Just a Minute: What Nick Saban Means to the People of Alabama
The championships speak for themselves, but what Saban and his family have been able to do in the Tuscaloosa community will leave a lasting impact.
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00:00 True story. After Alabama lost to Mississippi State in 2007, little nine-year-old me looked to my dad and said,
00:07 "Why does Alabama always lose to Mississippi State?" Now that may have been a slight exaggeration.
00:12 It was only the second year in a row, but in my brain, that's how it always happened.
00:16 Flash forward a couple months to August 2008, Alabama's taking on Clemson in the Chick-fil-A kickoff game.
00:24 And I'll never forget that game or that day because it wasn't even necessarily at the time that I thought,
00:32 "Oh, Alabama's back." It's more, I just couldn't believe that Alabama was beating a ranked team.
00:39 Then flash forward a year and the 2009 season, and that's just the norm for this team.
00:46 It would become the norm over the next 15 years under Nick Saban.
00:50 Obviously, the college football world, the Alabama fan base was shaken up yesterday with the news that Nick Saban was retiring after 17 seasons as the Alabama Crimson Tide head coach.
01:00 And it's really just gotten me thinking about what Nick Saban means to the people of Alabama.
01:05 There's been a lot said and there will be a lot more said and stories written about what Nick Saban accomplished on the field with the Crimson Tide in college football.
01:11 The whole seven national championships overall, six at Alabama, all the SEC championships, all the first round draft picks, more first round draft picks at Alabama than losses, which is just an incredible stat.
01:24 Bringing Alabama their first Heisman winner and not just one, but four overall to now have Alabama being one of the schools with the most.
01:34 So his on-field accomplishments are great, but there's something that Nick Saban did for the fan base.
01:40 He said in his introductory press conference that we're working to be a champion every day.
01:45 He said at the national championship celebration after the 2009 one that this is not the end.
01:50 This is just the beginning. And he held up to those promises.
01:55 He brought this fan base not just back into its glory days, but into a space that it had never seen before, that college football had never seen before.
02:04 And that we'll probably never see again with the streak of championships that he had in a short time span.
02:11 But it's more than that for Nick Saban.
02:14 It's the way that he and his family rallied around the Tuscaloosa community after the tornado in 2011.
02:20 And we're there on the front lines with his team helping to rebuild and then giving that community something to cheer about that fall and then going on to win the national title that season and the next in 2012.
02:33 It's the way he and his family have sunk roots down into this state and into this community.
02:38 The Saban Center that's being built in downtown Tuscaloosa.
02:42 It's the way he's brought families together over the last decade and a half to support the Crimson Tide and cheer on championship teams.
02:51 And it's the way he ended his career this year with a team that was one of his most unique coaching jobs that a lot of people have written off in week three.
03:01 And went on to win the SEC title and make the college football playoff.
03:05 It's not the way most people thought Nick Saban would go out with a loss, but it is the way people thought he would go out quietly and not making it about himself.
03:14 So just as someone that had the opportunity that they grew up as an Alabama fan that in my early elementary school days, the pre-Saban era, used to, you know, live through the fear of the thumb on the Auburn side and hated losing six in a row to getting to be a student in Alabama during the Saban era.
03:35 And getting to witness some national championships and then for my first job out of college to get to cover the program that I grew up cheering for and covering Nick Saban on the beat.
03:45 It has been such a gift. It's not, he's not always to burst anyone's bubble.
03:50 He's not always been the easiest coach to cover at times, not been the most personable.
03:56 But what he's done, obviously for this program, for college football, for the state of Alabama is really unmeasurable and will truly leave a lasting impact for generations to come.
04:11 [BLANK_AUDIO]