Farewell to the GOAT. There will never be another like Nick Saban
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Ryan McGee, ESPN Senior Writer
Nick Saban is the best who has ever done it.
There is no argument to be made against that. None. It is a statement of fact. Any historian who says otherwise is one of those folks who spends their days surrounded by dust-covered books about the single wing, watching black-and-white films on their pocket computers, the ones who so desperately hang on to that overcooked idea that things were always better way back when. Any current observer of college football who pushes back on that point is likely a bitter fan of a team Saban’s squads regularly drubbed, or one the players or coaches who were on the rosters of those teams, denied greatness by greatness.
He’s the best. Period. And now there is a period at the end of his unparalleled career. On Wednesday afternoon, ESPN’s Chris Low broke the news that after 17 seasons as the head coach of the Alabama Crimson Tide, Saban is hanging up his headset.
Over those 17 seasons, he won a half-dozen national titles, 201 games, and 11 SEC championships during the most competitive era of any conference in the 154-year history of college football. He had a team ranked No. 1 at least once during all but two of those seasons.
Statistics like that make no sense. They don’t look real. The math looks like it cheated, and yet it all adds up to the greatest college football résumé ever written. That point is inarguable.
Bear Bryant, he who built Bama and previously held GOAT status in most minds, also won six national championships in Tuscaloosa, thanks to a willingness — after an admitted initial reluctance — to evolve, modernizing his offensive mind. At Notre Dame, Knute Rockne revolutionized the way a true college football program is constructed and steered. Frank Leahy saved what Rockne had built, revitalizing a struggling program and returning it to its former glory. At Florida State, Bobby Bowden forever changed the way rosters are recruited and assembled. Pop Warner championed safety innovations and managed to balance a hefty ego by continually campaigning to keep football healthy at its grassroots. Woody Hayes had a temper that was only slightly less combustible than a barrelful of gunpowder, but he won big games and planted a coaching tree with more branches than one could possibly keep track of.
Nick Saban did all of the above. Not only that, but he also did it all better. And while he has filled college football with his proteges — Kirby Smart, Steve Sarkisian, Lane Kiffin and Dan Lanning, to name just a few — he has also done all of the above for so long that we have forgotten exactly how long. As good as he has always looked in Crimson, he also looked pretty spiffy in Toledo blue and gold, Michigan State green and white, and LSU purple and gold. His first head coaching job was at Toledo in 1990. In the nearly 30 seasons spent on a sideline since, he posted one losing record.
At LSU and Alabama, it is tempting to slash a historical line between his arrival and everything prior. Let’s call it “Before Saban” and “After Saban” but not use the acronyms. Why? Because anyone who has ever talked with the coach knows there is no BS about him.
Before Saban, LSU hadn’t won a national title since 1958. In 2003, he fixed that. After Saban, the Tigers have added two more.
Before Saban, Bama hadn’t won a national title since 1992 and only one since Bryant’s sixth in 1979. After Saban, it has won six since 2009.
Before Saban, no Tide player had ever won a Heisman Trophy. After Saban, they’ve brought home four stiff-armed awards.
The list goes on and on. But perhaps the most telling and impactful dividing line is less BS/AS and more OS/NS, as in “Old Saban” and “New Saban.” Football-wise, that’s about his Bryant-like willingness to change his offensive philosophy. As the game increasingly sped up and spread out, he openly campaigned for rules that would keep offensive football slower and closer to his longtime pro-set, run-first beliefs. When he realized that was a losing battle, he not only embraced up-tempo offenses, he accelerated their development. He hired west coasters like Kiffin and Sarkisian. Against all odds, Alabama became the new Wide Receiver U.
But anyone who has spent even the tiniest amount of time around the coach in recent seasons knows his personal evolution has outpaced his on-field one. There has been a noticeable change in demeanor. The intensity has never wavered, but he has learned to pick his explosive spots. During a conversation in the days leading up to what turned out to be his final game as Alabama’s head coach, the 2024 Rose Bowl, he became emotional when talking about how this team and its collective personality had kept him laughing all season, even when that team looked lost just three weeks into the season. He credits his last national title team – the 2020 squad that was forced into a close-quarters bubble due to the Covid-19 pandemic – for teaching him to appreciate what was around him more, while keeping his legendary hyperfocus toward maintaining the Crimson Tide empire.
“People tell me that I smile more now. I don’t know if that is true or not. I do know that I pause to enjoy things more now than I did before. Perhaps that’s just getting older, aight? But I like to think that it’s growth. Personal growth. Proof that we never stopped growing, even when you are an old West Virginia guy with stiff joints and grandkids and dealing with a hundred teenagers every day.”
Saban chuckled.
“Here’s the deal. I love what I do, aight? I always have and always will. But yes, maybe I do appreciate it more. One day I will look back and miss it. But I don’t think that will be anytime soon. I’m too busy right now.”
