An appreciation of Nick Saban's run of excellence at Alabama

A quick series of flashbacks before we look ahead to Alabama-LSU, this weekend’s Game of the Century of the moment: 

1. In 2010, after going undefeated and winning the national championship in 2009, Alabama lost three games, blew a 24-point lead to Auburn quarterback Cam Newton and wound up in the Capital One Bowl. Four years into Saban’s tenure, it felt as if Alabama’s dominance of the SEC — not to mention its dominance within its own state — was suddenly on shaky ground.
2. After winning national championships in 2011 and 2012, Alabama lost to Auburn again in 2013 on one of the most epic plays in college football history. And then the Tide got throttled by Oklahoma in the Sugar Bowl. “How do you sense when a dynasty may be in decline?” Alabama columnist Kevin Scarbinsky asked after the Tide lost a game to Ole Miss early in the 2014 season.
3. At the tail end of the 2014 season, Alabama made the College Football Playoff and then lost to eventual national champion Ohio State, 42-35. The question was whether Urban Meyer could sustain enough momentum to out-recruit Saban and defeat him again. “Think about that, the SEC trying to catch up to Ohio State,” wrote The Washington Post’s Adam Kilgore.
4. At the end of the 2016 season, Alabama, which had won another national title in 2015, lost to Clemson in an epic national championship game, 35-31. Had Dabo Swinney surpassed Saban as the best coach in college football? “Coach Dabo Swinney had built an elite program at Clemson that was missing only one thing,” according to the Associated Press, “and now the Tigers can check that box, too.”
5. In the culmination of the 2018 season, Alabama, which had won yet another national title, Saban’s fifth with the Tide, by beating Clemson in 2017, got throttled by the Tigers. The question, once again, was if Swinney had surpassed Saban for good. “Suddenly, those 67 years hang hard and heavy on Nick Saban,” wrote CBS Sports’ Dennis Dodd. “A coach 18 years younger was better — much better — Monday night.”

So here we are again in 2019, with the Alabama dynasty at yet another fascinating watershed moment — and with Saban, now age 68, seeking to prove that the greatest decade-long run in college football history is not yet over. On Saturday afternoon the Crimson Tide (8-0) will host the best LSU team they’ve faced in years, led by 58-year-old coach Ed Orgeron. The Tide’s hopes will ride on quarterback Tua Tagovailoa, who’s recovering from ankle surgery. Even with Tua, they don’t seem quite as dynamic offensively as the Tigers (8-0) do behind quarterback Joe Burrow. The Tide is favored by 6.5, but not many will be legitimately surprised if they lose.    

And in truth, it may not matter even if they do. If you haven’t learned by now that an Alabama loss in the regular season does not eliminate the Tide from winning a national championship, then you haven’t been paying attention. But what happens if LSU looks significantly better? What happens if Alabama, 154-21 in 13 seasons under Saban, then loses its season finale at Auburn? And what happens if all those threats that have slowly been encroaching on Bama’s dominance — from Clemson to Georgia to LSU to Ohio State — finally converge to knock the Tide completely out of the playoff for the first time?

It is a testament to Saban’s brilliance that the Alabama dynasty has lasted this long, because it doesn’t happen often in college football; the closest analog might be Frank Leahy’s Notre Dame teams of the 1940s and early 1950s, and Leahy was so stressed by 1953 that he collapsed in the locker room and thought he was dying. 

Few coaches could manage to recover from setbacks time and time again the way Saban has; few coaches could maintain the maniacal edge necessary to keep on winning at a high level over the course of an entire decade.  

But at some point, it’s going to stop. At some point, it’s going to become too much for even Saban to sustain. So every time we reach a moment like this, it’s worth celebrating the sheer miraculous nature of what we’ve witnessed at Alabama over the course of these past 10 years. And it’s worth wondering what it might look like when it finally does end.