Why Nick Saban is the GOAT

On the rare occasions over the past 17 autumns when a school managed to beat Alabama, while that school’s fans were still celebrating, Alabama fans would pull up a meme adapted from the long-forgotten “Street Fighter” movie. Over a picture of Nick Saban in a news conference shrugging a “what are you gonna do?” shrug run the words:

“When you beat Bama, you rush the field. You tear down goal posts. You jump to #1 in the polls. You celebrate. You should. The day you beat Bama is a momentous occasion. It’s a cause for celebration. It’s a storied moment that will go down in the history of your program.

“But understand, when Bama beats you … it’s just Saturday. Roll Tide.”

That's the legacy of Nick Saban, the college football coaching GOAT. This really ought to be the shortest article you’ll ever read — "Nick Saban is the GOAT" is so obvious that, for once, you can just read the headline and get the point of the story. But just to drive this point home, like an early 2010s Alabama defense crushing some poor, hapless quarterback into the Bryant-Denny turf, let’s run through Saban’s GOAT credentials.

Start with the numbers: Saban has 297 on-field wins over the course of his career at Toledo, Michigan State, LSU and Alabama (five wins were vacated from the official record books due to a scandal that preceded him at Bama). That ranks him fifth all-time behind Joe Paterno, Bobby Bowden, Bear Bryant and Pop Warner.

But Saban didn’t just pile up wins over a long career; he won the last game of the season a whole lot, too. His seven national championships rank No. 1 all time in college football history, and his six at Alabama match Bryant’s total. But Bryant won half his titles before integration, and Warner won all of his while players were still wearing leather helmets. Paterno and Bowden coached during the era of college football’s explosive growth, but neither of them had to deal with NIL or transfer portal challenges.

At Alabama, Saban produced more first-round NFL Draft picks (44) than losses (29). His 123 NFL Draft picks since 2009 are the most of any coach in that span. Saban’s teams spent 128 weeks in the AP Top 10, from Oct. 3, 2015, to this past season’s loss to Texas in September.

In perhaps the best example of “I taught you everything you know but not everything I know,” Saban was 31-3 against his former assistants, with the only losses coming to Jimbo Fisher at Texas A&M in 2021, Kirby Smart at Georgia in the 2021 season’s national championship game and Steve Sarkisian of Texas last season.

After losing his first SEC championship while at Alabama — to the Tim Tebow/Urban Meyer Florida Gators in 2008 — Saban won nine SEC titles without a defeat. He has eight career wins over No. 1-ranked teams, most recently the Georgia Bulldogs in last month’s SEC championship. Every change he instituted at Alabama, from multi-million-dollar facilities to waves of assistants and “analysts” to military-grade recruiting, became the standard in college football.

Saban won so often because he recognized — and quickly adapted to — a rapidly changing college game. He won titles with suffocating defense, with relentless ground game and, when college offenses took to the air, with a spread offense of aerial attacks guided by quarterbacks who, as of this season, started for four different NFL teams.

The relentless precision and focus that Saban brought to every element of the Alabama football program bred excellence. Saban, in one often-told anecdote, complained that the time spent winning national championships took time away from recruiting. He was (probably) joking — Saban has a wicked, sarcastic sense of humor — but there was more than a thread of truth in it. Dominance demands discipline, and discipline starts with accounting for every minute.

Beyond wins and losses, though, Saban tried to make a difference in both the lives of his players and his community. When tornadoes ripped through Tuscaloosa in April 2011, killing dozens, Saban was out the next morning, handing out water bottles and helping Habitat for Humanity build homes. His Nick’s Kids Foundation — which actually confirmed Saban’s retirement before the university — has distributed more than $12 million to 150 charities, according to Alabama.

Plus, the impact on the university itself has been dramatic and substantial; during the Saban era, enrollment at Alabama has grown by more than 60%. More than half the student body now comes from out of state, lured in part by the draw of Alabama football and near-constant victory.

The stories of players put on the right path by Saban — and not just to the NFL — are legion. “We always tried to do it the right way,” Saban said in the statement Alabama released announcing his retirement. “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.”

If you’re looking to transform this into a sports-bar argument, pitting Saban against the coaching greats in other sports — the NBA’s Phil Jackson, the NFL’s Vince Lombardi, college basketball’s John Wooden, Pat Summitt and Mike Krzyzewski — gets a little tricky. How do you compare, say, the undefeated 2020 Alabama behemoth with, say, Jackson’s 1995-96 72-win Chicago Bulls or Wooden’s undefeated 1972-73 UCLA Bruins? You can’t. But you can look at what Saban did and how quickly he did it — Alabama was scandal-ridden, misfiring trash when Saban arrived in 2007 — and make a very good case for St. Nick.

Saban negotiated the Tide through radical on-field changes and the most dramatic off-field upheavals in the sport’s history, keeping Alabama not just competitive but dangerous through it all. Until Wednesday afternoon, Alabama ranked No. 1 in Yahoo Sports’ first 2024 preseason poll, a testament to the belief that Saban could conquer whatever new wrinkle the sport, or society at large, threw his way.

On Wednesday night, at the 10-foot-tall statue of Saban outside Bryant-Denny Stadium, students and well-wishers left flowers, six-packs of beer and boxes of Little Debbie oatmeal cookies, Saban’s favorite daily snack. Alabama erected that statue in 2011, after Saban brought his first title to Tuscaloosa, and another five championship years are now inscribed on the semicircular wall behind the statue. It’ll be a long time before anyone — in any sport — comes close to matching that.