Never flashy, almost always successful, Saban leaves a legacy that goes beyond football

Throughout a national era of disillusionment, institutional failure and turmoil, Alabama football has been, above all, a machine of astonishing consistency, humming along at the top level for nearly two decades.

Based on hard work and discipline, Nick Saban, who took over as head football coach at the University of Alabama in 2007, compiled a catalog of accomplishments that Alabama fans will recite at the slightest provocation: a record seven national championships – six of them at Alabama, after one at Louisiana State University – a record 15 consecutive seasons in which the team was ranked No. 1 at one point, a record 44 Alabama players picked in the first round of the NFL draft.

Saban’s pension, announced on Wednesdaycomes after a season that some have argued that it was one of the the best coaching jobs of his career. Even Bill Belichick, the similarly cantankerous New England Patriots coach and Saban’s mentor who parted ways with his team on Thursday after 24 years, seemed to be leaving a year or so too late.

Saban was at times the highest-paid public official in the entire country, a striking illustration of our national priorities, especially in a poor state like Alabama. But his successes on the field helped change the way people thought about the state and the university.

In the late 1990s, when Alabama football was an afterthought, the state was usually in the news for no good reason, says Chris England, now a state lawmaker who represents part of Tuscaloosa. When he told his classmates at Howard University in Washington DC that he was from Alabama, they said, “Wow, how do you live there?”

It’s not like that anymore.

“A few years ago I was in Turkey and I was sitting in the middle of a hotel lobby wearing an Alabama shirt and people started shouting ‘Roll Tide!’ to scream,” England recalled. “It changed the response.”

The timing of this was fortunate. During Saban’s years in Tuscaloosa, the state began a long series of national embarrassments: major corruption scandals, the resignation of a governor due to leaked recordings of his humiliating dirty talk and the whole circus surrounding Roy Moore’s candidacy for the US Senate in 2017. (Saban received 426 write-in votes in that election.)

Seeing Alabama in national headlines often brought a shudder of fear, like watching a drunken relative rise for a wedding toast.

But you can also just go to the sports pages. Here, next to photos of Saban pacing the sidelines with dyspeptic determination, Alabama was synonymous with discipline and performance.

This had been the case decades earlier, when Paul “Bear” Bryant was Alabama’s coach and seemed to set an impossible standard at the time. But Saban not only matched (and surpassed) Bryant’s achievements, he also brought a philosophical worldview that became as much a part of the program’s identity as its success on the field.

Saban embraced what he called “the process,” insisting that players focus entirely on what was required of them on each play, rather than what was on the scoreboard. He preached a restless perfectionism and a deep allergy to praise, which he called ‘rat poison’.

It was out of step with the direction of college football and the broader culture, and became even more so. With his permanent grimace and unwillingness to discuss much of anything other than schedules and player development, Saban was almost the antithesis of camera-ready. But we enjoyed watching it so much.

Saban reluctantly but with incredible success adapted to the changing pace of college football, ultimately recruiting some of the sport’s most dynamic quarterbacks. But true Saban aficionados knew him as the avatar of what was often called “joyless murderball”: a steady, unexciting but unrelenting conquest.

That’s not the way politics is typically done in Alabama, where the approach has tended to be big on defiance and less on the details. Take Saban’s former intrastate foe Tommy Tuberville, the former Auburn University coach and now a Republican U.S. senator best known for his ostentatious blocking of hundreds of military promotions.

Saban has never been described as flashy. He had one job, focused on it relentlessly, and succeeded far beyond anything Alabama fans could have ever dreamed of. He did it so consistently and for so long, said England, the state lawmaker, that fans who came of age in Alabama had no other experience to compare it to.

“All he knows is that we’re the best, and we always have been,” England said of his own 14-year-old son, nervously anticipating what lay ahead. “He never knew what it was like to be terrible.”