Saban ready to support Alabama in transition
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Chris Low, ESPN Senior Writer
On the first day of his retirement in the wake of a legendary coaching career, Nick Saban was still thinking team first.
He wasn’t playing golf, planning a vacation or even sleeping in for an extra hour. Like every other morning for the past 17 years as Alabama‘s football coach, he was driving to the office — always there by 7:20 a.m. sharp at the latest.
“I want to be there for the players, for the coaches, anything I can do to support them during this transition,” Saban told ESPN in his first public comments since retiring Wednesday, a move that reverberated throughout the sports world and shocked even those who were closest to him within the Alabama program.
“There are a lot of things to clean up, to help as we move forward. I’m still going to have a presence here at the university in some form and trying to figure out all that and how it works. This is a place that will never be too far away from Miss Terry’s and my hearts.”
Saban informed his staff and players that he was retiring during a 4 p.m. meeting in the team room Wednesday. It wasn’t a long meeting, less than 10 minutes, and Saban said it was important to him that they hear the news first from him.
“I wanted them to know how much they meant to me,” said Saban, who won six national championships at Alabama and another one at LSU. “It was hard, all of it was. The last few days have been hard. But look, it’s kind of like I told the players. I was going to go in there and ask them to get 100 percent committed to coming back and trying to win a championship, but I’ve always said that I didn’t want to ride the program down, and I felt whether it was recruiting or hiring coaches, now that we have people leaving, the same old issue always sort of came up — how long are you going to do this for?”
Jeff Allen, Alabama’s head athletic trainer, has been with Saban all 17 years. He’s the last football staff member remaining that Saban hired from the outside when Saban took the job at Alabama in 2007. Allen was emotional Thursday even talking about Saban’s retirement.
“This is one of those days you knew was going to come, but when it does, you’re still somewhat in shock that it finally has come,” Allen said. “I don’t want to say it was a grieving process, because he’s still here, but what’s helped us process it all is how he’s managed it. He’s in the office today and wants to still be a part of this place. It was special for me this morning when I was with him, just hearing him talk about how important it was for him for Alabama to continue to be successful. That means the world to all of us who are here and love this place and want to see what he’s built continue to grow.”
Saban, 72, said his age made it increasingly more difficult for him to do the job the way he demanded of himself that it should be done. He told ESPN last month that 14-hour days were a lot harder to navigate at 72 than they were at 62 and reiterated that on Thursday.
“Last season was difficult for me from just a health standpoint, not necessarily having anything major wrong, but just being able to sustain and do things the way I want to do them, the way I’ve always done them,” Saban said. “It just got a little bit harder. So you have to decide, ‘OK, this is sort of inevitable when you get to my age.'”
Saban added that it would have been unfair to everybody to keep saying that he was going to be at Alabama for four or five more years.
“Which I would have been happy to try to do, but I just didn’t feel like I could do that and didn’t want to get into a year-to-year deal that doesn’t help anybody and doesn’t help you continue to build and be at the standard that I want to be at and want this program to be at,” Saban said.
At no time did Saban consider scaling back his responsibilities or transitioning into more of a CEO role as a head coach. He’s renowned for being hands-on in everything that touches his program. He said he finalized his decision to retire after returning from a trip to his home in Florida with his wife, Terry, last weekend. Saban was still interviewing potential assistant coaches via Zoom on Tuesday and Wednesday. In fact, he was talking with a potential receivers coach about an hour before telling the team that he was retiring.
“It’s the way I’ve always done things,” Saban said. “You keep working right up until it’s time to walk away. I think when you get away from doing what you’ve always done, you’re never going to be as effective. And that’s just sort of it. I knew it was time.”
Saban has expressed disdain over the past few years for the lack of uniformity in college football, especially regarding NIL being used as a guise for pay-for-play and the transfer portal and all the tampering that has occurred with players moving from school to school.
Saban was insistent, though, that the changing landscape in college football was not the reason he was leaving.
“Don’t make it about that. It’s not about that,” Saban said. “To me, if you choose to coach, you don’t need to be complaining about all that stuff. You need to adjust to it and adapt to it and do the best you can under the circumstances and not complain about it. Now, I think everybody is frustrated about it. We had an SEC conference call, 14 coaches on there [Wednesday], and there’s not one guy you can talk to who really understands what’s happening in college football and thinks that it’s not an issue.
