The football coaching carousel is spinning at warp speed at the collegiate and NFL levels.
Insurance pitchman Nick Saban retired from Alabama at the age of 72, leaving others to sort out where the industry goes with the Name. Imagine, Likeness madness, heavy transfer portal traffic, and the endless conference instability.
Saban have more free time to film commercials with that duck.
Michigan Man Jim Harbaugh seems destined to land back in the NFL, especially given the upheaval at that level.
To that point, the Seattle Seahawks clipped Pete Carroll after a 14-season run that he clearly wanted to extend with more sideline jumping jacks. That brought the list of NFL teams looking for a new head coach to six.
Oh, and Bill Belichick is on the way out of New England. He doesn’t seem inclined to retire his hoodie, so he is hitting the marketplace too after Patriots owner Robert Kraft had the temerity to turn him loose.
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Saban, Belichick, Harbaugh, Carroll . . . this is a Who’s Who list of coaches either changing places or shutting ‘er down.
The next few weeks will be crazy. How would you like to be the guy who replaces Saban at Alabama? As the old adage goes, you want to be the guy who replaces the guy who replaced The Guy.
Dare we suggest Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin take on Mission: Impossible?
With Belichick exiting New England, just-fired Tennessee Titans coach Mike Vrabel would be a fine candidate for the Patriots. And if Belichick wants to keep coaching, the Atlanta Falcons could offer the right opportunity.
Harbaugh is taking this week to bask in his national championship glory, but he is the subject of much speculation for the Los Angeles Raiders and Washington Commanders. His new agent, Don Yee, is presumably working the phones as you read this.
Here is what folks were writing about Saban’s exit from college football:
Dan Wolken, USA Today
“Maybe we should have seen it coming when Nick Saban, the greatest college football coach who ever lived, bought a $17.5 million mansion in Florida last spring. Or when he finally took that delayed 50th anniversary vacation in Italy and not only realized the world wasn’t going to end, but that he was capable of having a good time despite being thousands of miles and several time zones away from his office. Or when he jogged a victory lap around Bryant-Denny Stadium this October, waving to fans after Alabama beat Tennessee. All along, the signs were hidden in plain sight. Saban, at age 72 and understanding how rapidly college athletics were changing, finally had enough. Congratulations to him on a job more than well-done. Pity the rest of us who will never see his kind again. There is an entire generation of young people old enough to drive cars who have never lived in a world without Saban churning out championships. They can’t conceive what college football was like as Alabama yawed aimlessly and embarrassingly from Dennis Franchione to Mike Price to Mike Shula. They will never be able to appreciate just how remarkable it was for Saban to figure it all out and build a Death Star like nobody had ever seen, within the span of a couple of years.”
Ryan McGee, ESPN.com
“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 . . . 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.”
Dennis Dodd, CBSSports.com
“Saban cornered the market on titles, but he did it during the most competitive period in college football history. He's responsible for much of that. Recruiting has never been more intense. Still, Saban and Alabama largely dominated with by far and away the most top-ranked classes (10) since 2010. Though the stretch was started by Florida, the SEC has won 13 national titles across the last 18 seasons; Alabama's six account for nearly half of that accomplishment. The former Kent State defensive back from Fairmont, West Virginia, has at the center of it all, ruling his sport like no other coach before him. It took Bryant 22 years to win his six national championships. Saban did it in a 12-year span at Alabama. Game, set, match that, college football! It won't. Beginning this season with the expanded 12-team College Football Playoff, it will become even more difficult to raise the trophy at season's end. Saban stepped away before he would have participated in his fourth different postseason era — the old bowl system, BCS, CFP and expanded CFP. He coached in eight bowl games, won three conference titles and a national championship before taking over Alabama.”
