COLUMN: Why Oklahoma Fans Will Miss Nick Saban — and Why They Won't
The GOAT won’t be coming to Norman next year after all.
The running joke in Sooner Nation, of course, is that Nick Saban saw Oklahoma on the Alabama schedule this coming season and decided to hang up his whistle.
Saban shocked the college football world when he suddenly retired on Wednesday, according to ESPN’s Chris Low and multiple reports.
OU fans were hoping to watch the Titan of Tuscaloosa work when the Crimson Tide comes to Norman on Nov. 23.
But Saban, 72, apparently wanted no part of it — not no part of Oklahoma, but no part of an 18th season at Bama.
Saban owns seven career national championships, including six at Alabama. One of those national titles, his first, came directly at Oklahoma’s expense as Saban directed LSU to a 21-14 BCS Championship Game victory over Bob Stoops and the Sooners in the 2003 Sugar Bowl.
Saban is 2-1 all-time in his career against OU, with a 45-34 victory over Lincoln Riley and the Sooners in the College Football Playoff at the Orange Bowl in 2018.
His only loss to OU came in the 2013 Sugar Bowl (Jan. 3, 2014), when Stoops and the Sooners pulled off a 45-31 victory in the Sugar Bowl.
Saban and the Tide took down OU Heisman winners Jason White and Kyler Murray, but couldn’t overcome occasional backup Trevor Knight’s big game.
Knight threw for 348 yards and four touchdowns — by far the best game of his OU career — as the Sooners pulled away from a one-score game and won comfortably at the end.
Saban explained that the Tide, who had been knocked out of the chase for a third straight national title by a stunning loss to Auburn in the regular-season finale — the famous “Kick Six” game — weren’t particularly motivated to play a “consolation” bowl game in New Orleans, but the Sooners didn’t care and gave the Tide their second straight defeat.
Saban’s ongoing success changed the face of football, turning coach mantras toward an unrelenting dedication to “the process.” That success and that process permeated all levels of the game. Go to any coaches clinic and you might hear it two dozen times.
Saban’s unprecedented run of championships also steered the college game back to its roots in a way, with fewer teams trying to replicate the spread offense fireworks and the hyper-tempo pace and more teams trying to find earth-shaking defensive linemen like Saban had in stockpiles.
“They're snapping the ball as fast as you can go and you look out there and all your players are walking around and can't even get lined up,” Saban said in 2012. “That's when guys have a much greater chance of getting hurt when they're not ready to play.
“I just think there's got to be some sense of fairness in terms of asking is this what we want football to be?”
Saban figured it out, of course, winning his second straight national title that season, then adding three more in 2015, 2017 and 2020.
By the time his team played against Murray, the most outstanding player in America in 2018, and Riley, then the nation’s hottest offensive mind — Bama jumped out to a 21-0 lead in the first quarter — Saban was no longer overly concerned with up-tempo spread offenses. By then, he had employed Lane Kiffin for three seasons as offensive coordinator. By then, he had adapted.
That was probably Saban’s third-greatest attribute, his ability to adapt.
An old-school coach who thrived first on that unwavering focus on the process and second on an ability to recruit the nation’s best schoolboys to Tuscaloosa, Saban’s willingness to change — from Bill Belichick’s defensive coordinator in Cleveland to head coach at Michigan State, from finally restoring the roar at LSU to taking a chance with the Miami Dolphins, to building college football’s greatest dynasty at Alabama, Saban always had an eye on the future of coaching and what was coming next.
What’s coming next now is retirement with the coach’s wife he’s made famous by just her first name, Miss Terry.
And while that’s no doubt great for the Sabans — great for the GOAT — it’s a little sad for Oklahoma fans.
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