“But [his retirement] ain’t about that. We’ve been in this era for three years now, and we’ve adapted to it and won in this era, too. It’s just that I’ve always known when it would be time to turn it over to somebody else, and this is that time.”
Saban, who loves playing golf, has made it a point to never play during the season except for maybe during the open week. He made his first hole-in-one during the open date before the LSU game in 2016. Now that he’s retired, Saban pushed back on the notion that he’d be able to get his handicap down under 5.
“I don’t think that’s going to happen, but we’ll be able to play more than we used to,” he said with a laugh.
Over the years, Saban has joked “What the hell else am I going to do?” any time he was asked about retiring from coaching. His late father was a Pop Warner coach in their Monongah, West Virginia, community, and Saban broke into the coaching ranks in 1973 as a graduate assistant at Kent State under Don James.
But now that he is retiring after 30 years as a head coach in the college and NFL ranks, Saban said, “There’s a lot I can do and a lot I want to do,” adding that it was important to him that he still had the quality of life remaining to do all of those things after he quit coaching.
“There’s life after football, but I’m always going to be here for Alabama however they need me,” Saban said.
Allen met privately with Saban on Thursday morning and said his longtime boss paused briefly before telling Allen how much he had meant to him.
“But he’s been doing that all morning with everybody, literally walking around and thanking people,” Allen said. “One of our custodians came up to me and said how much she was going to miss him and miss cleaning his office and how well he had treated her. People don’t always see that side of him. But all this being said, we also know what he wants us to do is to move on in the right way and help the new coach to continue to be successful, and that’s the way we can best honor Coach Saban.”
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David Hale, ESPN Staff Writer
The committee has released its second crack at the top 25, and it’s (almost) all Big Ten at the top.
That might seem a bit strange to the conference that boasts the most playoff-caliber teams and the most nonconference wins against other Power 4 leagues, and also has Paul Finebaum there to remind everyone just how angry they should be at this affront to good judgment.
With that, we’ll handle much of Finebaum’s homework for him. Here’s this week’s Anger Index.
1. The SEC
Eleven weeks into the 2024 season, and one thing seems abundantly clear: The SEC is the best conference in college football. Take a look at Bill Connelly’s SP+ rankings, for example, where nine of the top 17 teams are from the SEC. Or use ESPN’s FPI metric, where the SEC has spots 1, 2, 4, 5 and 9. Consider that the team currently ninth in the SEC standings, South Carolina, has three wins over SP+ top-40 teams and losses to the committee’s No. 10 and 22 teams by a combined total of five points.
Yes, the SEC’s dominance and depth seem obvious.
So, of course, four of the top five teams in the committee’s rankings this week are from the SEC.
Wait, no, sorry about that. We’re getting late word here that, in fact, it’s the Big Ten with teams No. 1, 2, 4 and 5 in this week’s rankings.
It’s not that those four Big Ten teams aren’t any good. Oregon (No. 1) has chewed up and spit out nearly all comers this season. Ohio State (No. 2) is the best squad the gross domestic product of Estonia can buy. Penn State (No. 4), well, the Nittany Lions still haven’t beaten Ohio State, but we assume the rest of the résumé is OK. Indiana (No. 5) is blowing the doors off people.
But that’s it. The rest of the Big Ten is a mess. You need a magnifying glass to find Michigan‘s QB production. Iowa finally learned how to score and somehow has gotten worse. Minnesota looked like the next-best team in the conference, and the Gophers have losses to North Carolina and Rutgers.
A lack of depth does not inherently mean the teams at the top are not elite. Indeed, the other teams in any conference remain independent variables when addressing the ceiling for any one team. If the Kansas City Chiefs joined the Sun Belt, Patrick Mahomes would still be a magician and Andy Reid would still be saying “Bundle-a-rooskie-doo” in your nightmares.
But the cold, hard facts are these: Indiana’s best win came last week against Michigan (No. 40 in SP+) by 3. Penn State’s best win (by SP+) came by 3 against a below-.500 USC team that just benched its QB. Ohio State is absolutely elite on paper, but on the field, the Buckeyes’ success is entirely buoyed by a 20-13 win at Penn State, a team we also know very little about.
