The numbers show Nick Saban is the best college football coach ever

For an entire era, Nick Saban completely shattered the definition of success in college football.

Mark Richt has won at least nine games in 11 of 15 years at Georgia, with two conference titles and seven top 10 finishes, one fewer than the legendary Vince Dooley did in 25 years. Richt was fired after the last of those nine winning seasons.

Les Miles never won fewer than eight games in 11 full seasons at LSU. He won a national title with five top-10 finishes, more than the Tigers had managed in the 35 years before he was hired. He was fired after losing two matches in early 2016.

After a string of six straight top-three finishes with two national titles, Dabo Swinney's Clemson has simply averaging 10 wins over the last three years, and it feels like a bit of a crisis. Lincoln Riley has won 65 games in six full seasons and Ryan Day has won 46 in four, and they both face extreme pressure and doubt. And although I'm not going to pretend that's the case all because of one man in Tuscaloosa – losing three straight to Michigan, as Day did, will always test the patience of Ohio State fans, for example – the relentless and consistent success of Saban has scrambled the brains of fans and administrators throughout the sport.

Simply put, Nick Saban, who announced his retirement from coaching Wednesday, was the best and most successful coach in college football history. No one – not Bear Bryant, not Bobby Bowden, not Bud Wilkinson, not Bernie Bierman, not Frank Leahy, not Woody Hayes, not Walter Camp – can match his seven national titles. And even though the College Football Playoff didn't come into existence until Saban had already won four titles, it would take Swinney two more trips or Kirby Smart five more trips to match Saban's eight appearances in 10 years.

But it's not just about the titles. Random losses happen and can derail title attempts, but even when Saban's Alabama teams don't win the title, they are almost always titled.worthy.

Here's a complete list of teams that finished first or second in SP+ – my opponent-adjusted power rating – for at least five consecutive seasons:

• Penn, 1894 to 1898 (five years)

• Michigan, 1901 to 1905 (five)

• Georgia Tech, 1917 to 1921 (five)

• USC, 1925 to 1929 (five)

• Ole Miss, 1959 to 1963 (five)

• Miami, 1986 to 1991 (six)

• Yale, 1884 to 1895 (12)

• Alabama, 2009 to 2021 (13)

Miami's near-perfect five-year streak was good enough to inspire a 30-for-30. It was the only such streak between the mid-1960s and mid-2000s. But at a time when scholarships are limited to 85 players and where national title races are tougher — a guaranteed 1-on-2 game starting in 1998, a four-team playoff starting in 2014 — Saban's Crimson Tide is more than double Miami's race outpaced Yale's, even in the late 1800s, which only had to compete with a few dozen football schools.

And even that doesn't fully capture the brilliance of Saban's run, because it doesn't capture the complete and utter reinvention that happened halfway through.

Saban won BCS national titles in 2009, 2011 and 2012 with supernatural defense; SP+, in fact, ranks the 2011 unit – which allowed 8.2 points per game and just 3.3 yards per play, pitched a shutout in the BCS Championship and allowed more than 14 points just once all season – as the best defense in college football. history. But he noticed that the sport was becoming more and more offensive. “Is this what we want football to be?” he famously asked about the sport's increasing pace and points totals in 2012. But as the joke goes, he wasn't complaining – he was just confirming. Because starting with the hiring of Lane Kiffin as offensive coordinator in 2014, he oriented his program more toward that side of the ball.

“It used to be that good defense beats good offense,” he told ESPN’s Chris Low in 2020. “Good defense doesn’t beat good offense anymore. […] In the past, if you had a good defense, others weren't going to score. You were always going to be in the game. I'm telling you, it's not like that anymore.”

So be it: after ranking first or second in defensive SP+ for 10 straight years from 2008 to 2017, his Tide ranked first in offense for five consecutive years from 2018 to 2022. He completely reinvented his program, and his overall level never really declined. The Tide continued to place first or second overall every year and never went more than three years without another national title.

Until 2023. It stands to reason that even when Bama's level finally dropped a bit – even though the offense briefly battled its first quarterback crisis in years and the Tide lost at home to Texas by 10 points and had to survive four one-scores and a number of mediocre performances by their standards – Saban's last team still went 11-1 in the regular season, won the SEC and derailed Georgia's nearly two-year winning streak and its hopes for a third straight national title. The Tide unfairly earned a CFP bid against undefeated Florida State, but whether it was deserved or not, they came close to beating eventual national champion Michigan once they got there. Saban seemed to hate dealing with collectives and the NIL era, and he didn't dive into the transfer portal, but he continued to set the bar incredibly high when it came to recruiting talent, and his worst team in 15 years was still excellent. the standards of anyone other than Saban himself.

While he dominated college football, he also defined its future, hiring the coaches who would fill seemingly every important position around him. At Michigan State, he hired future MSU head coach, playoff appearance and soon-to-be Hall of Fame inductee Mark Dantonio. At LSU, Saban employed future national champion Jimbo Fisher, as well as future SEC head coaches Will Muschamp and Dooley and future NFL head coaches Pat Shurmur and Adam Gase. Bama's staff was constantly under attack from rivals hoping to find their own Saban. Current Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian, Ole Miss' Lane Kiffin, Oregon's Dan Lanning, Florida's Billy Napier, Maryland's Mike Locksley, Miami's Mario Cristobal, Indiana's Curt Cignetti, Charles Huff of Marshall, Butch Jones of Arkansas State and Jim McElwain of Central Michigan are among the active ones. coaches who spent time under Saban in Tuscaloosa, as did Brian Daboll of the New York Giants. Hell, even Saban's Miami Dolphins team included a number of future NFL coaches.

And then there was Kirby Smart. The former Georgia safety joined Saban's LSU staff in 2004, then earned an assistant role with Saban's Dolphins in 2006. And from 2007 to 2015, Smart served as the star's true right-hand man sports coach. In 2016, he replaced Richt at UGA and began building the only Death Star that could consistently rival Saban's. Georgia lost a decisive game to Bama in the national title game in 2017, but returned the favor in 2021, then won a second title a year later. The Dawgs have finished first or second in SP+ for three straight years, and while that's still 10 years before Saban's incredible run, if any active coach has a chance to match Saban's feats, it's his most great protégé.

By the way, Saban's last victory went to Smart. There is poetry in that.

Michigan State was stuck in a rut when Saban started his first Power 5 head coaching job there in 1995. The Spartans averaged just 5.9 wins per season in the seven years before his arrival, and after A few years in the making, its last MSU team went 10-2 with a top 10 finish in 1999.

LSU was considered a sleeping giant for decades when Saban moved to Baton Rouge in 2000. The Tigers had only one top-five finish between 1962 and 1999 and had averaged 5.5 wins over the previous 12 years. . Saban averaged 9.6, breaking through with a 10-win campaign in 2001 and a national title in 2003.

Alabama, of course, was in spectacular disaster when he finally gave in to athletic director Mal Moore's persistent pleas and signed up after a brief stint in the NFL. Despite winning the national title in 1992, the Tide had averaged 8.1 wins per year with three top-five finishes in the 24 years since Bear Bryant's retirement. Between 1997 and 2006, the school hired four head coaches and finished with a mark of .500 or lower five times. Promoters and administrators were pulling the program in about 17 different directions, but after just one year of transition, Saban had everything lined up. And he unleashed a dominance we may never see again.