldn’t unearth the source of Saban’s energy.

“How does he do it? I really don’t know, because I’ve never seen the man yawn,” said Cochran, now the special teams coordinator at Georgia. “I’ve even faked a yawn in front of him. You know how you can get somebody to yawn? Nothing! Nothing!”

A point to make about Saban: he won three of his seven national championships after he turned 64. Only two other Power Five coaches are older than 64: Kirk Ferentz of Iowa is 68. North Carolina’s Mack Brown, 72, is three months older than Saban. Brown is insisting he will coach next season. Brown also has an asterisk. He stepped away from coaching for five seasons (2014-18) after Texas let him go.

Another point to make about Saban. No one ever let him go.

His intensity didn’t mesh well with some very talented coaches. Until the last decade or so, assistant coaches traded horror stories about working for Saban like they were fantasy players. 

“I used to complain to Terry about this,” Saban said of his wife, “that I was being unfairly portrayed, if that makes any sense. And she used to always say, ‘Well, it’s your own fault.’”

That was late-career Saban, then more at ease with himself. He managed to mellow without losing his edge, smelled a rose or two along the way without succumbing to self-reverence. 

College football is in the midst of a revolution. The lack of guardrails for NIL benefits and the unworkability of the transfer portal calendar have made it harder than ever to coach college football. Saban’s resignation is the loudest warning shot to the feckless, toothless NCAA to fix the sport.

No one is foolish enough to suggest that Saban should become the czar of intercollegiate athletics. The man is retiring because he has had enough. But the NCAA needs an authority who will instill the discipline necessary for schools to create livable rules and then agree to live by them.

Saban once described his philosophy of discipline with holiday lights in mind.

“I always talk to our players about being a blinking light,” Saban said. “If you look at a Christmas tree, when all the lights shine bright, it’s beautiful. But if one light is going like this, your attention is just to that light. And nobody should be a blinking light. The players always bring that up to me. This guy is a strobe light. Why are we continuing to try? He can’t be somebody we can depend on.

“If you ask the players,” Saban said, smiling, “they’ll say I’m a blinking light.”

In this case, it’s not only appropriate, it’s an honor. In a high-wattage industry, Saban stood out like a strobe.