Why It's Hard To Imagine A Football Season Without Nick Saban

I heard they rolled the oaks in Auburn and drank the whole state dry in Tennessee the day Nick Saban walked away.

They say Champagne corks were bouncing off the ceilings in College Station, Oxford, and Baton Rouge and that the folks in Athens broke a lot of good glassware while toasting their tomorrows.

Throughout the South and across the national landscape of college football, fans rejoiced—or just breathed a little easier. The Dream Killer, the Gravedigger, was done. Saban, the greatest coach in that sport’s history, had retired.

And here at home in Alabama—where things were so good for so, so long—our chests hurt a little bit. The future seemed hard to fathom. For the first time since 2007, the dawn of an era of unprecedented dominance, we will look at a Crimson Tide sideline without seeing Saban.

He left The University of Alabama with six national championships and a trophy case that sagged with a metric ton of glittering proof that dreams absolutely do come true...and that sometimes you can even take them for granted.

Being a football fan down here is stressful. We forget that it’s just a game. But with Saban, we always had a feeling that it would be all right. It was like playing blackjack with a guy who could count cards and—if he needed one—had an ace in his sock. Whenever we did lose, I was amazed. It so rarely happened that it was like an eclipse of the sun.

We have borne up to it before. When I was a boy, I listened to the old men talk with that same swaggering confidence, and ultimate regret, about a legend named Paul William “Bear” Bryant. They told and retold a joke about an Alabama fan who passes through the pearly gates and asks to meet God and Bear Bryant. He sees a figure in the distance, walking on water.

“Is that the Bear?” he asks St. Peter.

“Nawwwww,” says St. Peter. “That’s God. He just thinks he’s Bear Bryant.”

In 1983, my newspaper sent me to interview the man who had dug Bryant’s grave. And I would have done it, too, if our truck hadn’t broken down some miles away in Irondale.

A lifetime later, after Saban was hired to resurrect an Alabama football program that had gone to seed, I sat across from him in his still-empty office. I was doing the cover piece for Sports Illustrated. I thought, briefly, about the fabled Sports Illustrated curse (how it was supposed to be bad luck to be featured on the cover) and wondered if he took any stock in such foolishness. I remember looking at him, a man who was in his fifties then, polite but a little impatient. He had a dynasty to build. Saban seemed like one of my brother’s hunting hounds, eagerly pulling at its chain when it heard the tailgate drop.

He had already earned one championship then, at Louisiana State University.I guess curses just bounce right off some-one like that.

Now I am an old man myself, and I know how my people felt when they were talking about the Bear. I heard a joke the other day about a guy who went to Heaven to meet God and Nick Saban, and.... Well, you know how it goes.