That was on Dec. 15. Anytime soon, it turns out, was less than a month later. But his impact certainly won’t subside anytime soon. Because that line, the one between “Before Saban” and “After Saban” has never applied to just Alabama, or LSU, or even the SEC. As of Jan. 10, 2024, that designation of eras applies to the entirety of college football.
Aight?
BOSTON — New York Mets manager Carlos Mendoza said he’ll talk to Juan Soto about hustling out of the batter’s box after the slugger watched his would-be home run bounce off the Green Monster for a single Monday night against the Boston Red Sox.
Leading off the sixth inning on a chilly night at Fenway Park with a 15 mph wind blowing in from left field, Soto hit a 102 mph line drive to left and stood watching as it sailed toward the 37-foot-high wall. The ball hit about two-thirds of the way up, and Soto was able to manage only a single.
“He thought he had it,” Mendoza told reporters after his team’s 3-1 loss. “But with the wind and all that, and in this ballpark — anywhere, but in particular in this one, with that wall right there — you’ve got to get out of the box. So, yeah, we’ll discuss that.”
Soto stole second on the first pitch to the next batter, but the $765 million star ended up stranded on third. He denied lollygagging on the basepaths.
“I think I’ve been hustling pretty hard,” he said. “If you see it today, you can tell.”
It’s not uncommon for balls that hit off the Green Monster to result in singles. In the first inning, Pete Alonso was thrown out trying for second base on a ball off the left-field wall. But Soto had also failed to run hard out of the box on a groundout Sunday night at Yankee Stadium.
“We’ll talk to him about it,” Mendoza said.
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Alden Gonzalez
LOS ANGELES — Hyeseong Kim started in center field to take some of the burden off Tommy Edman‘s tender ankle and wound up losing a baseball in the twilight. Jack Dreyer opened for Landon Knack in hopes of maximizing matchups against the opposing Arizona Diamondbacks, and yet the two surrendered seven runs within the first three innings.
Nothing, it seems, goes right for the Los Angeles Dodgers these days.
On Monday night, they were bad enough on defense and ineffective enough on the mound that their mighty offense could not make up the difference. They lost 9-5 at Dodger Stadium, suffering their first four-game home losing streak since May 2018.
“We haven’t given up, but you’re going to go through certain situations like this,” Dodgers shortstop Mookie Betts said. “It’s just tough. We got to find a way to get back healthy, get our guys back out there. But we’re battling with what we’ve got.”
Three critical members of the Dodgers’ rotation are currently on the injured list; Blake Snell, Tony Gonsolin and Roki Sasaki are all nursing shoulder injuries with uncertain timelines. Four high-leverage relievers — Kirby Yates, Blake Treinen, Evan Phillips and Michael Kopech — have hit the shelf since the start of spring training. And in the wake of that, a Dodgers organization that has been lauded for its ability to absorb injuries, most recently by riding bullpen games to a championship, has been unable to overcome.
Forty-eight games in, the Dodgers (29-19) possess a 4.28 ERA, which ranks 22nd in the major leagues. Their rotation, hailed as one of the sport’s deepest collections of arms when the season began, holds baseball’s sixth-highest ERA at 4.51.
“It’s not the staff we thought we’d have this season,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. “But I feel that what we still do and have done in the past with injuries, we’re not doing. And I say that in the sense of getting ahead of hitters and keeping the ball in the ballpark.”
Dodgers pitchers rank sixth in home run rate and have started behind in the count on 117 batters this season, tied for ninth most in the majors.
Dodgers coaches have spent the past few days preaching the importance of getting ahead and thus commanding counts in hopes of fostering a more aggressive approach from their staff. Dreyer seemed to carry that mindset with him early, getting ahead on three of his first four hitters. But the fourth sent a fly ball to straightaway center field that Kim, a rookie second baseman making his first career Dodger Stadium start at the position, never saw. It landed for an RBI double, igniting a two-run first inning.
The D-backs added another run in the second, on an errant throw from third baseman Max Muncy, a wild pitch from Dreyer and a sacrifice fly from Geraldo Perdomo. Four more came in the third, when Knack, vying for a long-term spot in the rotation, surrendered two-run homers to Lourdes Gurriel Jr. and Gabriel Moreno.
By that point, the Dodgers, coming off getting swept by the crosstown-rival Los Angeles Angels, faced a 7-0 deficit they could not overcome. Shohei Ohtani belted his major-league-leading 17th home run, Betts added two of his own, and the rest of the lineup rallied to make things interesting in the bottom of the ninth. But it wasn’t enough.
The Dodgers’ offense, which got Edman and Teoscar Hernandez back from injury in the past two days, is whole at this point. L.A.’s pitching staff is far from it.
The effects of that are being felt.
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