Bear Bryant recruited my Uncle Rob. My first SEC road game covering Kentucky was against Bryant’s 1980 team at Legion Field. (Alabama won 45-0. Big shock.) I am not unfamiliar with Paul William Bryant, whom I’ve considered the greatest college football coach ever — until now.
Nicholas Lou Saban has usurped that title, same as he has seized everything else. Having won four of the past seven national championships, we’ve reached the point where Alabama not winning has become the exception, not the rule. Back in September, this was seen as the flawed Bama team that would reduce this lordly program to the level of the merely mortal. On a January night in a domed stadium in the desert, the Crimson Tide reigned again.
It took everything Alabama had to subdue Clemson and the indomitable Deshaun Watson, but in the end Bama won because it had the one thing the Tigers didn’t. It had Saban.
Having done this for a while, I try not to get carried away by the last thing I saw. (Sometimes it's hard. Don't get me started on how good Watson was, or I might just decide he was even better than Vince Young against Southern Cal.) I've mentioned before that Saban merits consideration as the Greatest Ever, but I've never made that declaration. Until now.
It’s not just that he gets the best talent, though recruiting is the foundation of Fortress Nick. It’s not just that he turns good players – Blake Sims last year, Jake Coker this time – into big-timers because he hires the best assistants and lets them work. It’s the combination of everything, the little things especially, that has rendered college football a game not of thrones but of one throne, one emperor, one program to rule us all.
Alabama has a special teams coordinator. His name is Bobby Williams and he also coaches tight ends. (Yes, Williams had one heck of a Monday night. Tight end O.J. Howard caught five passes for 205 yards and two touchdowns.) Lots of programs — Georgia under Mark Richt, to name one — don’t designate one assistant as special teams coordinator. This never makes a lick of sense, seeing as how a game can be lost more suddenly on kicks than anywhere else. (Sure enough, Bama blocked a Georgia punt for a touchdown on that rainy Oct. 3.)
For all its offensive brilliance, Monday's game was won by one decision. Having seen enough of Watson flitting through and throwing over Kirby Smart's defense, Saban ordered an onside kick after Bama tied the game with 10:34 remaining. Clemson isn't unfamiliar with kicking wrinkles, having executed an outrageous fake punt against Oklahoma. But Saban had the confidence to try something extraordinary against the Tigers, something that could stifle Watson by keeping him on the bench, and he had this confidence because Alabama is unstinting on details.
“It’s a calculated risk,” Saban said Tuesday, “but it’s calculated based on your ability to execute.”
Did simply having a special teams coordinator enable Alabama to pull off such a maneuver — “Just like we drew it up,” Saban said — with the national championship perched on a knife’s edge? We can’t know for sure, but this much we do know: Saban thinks enough of special teams to put one man in charge of them, and he had enough faith in that man and his players to dare greatly in the fourth quarter of a tied title game.
But wait. There was more to this. Saban said Monday night that he’d been waiting for that moment all game. “We have someone assigned in the press box who’s saying, ‘Did they line up like we thought they would? Did they have the play that we want in any of these circumstances?’ We saw that we had that the first time they lined up. The first time that we kicked off, we said, ‘OK, we’ve got that.’”
Then Saban, who’s nothing if not pragmatic, said: “But let me say this … If we wouldn’t have got that, y’all would be killing me now.”
His is a results-oriented business. Thing is, Saban almost always get the desired result. He recruits talented players and works them hard, and they’re ready for whatever arises. Sometimes Alabama loses. Almost never is it caught unawares. (Auburn’s Kick Six return constitutes a subset of one.)
Counting the 2003 BCS title he won with LSU, Saban has five national championships over his past 11 collegiate seasons. This in an era of scholarship restrictions, which for the longest time Bryant didn’t have. This at a time when every Power Five program pours big money into its cash cow. This when college football actually decides its champion on the field, which happened only by accident in Bryant’s day.
It was Bum Phillips who said of Bryant: “He can take his’n and beat your’n, and he take your’n and beat his’n.” Never thought I’d say this, but here it is: I think Nick Saban could take his’n and beat the Bear’s. You probably think so, too.
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