The Dawn of a New Era, in Nick Saban’s Shadow
Alabama enters the 2024 season without the greatest coach in college football history. Saban’s absence leaves the Crimson Tide seeking a new identity—and the sport as a whole seeking a familiar force amid the chaos.The Dawn of a New Era, in Nick Saban’s Shadow
Alabama enters the 2024 season without the greatest coach in college football history. Saban’s absence leaves the Crimson Tide seeking a new identity—and the sport as a whole seeking a familiar force amid the chaos.
On a hot summer day in Dallas, a 72-year-old retiree walks through a cavernous hotel ballroom, followed by cameras and flanked by microphones, trying to find a seat. Technically, no one is here to see Nick Saban, but at SEC media days old habits persist. Saban is short and slender, but in college football he remains a giant, the centripetal force that has long kept the sport on its axis. And now that he’s arrived, players, coaches, and reporters are all drawn into his orbit.
There is Georgia’s Kirby Smart, now the favorite to take Saban’s place as the preeminent head coach in college football, pausing his opening statement to say of Saban: “The demand for excellence is met by none other than him.”
There is Ole Miss’s Lane Kiffin, once Saban’s embattled offensive coordinator and now the coach of a Rebels team picked by many to challenge for the SEC title, paying tribute to Saban by recycling one of his old lines: Kiffin referred to praise from the media as “rat poison.”
Then there is Tyler Booker, Alabama’s junior offensive guard, laughing when asked about his former coach picking Georgia and Texas—not Alabama—to meet in this year’s SEC championship game. “He always said, ‘Don’t let some guy who lives in their mom’s basement determine how you feel,’” Booker says. “I’m not gonna let a guy who played golf all day determine how I feel.”
No longer the coach at Alabama, where he dominated college football for 17 years, Saban is here as an analyst for ESPN. All week, though, reporters follow him around as if from muscle memory.
“Nick, a lot of people say we need a commissioner in college football,” a reporter says during a small media session tucked away in a private room one morning. “If we ever got to that point, do you have any interest in that?”
Saban smiles, shakes his head, then defers to his wife of 52 years, the longtime first lady of Alabama football.
“You need to ask Miss Terry,” he says.
College football is a sport in transition. That’s putting it gently. You could also say it’s a sport in crisis, or in chaos, or less a coherent “sport” than a mishmash of competing stakeholders: university presidents, conference commissioners, NIL agencies, and television executives all trying to secure the largest available piece of a fast-expanding revenue pie. On Saturdays each fall, young men step onto football fields across the country to play the game they love. Virtually every other moment of the year, thousands of others fight over how to make the most money off of what happens between those lines.
The playoff keeps expanding. The tectonic plates of the sport’s conferences continue to shift. The transfer portal and NIL have fundamentally revamped recruiting. Some of these changes are unwelcome, depending on whom you ask. Many of them are long overdue. “I think players should be compensated,” Saban says. But, he adds, “the implementation needs to be fixed.”
Through all of this change, Saban had remained the sport’s lone constant. He outlasted most every challenger to his throne. Between his debut season at Alabama in 2007 and his final game with the Crimson Tide last January, he watched Urban Meyer resign from both Florida and Ohio State and get fired by the Jacksonville Jaguars. He watched Gus Malzahn go from being his chief SEC rival at Auburn to the head coach posting a record below .500 at UCF. He watched Dabo Swinney slip from being the architect of college football’s supposed next dynasty to someone who draws criticism for his unwillingness to accept the sport’s rapidly evolving landscape. Even Smart has more national titles (two) than wins over his mentor (one). Saban has a career record of 5-1 against his former defensive coordinator and protégé.
Most old-school coaches didn’t evolve. He’s always evolved, even though in a lot of ways he’s conservative.Lane Kiffin
It never mattered who played in what league, how many teams got a shot to play for the national title, or how much money boosters could pay players: Down in Tuscaloosa, the juggernaut Saban built was fully prepared to kick your ass. He won three national championships in the BCS era (not counting the one he won at LSU after the 2003 season) and three more in the four-team playoff era; if he had wanted to coach a few more years, it stands to reason that he could have won a championship in the 12-team playoff era, too. He won SEC titles back when stars got suspended for accepting money to sign autographs, and he won SEC titles when one of the league’s starting quarterbacks, Georgia’s Carson Beck, drove around his college town in a Lamborghini. Before the transfer portal became a fixture of the sport, Saban won by developing future NFL stars such as Julio Jones and Derrick Henry. After the transfer portal became a fixture, he won by luring future NFL stars such as Jameson Williams (from Ohio State) and Jahmyr Gibbs (from Georgia Tech). He won by not only creating the Process, but adapting it.
