It’s been two weeks since Michigan defeated Washington to win its first national title since 1997 (and its first unshared title since 1948). Considering the number of college football news cycles we’ve gone through since, it feels more like two months. While the games are still only played from September through early January, the college football consciousness, much like the NFL, has crept into nearly every month of the sports calendar. From the coaching carousel to the transfer portal to conference realignment, there is always something going on. It’s beautiful. It’s chaotic. It’s beautiful in its chaos.
It’s been well documented that the 2023 season marked the end of several eras in college football. 2024 has already shaken the foundation of the sport; despite the fact that, for the moment, Texas and Oklahoma are still in the Big 12, the Pac-12 is still the Pac-12, and Florida State is still mad as hell about being left out of a 4-team playoff. The upheaval we’ve seen is primarily the result of one event….a 72-year old man decided that after 51 years of coaching football, it was time to retire. Of course, this was not just any coach.
Nick Saban has more national championships to his name (7) than any other coach at an FBS school in history. You can call him the GOAT and get very little pushback for recency bias. The deserved accolades for Saban have cascaded in since his announcement. I want to focus mostly on the impact of his departure versus his career accomplishments; but there are a couple statistics I just can’t let go without mentioning. During Saban’s 16 seasons at Alabama, he lost a total of 29 games….23 games over 15 seasons if you toss out his first year playing with inherited players. Over those 16 seasons he had 44 players go on to be 1st Round NFL Draft picks. The other stat is that every player that Saban recruited who stayed at Alabama for 4 years won at least 1 national championship. It’s safe to say we may never see another coach who approaches Saban’s accomplishments. That’s not a knock on the current coaches, rather it’s the reality of where the sport is today and the transient nature of both players and coaches.
It’s been so long that it is hard to think of Alabama outside of college football’s elite programs. But before Saban arrived in 2007, they hadn’t been in that pantheon since Bear Bryant retired after 1982 – a lone title in 1992 notwithstanding. They were viewed in a similar way we look at Miami, Oklahoma and USC right now – programs that are struggling to varying degrees to recapture past glory. Alabama’s fortunes didn’t change because of their rich history or elite facilities. It changed Nick Saban willed it to change. With Saban gone there is no guarantee Alabama’s dominance will continue through mere inertia, just like it didn’t when Ray Perkins took over after Bryant. That’s never been more true than it is now that NIL and no restrictions on player transfers is a thing. The Tide have had 24 players enter the transfer portal, 9 of them after Saban retired, and many who were expected to be near the top of the depth chart in 2024. They have also lost multiple 5-star high school commitments. No school, not even Alabama, is immune to the pitfalls of losing their head coach. If new head coach Kalen DeBoer is to maintain the Tide’s standard, he will have to do it entirely on his own, not on Saban’s coattails.
Speaking of DeBoer, his decision to leave Washington for Tuscaloosa just days after playing for the title has had a massive domino effect that was felt from coast-to-coast. The Huskies replaced DeBoer with former Arizona head coach Jedd Fisch. Arizona replaced Fisch with former San Jose State head coach Brent Brennan. San Jose State just hired former Navy head coach Ken Niumatalolo, who was working as an advisor to Chip Kelly at UCLA. But that wasn’t all. DeBoer also brought in two G5 head coaches to his staff – South Alabama’s Kane Wommack and Buffalo’s Maurice Linguist. Yes, the separation within FBS is now such that head coaches will leave their job to work as an assistant elsewhere. Good luck if you are one of the schools unfortunate enough to be at the bottom of the college football food chain. And because each head coach departure opens a 30-day transfer portal window for that program, more players are bolting for the exits. G5 schools have become coaching and player feeder systems for the power conferences.
If you read this and find yourself thinking that this is not great for college football, and something needs to change for the better, you are right. The current state of affairs is unsustainable. Everyone recognizes that. I am certain something will change. Unfortunately I am less certain if that change will be for the better. While the NCAA seems to be moving in the direction of letting schools pay players directly via NIL, that won’t exactly solve the issue. The players will still be students, and the courts are making it clear the NCAA cannot restrict freedom of movement for students, so players could still switch teams at will for the highest bid. Classifying players as employees and collectively bargaining both revenue sharing and movement controls sounds like the answer, but for now the NCAA isn’t having it. Coaches might even agree to a similar arrangement if it means they can have a real offseason again to spend time with their families instead of having to recruit high schoolers, portal players, and their own roster 24 x 7 x 365. But for now, the chaos will continue and college football will keep its spot in the sporting world headlines year-round….and maybe that’s what the powers-that-be really want?
College Football Analyst
Mike is a Baltimore native living in Portland, OR since 2007. He currently runs his own business specializing in video production and online marketing. Prior to that he was a legal technology consultant, worked for 9 years at Johns Hopkins University and served 6 years in the Air Force. He also enjoys travel, food, beer, and is a volunteer at the Oregon Humane Society.