The SEC gets flack for boasting of its greatness routinely, and to be sure, that narrative has often bolstered less-than-elite teams. But this year, every reasonable metric suggests the SEC’s production actually matches its ego, and when Ole Miss (No. 11), Georgia (No. 12), Alabama (No. 10) and Texas A&M (No. 15) — all with two losses — are dogged as a result of playing in a league where every other team warrants a spot in the top 25, it undermines the entire point of having a committee that can use its judgment rather than simply look at the standings.
Let’s compare two teams with blind résumés.
Team A: 8-1 record, No. 14 in ESPN’s strength of record. Best win came vs. SP+ No. 20, loss came to a top-10 team by 3. Has four wins vs. Power 4 teams with a winning record, by an average of 14 points.
Team B: 8-1 record, No. 11 in ESPN’s strength of record. Best win came vs. SP+ No. 28, loss came to a top-15 team by 15. Has one win vs. a Power 4 team with a winning record, by 3.
So, which team has the better résumé?
This shouldn’t take too long to figure out. Team A looks better by almost every metric, right?
Well, Team A is SMU, who checks in at No. 14 in this week’s ranking.
Team B, though? That’d be the Mustangs’ old friends from the Southwest Conference, the Texas Longhorns. Texas checks in at No. 3.
Perhaps you’ve watched enough of both Texas and SMU to think the eye test favors the Longhorns. That’s fair. But should the eye test account for 11 spots in the rankings? At some point, the results have to matter more.
Or, perhaps it’s the brand that matters to the committee. If that same résumé belonged to a school that hadn’t just bought its way into the Power 4 this year, it’s hard to imagine they wouldn’t be in the top 10 with ease.
Let’s dig into three different teams still hoping for a playoff bid, even if the odds are against them at this point.
Team A: 7-2, 1 win over SP+ top 40. No. 28 in ESPN’s strength of record. Losses by a combined 18 points.
Team B: 7-2, 1 win over SP+ top 40. No. 25 in ESPN’s strength of record. Losses by a combined 13 points.
Team C: 7-2, no wins over SP+ top 40. No. 24 in ESPN’s strength of record. Losses by a combined 21 points.
You could split hairs here, but the bottom line is none has a particularly compelling résumé, and they’re all pretty similar.
So, who are they?
Team B is Iowa State, which plummeted from the rankings after losing two straight. But the committee isn’t supposed to care when you lost your games. Losing in September is not better than losing in November. At least that’s what they say.
Team A is Arizona State. Its 10-point loss to Cincinnati came without starting QB Sam Leavitt and was due, at least in part, to a kicking game so traumatic head coach Kenny Dillingham held an open tryout afterward. The Sun Devils and Cyclones are two of three two-loss Power 4 teams unranked this week (alongside Pitt), but unlike Iowa State and Pitt, Arizona State isn’t coming off back-to-back losses. The Sun Devils’ absence seems entirely correlated to the fact that no one believed this team would be any good entering the season, and so few people have looked closely enough to change their minds that the committee feels comfortable ignoring them.
The team the committee can’t ignore, however, is Team C. That would be Colorado. Coach Prime has convinced the world the Buffaloes are for real, even if nothing on their résumé — a No. 77 strength of schedule, worse than 7-2 Western Kentucky‘s — suggests that’s anything close to a certainty.
The Big 12 remains wide open, but it’s to the committee’s detriment that it has so eagerly dismissed two of the better teams just because they’re not as fun to talk about.
Has Missouri played with fire this year? You betcha. Just last week, the Tigers were on the verge of falling to Oklahoma before the Sooners’ woeful QB situation reared its ugly head again and the game ended in a 30-23 Tigers win.
But here’s the thing about playing with fire: So long as you don’t turn your living room into an inferno, it’s actually pretty impressive.
Missouri is 7-2 with wins against SP+ Nos. 26 and 28, and its only losses are to the committee’s No. 10 and No. 15 teams. SP+ has Missouri at No. 17, though we can chalk that up to Connelly’s hometown bias. But No. 23? After a top-10 season in 2023, don’t the Tigers deserve a little benefit of the doubt? They currently trail three three-loss teams (Louisville, South Carolina and LSU) and are behind Boise State, Colorado, Washington State and Clemson, who, combined, have exactly one win over SP+ top-40 teams.