“Most kinda old-school coaches didn’t evolve,” Kiffin says at media days. “They weren’t willing to change. They weren’t willing to take risks. … He’s always evolved, even though in a lot of ways he’s conservative and old school. He evolves and takes risks.”
And yet, the Crimson Tide haven’t won any of the past three national titles—the program’s longest drought since Saban took over. When Saban chose to step away, Bama’s stranglehold on the rest of the sport had undoubtedly begun to loosen. “I got to the point,” Saban says, “where it was difficult for me to sustain things the way I needed to sustain them to be satisfied with myself. So the last year was hard.”
This ushers in a different type of transition from what college football has recently experienced. When LSU won the national championship after the 2019 season, it had been 12 years since the program’s last title. When Michigan won it all in January, it had been 26 years since the Wolverines reigned supreme. Clemson waited 35 years for a national title before winning one after the 2016 season, and Georgia ended a 41-year drought when it triumphed after the 2021 campaign.
An entire generation of Georgia parents had not seen its team win a title until this decade. In Alabama, the only people who haven’t been alive for a Tide title are babies and toddlers.
Just beneath the escalator descending from the ballroom that hosts SEC media days, a grown man stands in a Crimson Tide poncho and a luchador mask, with a “Bama Boyz” chain hanging from his neck and a makeshift hammer hoisted to the sky. He goes by the moniker Nacho Alabamo. “My kids are already a little embarrassed,” he jokes of his persona. “So I don’t give out my real name.”
Nacho, as we’ll call him, is originally from Danville, California, an inland suburb about an hour outside of San Francisco. He moved to Mississippi in adulthood and fell in love with an Alabama grad. Still, he didn’t care much for Tide football at first, until their son was touring colleges and the family went to a Bama home game against an FCS team. “I got in that stadium,” Nacho says, “and I thought, ‘Oh my god. This is unbelievable.’ I had been to maybe 25 NFL games—not a single one of them compared to this. And it was against a cupcake! During the game, my son turned to me and said, ‘Dad, there’s nowhere else I want to go.’ And I’m like, ‘Roll Tide.’”
Soon Nacho had season tickets, a packed tailgate, and a travel trailer to take on the road. Then, in 2018, he bought the Alabama poncho, which he found in a shop on vacation in Costa Maya, Mexico. Later, he added the mask, and then the hammer, and soon cameras began to find him in the stands at Alabama games. Loving Bama football has since become one of the defining facts of his life—a shared passion that connects him to his wife and his children, that puts him on airplanes across the country, and that ties him to a community of friends and strangers every fall Saturday.
On January 10 of this year, Nacho had a doctor’s appointment. Like everyone else in his life, Nacho’s doctor knows all about his love for the Tide, so he asked: “How much longer do you think Saban can go?”
“Oh,” Nacho remembers saying, “easily three or four more years. He’s still on top of things. He loves what he does.” He left the appointment, got back in his car, and saw that he had several text messages about a news conference Alabama had scheduled for later that afternoon. “I just assumed they were announcing the new offensive coordinator or something,” he says. “That was all.”
But that wasn’t all. The news broke, reported first by Chris Low of ESPN, that Saban was retiring. “It was devastating,” Nacho says.
The day most Bama fans dreaded had arrived. And even though Saban was north of 70 years old, it still felt abrupt. Joe Gaither, who covers Alabama football and recruiting for the online outlet BamaCentral, remembers scrambling to get to campus, where he’d heard Saban had called a team meeting, and then trying to confirm with players that the news was true. “They had all been told not to say anything,” he says. But within a matter of minutes, the university released a statement, making the news official.
Gaither and other reporters raced to find any information on who the next coach might be. “That three or four days was insane,” he says. Who could possibly fill the shoes of a legend? What would the program look like without the man around whom it’d shaped its identity? Some candidates who emerged were sentimental (Kiffin), while others were pipe dreams (Smart). Oregon’s Dan Lanning and Florida State’s Mike Norvell announced that they were staying put.
Those clamoring for answers didn’t have to wait long. Alabama athletic director Greg Byrne told the players to give him 72 hours and he would have their new coach. Within two days, he had found the candidate willing to replace the man who’d set a new standard for dominance in college football: former Washington head coach Kalen DeBoer.
