College Football’s Greatest Source of Misery Is Finally Giving His Rivals a Break

Nick Saban hung up his decorative Coke bottle on Wednesday night. The greatest coach in college football history will stage no more weekly press conferences with that soda adorning the podium as he explains to beat reporters why Alabama has to take that week’s opponent seriously. He will take no more helicopter rides onto high school fields during visits to convince five-star safeties to join him in Tuscaloosa. He will not participate in the 12-team playoff system that rolls out next year. And, blessedly for everyone else, he will stop leaving an unprecedented trail of carnage in his wake.

Saban, 72, retired in the expected way at an unexpected time. He never seemed like the type to stage a yearlong farewell à la Mike Krzyzewski in basketball. When Saban wanted to go, he would simply go. He was nine days removed from coaching in overtime at the Rose Bowl, where a win would’ve returned the Crimson Tide to the national championship game. He was a few hours removed from the usual business of coaching, having reportedly joined interviews with prospective coaches that day. Then it was over.

As he rides off into the sunset in his Ferrari (he co-owns a dealership in Nashville), Saban is the subject of all manner of glowing career obituaries. He ends up about even with Bear Bryant for consideration as the best Alabama coach ever, having won a matching six national titles at the school. A title beforehand at LSU gives Saban seven and an all-time record. An easy scroll through Saban’s annual win totals and rankings is wild even to people who know the history by heart. He arrived at Alabama in 2007. From 2008 on, he never won fewer than 10 games, and only once did he lose more than two. The College Football Playoff has existed for 10 years. Saban missed it twice. He dominated the Southeastern Conference and coached 49 first-round NFL picks. The press release wrote itself, though it needed to be long.

The universe will remember Saban’s excellence, but wise fans will not only think of the world he built. They will linger on the ones he destroyed or prevented from ever existing. So many programs were on the verge of so much joy in the past 17 years, and no one held them back from it more than the short man in Tuscaloosa. The best way to understand Saban’s run is not to count the national championships but to take stock of the reality he imposed on everyone else—and how different life might have been without him.

Pick the lowest-hanging fruit first. In national championship contests alone, Saban’s Alabama kept trophies from falling into the hands of Georgia, Ohio State, Clemson, Notre Dame, and Texas. Several of those programs won titles eventually anyway, going over Alabama to do it. But the Tide drew a lot of blood. Dabo Swinney’s Clemson may well have won four national titles in a row between 2015 and ’18 if Saban had not been on the other sideline to take two of them. Kirby Smart’s Georgia could have added another title in 2018, making itself a veritable dynasty by the time it repeated in 2021 and ’22. Without Alabama there to disembowel them in 2012’s title game by a 42–14 score, the Notre Dame Fighting Irish may well have won a national title that people under the age of 40 today remember.

But if you’re good enough to lose a championship game against Alabama, you’re likely good enough to get more chances. What about the programs that saw their dreams foreclosed earlier? In 2009, Saban’s first undefeated and national title season in Tuscaloosa, the Tide were ranked No. 2 entering the SEC Championship against the No. 1 Florida Gators. The team of Urban Meyer and Tim Tebow had won it all in 2006 and 2008 and was poised to do it again before Saban beat them with little-known quarterback Greg McElroy and left Tebow sobbing on the sidelines. If Alabama doesn’t get in the way, does Florida carry on a longer dynasty under Meyer? Do the Gators still take a dive under former Saban assistant Will Muschamp? Does Meyer still take a brief retirement and then go to Ohio State? If he doesn’t, does Michigan ever fall into enough of a ditch that it turns in 2015 to Jim Harbaugh, the former Michigan QB who had been in the NFL? Did Saban just win the 2023 national championship for Michigan??

The rabbit holes are endless. In 2014, historic SEC doormat Mississippi State rose all the way to No. 1 in the rankings for the first time in program history and held that spot until mid-November. Then the Tide rolled over them in Tuscaloosa.* If Alabama hadn’t crashed the party, would Mississippi goddamned State have contended for a national title? Quite possibly. The Bulldogs had an incredible QB (current Dallas Cowboy Dak Prescott) and would’ve at least played in the SEC Championship, where a win against a non-elite Missouri team would’ve delivered them to the inaugural Playoff. Needless to say, State has not been in shouting distance of a national title since the Tide ruined everything nine years ago.

And without Alabama’s pesky presence, the Playoff selection committee likely would not have excluded undefeated Florida State from 2023’s Playoff. The world would’ve been spared both an actual unfair decision and endless letters from grandstanding Florida politicians seeking to have the Playoff investigated. Indeed, most of the good conspiracy theories in college football in the past 17 years have somehow involved Alabama. In Saban’s last year, one of them—that some shadowy forces would find a way to install the Tide in the Playoff when they didn’t deserve it—finally came true.

Then there are the schools that found themselves stuffed into a locker at Saban’s hands again, again, and again. Mississippi State was one of those, beating Saban in his first year, 2007, and then never again. The Tennessee Volunteers lost 15 in a row to Saban upon his arrival. He became the Vols’ boogeyman, and beating him for the only time in 2022 made for an honest-to-goodness exorcism. Arkansas lost to Saban every single year of his tenure, with six different head coaches taking those defeats.

The fun flipside of Saban’s run is that when Alabama did lose, it became a capital-E event. For a handful of programs, the best moment in decades was a win over Saban’s Tide. Rival Auburn, which wins occasional national titles and even got one during the Saban era, most glorifies two regular-season wins over Alabama: an epic 2010 comeback led by Cam Newton (The Camback) and 2013’s Kick Six, which many casual fans regard as the coolest college football moment ever. A win over Saban in 2010 allowed South Carolina fans to feel hope. A win over Saban in 2012 made Johnny Manziel a folk hero and added to Texas A&M fans’ enormous self-confidence. (One day the long term will justify it.) Ole Miss football’s two main moments of national relevance since integration are wins over Saban in 2014 and ’15. Georgia’s two national titles are undoubtedly sweeter because it took so long for the Bulldogs to get over the Alabama-sized hump that had been in their way in the 2010s.

But there was not nearly enough happiness to go around. Saban coached 235 games at Alabama and lost 29 of them. Most teams did not get to make the Tide part of a redemption story. Their arcs with Saban had no peaks, only valleys. In retirement, Saban will spend more time on his boat, but the peace he finds there will be nothing compared to the bliss his peers enjoy by the sheer grace of his absence.