There’s a good chance that, should Brady Cook not return to the lineup, Missouri will get waxed at South Carolina on Saturday, and then the argument is moot. But the committee isn’t supposed to look ahead and take guesses at what it believes might happen (Florida State’s snub last year notwithstanding). It’s supposed to judge based on what’s on the books so far, and putting Missouri this far down the rankings seems more than a tad harsh.
The committee threw a nice bone to the non-Power 4 schools this week, with four teams ranked, including No. 25 Tulane Green Wave. That seems deserved, given Tulane’s recent run. But what is it, exactly, that puts the Green Wave ahead of UNLV?
UNLV has the No. 31 strength of record. Tulane is No. 32.
UNLV has the No. 98 strength of schedule played. Tulane is No. 96.
Tulane has a one-possession loss to a top-20 team. UNLV has a one-possession loss to a top-20 team.
The key difference between the two is UNLV has wins against two Power 4 opponents — Houston and Kansas. Houston, by the way, just knocked off Kansas State, a team that beat Tulane.
So perhaps the committee should spread a bit more love outside the Power 4.
Also Angry: Pittsburgh Panthers (7-2, unranked), Duke Blue Devils (7-3, unranked), Georgia Bulldogs (7-2, No. 12), Utah Utes AD Mark Harlan (the Utes would be ranked if Big 12 Commissioner Brett Yormark hadn’t rigged the system!) and UConn Huskies (7-3, unranked and thus prohibiting us from Jim Mora Jr. giving a “You wanna talk about playoffs?!?” rant).
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Mark Schlabach, ESPN Senior Writer
Oregon remained No. 1 in the second rankings released by the College Football Playoff selection committee on Tuesday night.
The Ducks, who cruised past Maryland 39-18 last week to improve to 10-0, were followed by No. 2 Ohio State, No. 3 Texas, No. 4 Penn State and No. 5 Indiana.
BYU, Tennessee, Notre Dame, Miami, Alabama, Ole Miss and Georgia round out the committee’s top 12.
Miami’s first loss of the season, 28-23 at Georgia Tech, and Georgia’s second defeat, 28-10 at Ole Miss, shook up the committee’s rankings. The Hurricanes fell five spots to No. 9, while the Bulldogs dropped nine spots to No. 12.
Using the current rankings, Oregon (Big Ten), Texas (SEC), BYU (Big 12) and Miami (ACC) would be the four highest-rated conference champions and would receive first-round byes in the 12-team playoff.
Boise State is No. 13 in the committee’s rankings, but the Broncos would be included in the 12-team playoff as the fifth-highest-rated conference champion from the Mountain West.
The first-round matchups would look like this: No. 12 Boise State at No. 5 Ohio State; No. 11 Ole Miss at No. 6 Penn State, No. 10 Alabama at No. 7 Indiana; and No. 9 Notre Dame at No. 8 Tennessee.
Although Georgia, which captured two of the past three CFP national championships, is ranked No. 12 in the committee’s rankings, the Bulldogs would be the first team left out of the 12-team playoff.
SMU is No. 14, followed by Texas A&M, Kansas State, Colorado, Washington State, Louisville and Clemson.
South Carolina, LSU, Missouri, Army and Tulane close out the top 25.
The updated College Football Playoff Top 25 rankings 🏆 pic.twitter.com/ymA9wlI1dB
— ESPN (@espn) November 13, 2024
The Gamecocks and Green Wave made their CFP rankings debuts this season, replacing Iowa State and Pittsburgh, who were Nos. 17 and 18 last week, respectively.
There were nine SEC teams included in the committee’s rankings, four each from the ACC and Big Ten and three from the Big 12.
Georgia, which also fell 41-34 at Alabama on Sept. 28, plays what might be a CFP elimination game against Tennessee at Sanford Stadium on Saturday (7:30 p.m. ET/ABC, ESPN+). Georgia is 14-3 after a loss under coach Kirby Smart, bouncing back after each of its previous eight defeats. The Bulldogs haven’t lost back-to-back games in the regular season since 2016, Smart’s first season coaching his alma mater.
