Alabama coach Nick Saban shares thoughts on his legacy
Nick Saban is widely considered the greatest college football coach of all time. Since the start of this millennium, the longtime Alabama coach has won seven national titles, including six with the Crimson Tide. Those championship numbers alone will forever carry his legacy.
Is winning the only thing Saban views as important to that legacy though? Absolutely not.
On Monday, Saban was in Birmingham for the inaugural Nick Saban Legacy Award ceremony. The first two recipients of the award were Steve Spurrier and Eddie Robinson. But considering the name of the event, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to find out that Saban was asked about his own legacy.
So what does he want it to be? Well, we’ll let him tell you.
“My goal, our goal as a program and as a coach is to help our players be more successful in life because they were in the program that we have,” Saban responded. “I think there’s a lot of life lessons that you can learn in athletics, and hopefully, they carry those over into things that are gonna help them be better parents, do a better job someday, have more success in their career, have a happier, more self-fulfilled life. So any time a player comes back and says, ‘Coach, you really made an impact on me,’ I think that’s what I’d like my legacy to be.”
If you’ve come to learn anything about Saban over the years, that answer plays.
This is a head coach who cares deeply about his players. But he isn’t interested in simply passing along a winning mentality that’s going to help his guys be successful on the field; he wants them to be successful people, too. That’s an important difference that sometimes gets lost amongst Saban’s biggest critics.
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When a player does wrong, Saban doesn’t discipline just to discipline. He wants to find a way to correct the behavior and help the player do and be better in the long term. Sure, that might sometimes involve a suspension of some sort, but he’ll only take that route if he feels that it can be a corrective measure.
Saban has always believed in second chances, too.
Here’s a perfect example of him talking about former Alabama defensive lineman D.J. Pettway, who was once kicked off the team for an entire year after his involvement in an on-campus robbery back in 2013. I highly recommend watching the entire video.
Pettway was allowed to return to the team after a year of playing on the JUCO level and ended up serving an important role on passing downs (4.5 sacks from 2014-15) for the Crimson Tide. From there, the defensive lineman even spent some time on an NFL roster with the New Orleans Saints.
I wonder what Pettway would have to say about Saban having a positive impact on his life.
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