Anvil-jawed and stone-eyed, DeBoer does not seem like the kind of man to be intimidated by whoever previously held his job. When he walks to the podium at SEC media days, in a gray suit and crimson tie with an Alabama logo pinned to his lapel, he certainly looks the part. Yet there is something jarring about his presence. Namely, it’s that this stern-voiced figure at the podium is not the person who has stood at similar podiums talking about Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pies and “rat poison” for the past 17 years. DeBoer seems to recognize this. So much so that when he references Saban in his opening statement, he doesn’t even use his name.
“I do want to, first of all, congratulate Coach,” DeBoer says, and every single person watching, both in this room and on television, knows exactly what he means. “I think on behalf of everyone with Alabama football and the University of Alabama, we appreciate everything Coach has done to make the foundation strong where we can continue to build on it.”
DeBoer’s rise up the sport’s coaching ladder has been meteoric. He was the offensive coordinator and then head coach at the University of Sioux Falls (then an NAIA school) in the early aughts, before taking assistant gigs at Southern Illinois, Eastern Michigan, Fresno State, and Indiana. He landed his first Division I head-coaching job at Fresno State in 2020; two years later, he was hired at Washington, where he led the Huskies to the national championship game in January. DeBoer has won at every level, losing only 12 games in nine seasons as a head coach. His origins are so humble that they have inspired apocryphal stories. “I did not drive the bus,” he says at the podium of his days in Sioux Falls, correcting a reporter who suggested otherwise. “But that’s what the stories and the legends will be down the road.”
He does concede that coaching at that level involves a certain drudgery: cutting up film, cleaning the locker room, organizing equipment before practices and games. Now, DeBoer has inherited an army of recruiting staffers and coaching analysts, an infrastructure built by the man who was at the forefront of college football’s arms race for nearly two decades. “It allows me to really focus on the things that I really love to do,” DeBoer says. “That’s build relationships with these guys and dive into the football and coach these guys up and help them be the best they can be.”
When Alabama’s players heard that Saban was retiring, the team’s veteran leaders met in a small group. “We all got together,” says Booker, “and made the choice: We were going to keep this team together.” Booker, quarterback Jalen Milroe, safety Malachi Moore, and others decided that they weren’t going anywhere before they even knew who was coming to replace Saban. And they made it their goal to get as many of their teammates on board as they could. “Don’t make any rash decisions,” Moore remembers telling the younger players.
After Alabama had its man, Moore was impressed by how quickly DeBoer had accepted the challenge. “I knew that I was going to have respect for whoever stood up and took the job after Coach Saban,” Moore says. “I told Coach DeBoer when he first got here how much respect I had for him just coming here, behind the greatest coach of all time. Leaving the team that just went to a national championship and coming here and taking on the job … it says a lot about him as a man.”
I don’t want to disparage the fan base, but if we’re being honest here, I think that really there’s this sense that, ‘This is Alabama football. We deserve to be in the national championship, no matter who’s the coach.’Joe Gaither, BamaCentral
There were defections, of course. Safety Caleb Downs, perhaps the best freshman defender in the country last season, transferred to Ohio State. Incoming freshman quarterback Julian Sayin, a five-star recruit, defected to the Buckeyes too, leaving Alabama’s campus days after he arrived. Game-breaking wide receiver Isaiah Bond left for Texas. Former five-star offensive tackle Kadyn Proctor transferred to Iowa and then transferred right back. Milroe says that the team’s leaders tried to make clear to their teammates that the program wasn’t defined by any single person—not even the greatest coach in the history of the sport. “This is our team,” he says.
After meeting with veteran leaders to solicit input on how he should mold the program, DeBoer has begun to implement changes. His office now looks made for TV; Saban’s was decorated like a country club meeting room. DeBoer allows music during practice, which he says helps with energy and simulates the kinds of distractions players face on game day; Saban sometimes played simulated crowd noise but no music. And DeBoer moved practice up from the afternoon to the morning. “We like it a lot,” Booker says of the change in schedule. “It’s definitely going to give us a lot more time on the back end of the day to have time with our teammates, to go over film with our coaches, take care of our bodies, eat more if we need to. It just gives us more time.”