Georgia has defeated Tennessee in seven of its past eight contests, including a 38-10 win on the road last season.
Asked about the CFP implications of the game on Monday, Smart said his team had to solely focus on beating the Volunteers.
“I don’t ever take those approaches,” Smart said. “I don’t think they’re the right way to go about things. I think you’re trying to win your conference all the time, and to do that you’ve got to win your games at home. You’ve got to play well on the road, which we have and haven’t. We’ve done both, but I like making it about who we play and how we play, and less about just outcomes.”
BYU survived a 22-21 scare at Utah last week. With Miami’s loss, the Cougars jumped the Hurricane as the third-highest-rated conference champion. BYU hosts Kansas on Saturday, followed by a road game at Arizona State on Nov. 23 and home game against Houston the next week. According to ESPN Analytics, BYU is the heavy favorite (92%) to earn a spot in the Big 12 title game and also win it (40%).
Army would be the next-highest-rated conference champion behind Boise State, one spot ahead of fellow AAC program Tulane. The Black Knights improved to 9-0 with last week’s 14-3 victory at North Texas. They’ll have their best chance to make a statement to the selection committee in their next game, against Notre Dame at Yankee Stadium in New York on Nov. 23.
The four first-round games will be played at the home campus of the higher-seeded teams on Dec. 20 and 21. The four quarterfinal games will be staged at the VRBO Fiesta Bowl, Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl, Rose Bowl presented by Prudential and Allstate Sugar Bowl on Dec. 31 and Jan. 1.
The two semifinal games will take place at the Capital One Orange Bowl and Goodyear Cotton Bowl on Jan. 9 and 10.
The CFP National Championship presented by AT&T is scheduled for Jan. 20 at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta.
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Paolo Uggetti, ESPN
The USC football program has been fined $50,000 and placed on a one-year probation because of a violation of “on- and off-field coaching activities,” the NCAA announced Tuesday.
After conducting an investigation, the NCAA found that USC exceeded the permissible number of countable coaches by six during the 2022 and 2023 seasons.
“Eight analysts for the football program engaged in on- and off-field coaching activities during spring 2022, fall 2022 and spring 2023, resulting in the football program exceeding the permissible number of countable coaches by six for two academic years,” the NCAA said in its release. “As a result of the violations, the parties also agreed that football head coach Lincoln Riley violated head coach responsibility rules.”
The NCAA said that because some of the violations occurred before rule changes in January 2023 that shifted head coach responsibilities from a rebuttable presumption to an automatic attachment, Riley — who was hired by USC in November 2021 — will not be suspended.
“Because Riley was not personally involved in the violations and demonstrated that he promoted an atmosphere of compliance and monitored his staff, Riley rebutted his presumed responsibility for the violations occurring before the rules change,” the NCAA said. “For the same reasons, the parties also agreed that a suspension penalty for Riley was not appropriate.”
Aside from a year of probation and the $50,000 fine, the NCAA Committee on Infractions approved further penalties. USC will be restricted from having the special teams analyst in practice and film review for six consecutive days during two weeks of the 2024-25 season.
A restriction for the remaining analysts from practice and film review for six consecutive days during four weeks of the 2024-25 season will also be imposed and the school will self-impose a reduction in countable athletically related activities for the football program by 24 hours during the 2023-24 season.
“Since learning of potential violations related to our football program in May 2023, USC has worked cooperatively with the NCAA enforcement staff and with the Committee on Infractions, as we identified and acknowledged violations, issued corrective measures, and submitted a negotiated resolution in a timely fashion that was approved by the Committee,” USC athletic director Jen Cohen said in a statement. “We remain committed to upholding the highest standards of ethical behavior and integrity in our athletic programs.”
Riley, speaking later Tuesday, said he had little to add.
“We’ve had that behind us now for multiple months and have been past it,” he said. “I think you see, with the level of penalties that were levied, in this day and age, that the head coach responsibility thing has really … it’s a big deal, and we get it. If it’s something really big, they’re going to suspend the head coach, so I think that kind of says what it is. We don’t take it lightly, we own the things that we have to correct and we move forward.”
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