Stewart Mandel, The Athletic
“To successfully build a national championship contender, first at LSU in the early 2000s, then nearly every single year for the past 17 at Alabama, all he had to do was this: out-recruit nearly every school in the country; hit on far more evaluations than he missed; manage the egos of 85 players, all of whom arrived expecting to become first-round draft picks; oversee a coaching and support staff that had ballooned to roughly 50 people; and juggle countless administrative and media obligations. And then he had to coach the games. And they weren’t nearly as easy as he made them look.”
Bill Connelly, ESPN.com
“For an entire era, Nick Saban completely broke the definition of success in college football. Mark Richt won at least nine games in 11 of 15 years at Georgia, with two conference titles and seven top-10 finishes, just one fewer than the legendary Vince Dooley had in 25 years. Richt was fired after the last of those nine-win 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 his hire. He was fired after losing two games early in 2016. After a run of six straight top-three finishes with two national titles, Dabo Swinney’s Clemson has merely averaged 10 wins over the past three years, and it kind of seems like a crisis. Lincoln Riley has won 65 games in six full-length seasons and Ryan Day has won 46 in four, and they're both facing extreme pressure and doubt. And while I'm not going to pretend this is all because of one man in Tuscaloosa — losing three straight to Michigan, as Day has, will always test the patience of Ohio State fans, for instance — Saban's relentlessly consistent success scrambled the brains of fans and administrators throughout the sport. Simply put, Nick Saban ... was the best, 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 while the College Football Playoff didn't come into existence until Saban had already won four titles, it will still take Swinney two more trips or Kirby Smart five more trips to match Saban's eight appearances in 10 years.”
Barry Svrluga, Washington Post
“College football is unstable. What is it without Saban, the epitome of stability? By their nature, college sports produce outsize coaches. The players change. The coaches stay. They define programs. They define conferences. They provide the television programming. They’re the constants. In that prism, Saban was an alpha: steadfast, stern, disciplined and demanding. It’s simple to call him old-school, but that’s not really right. He’s a defensive coach by training — and, frankly, personality — his most recent Alabama teams were absolute TNT on offense. Why? Because college offenses began spreading the field, so for Saban to try to win the way he did as a player under Don James at Kent State or in his early coaching days at Toledo or as Bill Belichick’s defensive coordinator with the Cleveland Browns or at Michigan State — it just wouldn’t work anymore. The great ones are grounded in principles. But the great ones also know when and how to adjust. None did so better than Saban. Because he is retiring at this point in college football’s evolution — with name, image and likeness rights bringing players riches and the transfer portal allowing them de facto free agency — it will be easy to say he’s stepping down because he didn’t want to deal with what so many coaches consider distracting nonsense anymore. Maybe that’s part of the reason. Maybe it’s the whole reason. Indeed, he said a few times recently, ‘Is this what we want college football to be?’ We won’t know the full reason until he speaks, and even then maybe he’ll provide only part of the answer.”
Connor O’Gara, Saturday Down South
“The debate following Wednesday’s bombshell news shouldn’t be whether Saban is the best of all time. He earned the right to stand alone in that discussion, which should’ve been put to bed when he passed Paul ‘Bear’ Bryant to get ring No. 7. Nah, the debate is about who the new king of college football is. For my money, it’s not the guy who stood atop the college football world on Monday night (are we sure Jim Harbaugh would be around long enough to accept that?). It’s definitely not Dabo Swinney, AKA the guy who treats the transfer portal like reluctance to get on TikTok. You can’t be the king of the sport if you’ve never won a Playoff game, so that rules out Lincoln Riley, Brian Kelly, James Franklin, Dan Lanning and basically all but a handful of coaches. There’s only 1 choice for the new king of college football — Kirby Smart.”
MEGAPHONE
“WOW! College Football just lost the GOAT to retirement. WOW! I knew it would happen 1 day soon but not this soon. The game has change so much that it chased the GOAT away. College football let's hold up our mirrors and say HONESTLY what u see.”
Colorado coach Deion Sanders, via X, paying tribute to Saban.