Going into this season, Alabama is ranked fifth in both the AP and Coaches polls. The SEC media picked the Tide to finish third in the conference, behind Georgia and Texas—the same two teams that Saban himself picked to play for the conference title. But there’s plenty of reason to think Alabama can compete for another national title right away. For one, DeBoer just took a Washington team with less talent (albeit with multiple future first-round NFL draft picks at skill positions) to the national championship game. For another, he’s shown himself to be an offensive wizard, and he’s never worked with a roster as deep as the one he inherited from Saban.
Milroe flashed dazzling potential as a runner and deep passer in 2023, and DeBoer seems well-equipped to help his quarterback become more consistent and complete in his second season as a starter. And Milroe feels that the resolve his teammates showed over the offseason should give fans reason for belief. “This is a team; they could have went anywhere they wanted to, but they stayed grounded,” he says. “We have a special group.”
Of course, at Alabama, the bar for success is loftier than anywhere else. Many Crimson Tide fans say they would feel OK with a 10-2 season, maybe even 9-3. DeBoer deserves time to adjust, they say. He’s already recruiting well, with the second-highest-ranked 2025 class in the country, according to 247Sports. Give him a couple of years to get his system in place.
Gaither, though, thinks a pocket of the fan base has forgotten what it feels like to suffer. “I don’t want to disparage the fan base,” he says, “but if we’re being honest here, I think that really there’s this sense that, ‘This is Alabama football. We deserve to be in the national championship, no matter who’s the coach.’”
Gaither has seen up close what it takes to build a dynasty. He was a student assistant at Alabama in 2008, Saban’s second year at the helm, when the Tide made the leap from SEC also-ran to juggernaut. After going 7-6 in Saban’s first year, Alabama went 12-0 in his second, winning at Georgia and LSU before narrowly losing to Tim Tebow’s Florida Gators in the SEC championship game. Gaither barely spoke to Saban beyond exchanging a quick hello in the hallways of the facility, but even as a student assistant, he could tell how encompassing the program-wide attention to detail was. “He was on a mission,” Gaither says. “Everyone was on a mission. It was always, ‘How are you maximizing your time right now?’ For every single person in that building, that was the mentality.”
Every year, at worst, we won an SEC championship. And if it’s just an SEC championship, that’s a bad year.Sam Kornegay
While Gaither believes that DeBoer looks like a great hire, he is tempering his expectations for the program without Saban. “If you’re expecting six national championships over the next 17 years, you’re probably crazy,” Gaither says. And yet, an entire generation of Alabama fans has no idea what it’s like to be merely a great college football program rather than the most indestructible force in the sport’s modern history. Sam Kornegay, an Alabama student and a Tuscaloosa native who has cheered for the Tide since before he could talk, tells me he can remember one game before Saban was Alabama’s coach. Kornegay was 4 years old. “I didn’t even realize that we were terrible,” he says.
It has been a steady stream of triumphs ever since. That extends beyond the field. “The whole town has transformed,” Kornegay says. Between 2007, when Saban was hired, and 2022, the university saw its enrollment grow by 51 percent, its physical footprint nearly double, and its endowment triple. Applications have nearly doubled over the past decade, with 79 percent of Alabama applicants coming from out of state.
Anyone who showed up in Tuscaloosa motivated by love for the football team was rewarded. “Every year, at worst, we won an SEC championship,” Kornegay says. “And if it’s just an SEC championship, that’s a bad year.” This sounds like hyperbole, but it’s almost true. Since 2010, Alabama has completed only three seasons—2013, 2019, and 2022—in which it won neither the SEC nor the national championship. “I think there’s a real sense of entitlement,” Gaither says, “that Coach Saban has perpetuated through the younger fan base.”
Already, Gaither says, after Alabama went three years without winning a national title, some fans were starting to wonder if the times had passed Saban by. “It’s not exactly a ‘good riddance’ for Coach,” Gaither says, “but I do think that with the changes in college football over the last five years, there’s been a little bit of, ‘Go enjoy your retirement, boomer. Thank you for all you did, but we gotta get back up to speed.’” Gaither chuckles at the absurdity of this while nodding to its source. “I think it’s just born out of a sense of entitlement that he created.”
Therein lies a strange truth: Winning is wonderful, but expecting to win every game is exhausting. For years, week after week, Alabama fans felt mostly one of only two emotions: disappointment or relief. Losses were catastrophic, whereas wins mostly served as data points in answering the perennial question: Are we gonna win another natty?
“Fans rob themselves of joy,” Gaither says, “by not understanding how hard it is to win.”
