Hours before a College Football Playoff quarterfinal began Thursday, 74-year-old Nick Saban sat on an ESPN stage constructed inside the Rose Bowl, in the corner of an end zone, in Pasadena, California.
Since Saban retired from Alabama in 2024, having won more national championships than any coach in college football’s modern era, and began working as a television commentator, his perspective on game days has changed.
But as the playoff’s results have proven, his influence on what takes place between the lines remains as strong as ever.
Miami, Oregon, Indiana and Ole Miss are the last four teams standing in the College Football Playoff, and all have one thing in common: Their head coaches once worked for Saban.
Led by Mario Cristobal, Miami soundly defeated reigning national champion Ohio State in a playoff quarterfinal Wednesday. In the semifinals next week the Hurricanes will face Ole Miss, where former Alabama defensive coordinator Pete Golding was promoted to the top job last month — only after another former Saban assistant left the school.
In the other semifinal, Oregon, whose coach, Dan Lanning, spent 2015 as an Alabama graduate assistant, will face Indiana, led by coach Curt Cignetti, a member of Saban’s first Alabama staff from 2007 to 2011.
Even if Ole Miss had lost, the playoff’s semifinals would have been represented by all-former Saban assistants, anyway, because their opponent was Georgia, whose coach, Kirby Smart, was Saban’s longest-tenured coordinator at Alabama.
Famous for his difficult-to-impress demeanor, high standards and competitiveness — he once complained that winning one national title had cost him a week on the recruiting trail — Saban created and obsessively followed a “process” to team-building, in which no detail was too small. The principles that earned Saban one title at LSU and six more at Alabama rubbed off on his assistants.
“It was real important part of my journey,” Cignetti told reporters this week, before Indiana’s 38-3 quarterfinal demolition of Alabama, Saban’s old program, on Thursday.
“Learned a lot from Coach Saban in terms of organization, standards, stopping complacency,” Cignetti said. “I wouldn’t be where I am today without my time under Nick.”
An education like no other
Cristobal had already been a head coach by the time he worked as Alabama’s offensive line coach and recruiting coordinator from 2013 to 2016. Yet receiving what he once described as a “football PhD” under Saban reshaped how Cristobal thought about leading a program.
The Crimson Tide won one championship and played for another during Cristobal’s time on staff, and when he became Oregon’s coach in 2018, Cristobal explicitly modeled every detail of the team’s offseason — from how they lifted weights, to how he defined staffers’ job descriptions — off of his experience at Alabama.
His time in Tuscaloosa has carried over to Miami, too.
“That’s how you win games this time of year when you can dominate the line of scrimmage and your guys have done that tremendously,” Saban told Cristobal during ESPN’s “College GameDay” on Thursday, the morning after Miami’s win.
“Well, I mean, it was one of greatest lessons under you at Alabama, right?” Cristobal replied. “You used to tell us all the time, ‘Mass kicks a–.'”
Ole Miss’s matchup with Georgia was the clearest illustration of Saban’s continued influence over the sport, two years after he left the sidelines. When Lane Kiffin was deciding whether to remain as the coach at Ole Miss or bolt for LSU a month ago, he called Saban, his old boss at Alabama, for advice.
“So, there’s the reason I’m here,” Kiffin said during his introductory news conference in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
To replace Kiffin, Ole Miss immediately promoted Golding, who while working as Saban’s defensive coordinator from 2018 to 2022 had recruited with the pitch, “Hey, I work for the greatest coach of all-time.”
Then Golding, in his second game as head coach, pulled the upset on higher-seeded Georgia and Smart.
Beating Alabama using lessons from Alabama
Lanning spent 2015 as a graduate assistant at Alabama before eventually working for Smart at Georgia. Lanning has said he was struck by Saban’s willingness to take input from anyone with a good idea, regardless of their place on his staff’s hierarchy, and how strictly he kept to a daily routine.
That could make Saban feel “robotic,” Lanning said last year. But his boss was also adaptable enough to change his style to incorporate successful trends.
“There are a lot of people that have come from (Saban’s coaching) tree, some have had a lot of success and some have not,” Lanning said. ” I feel like the ones that maybe haven’t had as much success, they tried to be Nick. You know, Nick was Nick. You know, Nick, Coach Saban was himself every day.
“And that’s something I appreciate and learned from him that whenever you get your opportunity, you’ve got to be you. But you’ve got to be the definition of consistency if you want to last in this profession.”
Saban had a long history with Cignetti when he hired him in 2007 as Alabama’s receivers coach and recruiting coordinator. Cignetti’s father, Frank, was the coach at West Virginia when he hired Saban as an assistant in 1978. By 2009, Alabama won its first national title in 17 years thanks to recruits Cignetti helped land.
When Cignetti left Alabama in 2011 to become a head coach at a school in Division II, two rungs lower on the NCAA ladder and a world away from Alabama’s prestige, Saban has said he thought Cignetti was making a career mistake. But Cignetti won quickly there and worked his way up the ladder by replicating quick turnarounds at his next three schools, too, before landing at Indiana in 2024.
As a school in the NCAA’s four most-powerful conferences, it was a big opportunity — but also a historically difficult job. The Hoosiers entered this season with the most losses in the history of the NCAA’s Football Bowl Subdivision, and hadn’t won a postseason game since 1991.
Yet Thursday, from his sideline perch in Pasadena, Saban watched Cignetti’s team hand Alabama, 38-3, its most lopsided postseason loss in school history to continue one of the most remarkable coaching feats in college football history. The victory was both emphatic and symbolic as a longtime college football “have-not” physically and strategically dominated a Crimson Tide program that has long epitomized championships. After Saban’s 2024 retirement Alabama chose as his successor Kalen DeBoer, a highly successful coach — but not a Saban disciple.
“I probably think about (working for Saban) every single day, to be quite honest, because it had such a big impact in my growth and development,” Cignetti said this week.
“I think philosophically, the program that we run here is probably a lot more the same than different than Alabama,” he said. “There’s probably not a day that goes by where I don’t draw from those experiences.”