A personal note: I’m a lifelong Georgia fan who spends a considerable amount of time in Alabama, where my wife is from. For much of the past decade, on trips to Alabama, I have wondered aloud with my in-laws about when Saban might retire. For me, like fans of so many other major programs, Saban’s aging long seemed to offer a glimmer of hope. Not that he would ever lose a step, of course. But that, someday, finally, he would decide that he was ready for whatever his life held next.
Finally, that someday has arrived. So on a drive back to my home in Nashville from Tuscaloosa, I stop in Birmingham, at Miss Myra’s Pit Bar-B-Q, where the walls are adorned with newspaper clippings and photos of Saban, Bear Bryant, and a smattering of the men who have played under their watch. There, I order a pulled pork plate doused in Alabama white sauce and talk with the two rabid Tide fans I happen to know best: my in-laws, Allen and Janice.
I love these two, deeply. Both are warm, kind, thoughtful, and compassionate. But on fall Saturdays, well, we keep our distance. I’ve told Janice it astonishes me how the same person who fills me with gratitude in her capacity as a mother to my wife and a grandmother to my son can fill me with rage in her capacity as a smart-ass, shit-talking, rub-it-in-your-face-and-laugh-while-you-cry Alabama fan. And as for Allen, I have attended one football game with him: the 2012 SEC championship between Alabama and my beloved Bulldogs. I consider it among the worst days of my life.
But on this day in July, with the season fast approaching, I want to see how they’re feeling about Saban’s retirement and the start of a new era. “Honestly,” Allen says, “I think it’s going to be really exciting.” A change at the helm has given Bama fans something many had forgotten: the thrill of the unknown.
Besides, for an older generation of Bama fans, everything about the Saban era felt like a gift. Janice remembers going to the homecoming game every year with her parents as a little girl, when tickets for the family were cheaper than hiring a babysitter, and watching Bryant lead demolitions of whoever was unfortunate enough to line up on the other side. Allen’s family moved from North Carolina to Birmingham in 1976 and quickly fell in love with the Tide. His father used to celebrate big touchdowns by walking out on the back porch, firing his shotgun into the sky, and screaming “Roll Tide!” loud enough for the neighbors to hear and shout it back in return.
Alabama was dominant then, led by the greatest coach in the history of the sport. “Everybody thought there would never be another Bear Bryant,” Janice says. “I think that was always how we were going to measure every team.”
And after Bryant stepped down, Bama fans wandered through the wilderness for decades. Gene Stallings led the Tide to a national championship in 1992, but, mostly, the ’80s, ’90s, and early aughts were defined by teams that had plenty of promise but couldn’t put it all together. Any Bama fan of Janice’s generation can rattle off the list of subpar coaches, as she does: “Ray Perkins, Bill Curry, Dennis Franchione, all of the Mikes [DuBose, Shula, and Price, who got fired before he ever coached a game].”
Then along came Saban. Lured back to college from a miserable stint with the Miami Dolphins, days after publicly declaring he would not be Alabama’s coach. He brought back the dominance older fans thought they had lost forever when Bryant retired. And then he surpassed it. And so, when Saban decided to step away, Janice and Allen’s immediate feeling was gratitude. “I admire him,” Janice says, “for deciding it’s time. He’s earned the right to make that decision. It’s time for him to get to have a life, too.”
Retirement suits him. At least, that’s how it seems back in Dallas, in the small meeting room where Saban is addressing reporters. His smile is bright, his skin bronze. When he’s answering questions, his rougher edges seem to have been sanded down a little. It’s easy to see why so many people who are connected to the sport—Alabama fans or not—want him back. Why so many people feel that college football isn’t really college football without him.
Hence the question: Would you consider being commissioner? Saban grins at it, at the notion that anyone curious would ask him without first consulting Miss Terry. College football long orbited around Saban, but now Saban’s life orbits around other priorities, including a simpler set of tasks. “I go to play golf at 7:30,” he says. “I can’t get to the ninth hole without getting a text of, ‘This is what I want you to do. ... All the chores you have.’”
He stops, looks around the room, and shakes his head. “I mean, at least let me finish my round. It’s not like it’s gonna get done any faster. Right?”
And then he stands to move on to the next room, where he’ll be surrounded by a different throng of people, many of them powerless against the impulse to follow him, some a little bereft. Nick Saban is here, physically, but the feelings of familiarity he once inspired are gone. A new season is dawning, and those in Alabama and far beyond will have to figure out what comes next in college football without the man who long bent the sport to his will.