Nick Saban’s fingerprints all over CFP field with 4 remaining coaches sharing ties

Believe it or not, there was a time when being a Nick Saban disciple didn’t seem like a ticket to greatness. Especially during the first phase of his tenure at Alabama, when the school was desperately trying to imitate Saban’s approach, some of the more famous names on his coaching tree, like Derek Dooley, Jim McElwin and Will Marchand, couldn’t replicate his secret sauce when they got the chance to run an SEC program.

But Saban now sits comfortably on a desk at ESPN, seemingly spending most of his time complaining about the current state of the sport or helping rehabilitate the image of his fired peers, and his impact on college football is inevitable.

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While Saban left the scene before the professional era of college football threatened to diminish his mystique, he found a way to still dominate the sport through agents who adapted his classes into a mold that Saban himself wanted nothing to do with.

“I think everybody learned a lot from Nick,” said Indiana coach Kurt Cignetti, Saban’s wide receivers coach at Alabama during his first four seasons. “If you’re serious about your career and want to be a head coach one day, you’re going to take great notes or great mental notes. I feel like I’ve probably learned more about how to run a program after one year of working with Coach Saban than I did in my previous 27 years as an assistant coach.”

Now, as we enter the semifinals of the College Football Playoff, you can see Saban’s impact on multiple generations of coaches who have reached the pinnacle of the sport.

Signetti, 64, clearly borrowed Saban’s passion, attention to detail and unwillingness to accept complacency from anyone in the organization.

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Dan Lanning, 39, learned at Alabama the need to recruit the best players to build the best team and brought that philosophy to Oregon.

Mario Cristobal, 55, has molded Miami into the image of an Alabama franchise, dominating on both lines of scrimmage.

And then there’s 41-year-old Pete Golding, who sounds like he’s imitating Saban every time he steps up to the microphone as Mississippi’s new head coach — whether it’s the cadence or the swearing.

While they differ in their X-and-O expertise and styles borrowed from Saban, what they all have in common is how to build a multi-layered, well-staffed organization that covers every base and makes Alabama a consistent winning machine, no matter which coaches or players come in and out in a given year.

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“That time opened my eyes to the growth of college football, its growth and the resources it takes,” Cristobal said.

They are not alone. It seems like every top program, especially those that were rivals or cousins ​​of Saban’s prime, is trying to copy what Alabama did, with an army of analysts, personnel experts and assistants in addition to state-of-the-art facilities and a bloated recruiting budget.

Of course, this doesn’t always work. Many former Saban assistants coached amid much hype and left behind a string of expensive buyouts.

But when you look across the entire breadth of the sport, Saban’s coaching tree is undeniable now, from Kirby Smart at Georgia to Steve Sarkisian at Texas to Lane Kiffin at LSU to Brent Key at Georgia Tech and up-and-comers like newly hired Cal coach Tosh Lupoi and Memphis’ Charles Huff.

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The success associated with Saban is enough to raise the question of why Alabama — which has gone 20-8 in the postseason since Saban retired — now doesn’t have a Saban assistant at the helm.

But that’s a story for another day. Alabama is old news at this point, with Saban’s DNA spread throughout the four teams competing for a chance at a national championship.

It doesn’t even necessarily matter how long his former aides have been there, or how they arrived.

Lanning and Golding represent dozens of up-and-comers who have come through Saban’s system in hopes of learning his famous “process” from the inside.

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Golding, UTSA’s defensive coordinator, caught Saban’s attention during a chalk speech and went on to spend five years at Alabama, helping the Crimson Tide win the 2020 national championship. If you watch and listen carefully to what he says, you’ll notice that Saban repeats his verbal tics with lots of “yess” and hand gestures when making his points.

“I think most people who have been through it and had the privilege of being around Coach Saban understand that, number one, the lifeblood of this program is recruiting,” Goldin said. “Then both sides have to have sound plans. You want to have stability within those plans to promote player development. There’s also a toughness component, a competitive character component that holds these guys accountable and holds them to a high standard. I think that’s very consistent with the players they have right now.”

Lanning’s time at Alabama changed the trajectory of his career. Although he only lasted one year with Saban, he left his full-time field coaching job at Sam Houston State University in 2014 to serve as a graduate assistant at Alabama, which many considered a career step backwards. But not only did it help Lanning as an assistant coach in Memphis, entering Saban’s world also helped him during his four years under Smart at Georgia.

“I’m going to take a pay cut to go there,” Lanning said. “When someone asked me why, I said, ‘I’m going to get a doctorate in football.’ That’s what it was like working for Coach Saban. Things I thought I knew, I found out I didn’t know anything.”

Cristobal is representative of many coaches who go to Alabama to revive their careers in many ways. Like Sarkisian, Kiffin and current Maryland coach Mike Locksley, Cristobal came to Alabama as offensive line coach and recruiting coordinator after six years at Florida International, where he had some success but ultimately fell victim to significant financial and management challenges. Cristobal left after four years to serve as Willie Taggart’s offensive coordinator at Oregon State and took over as head coach the next season when Taggart left for Florida State, finding enough success in four years to return to his alma mater.

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“If I could point to one thing that I value most in terms of learning, it would be reaffirmation of what I learned under my coach [Jimmy] johnson and coach [Dennis] Erickson, the player that I had the opportunity to play here, under no circumstances allow humanity and complacency to take over yourself and the people in your program,” Cristobal said. “It’s at all costs, it’s a daily battle. When you wake up, that has to be No. 1 and you have to attack with purpose and urgency, and I would say that’s going to be the most important thing. “

But perhaps the disciples who most resemble Saban are those who have few memories of their time at Alabama.

By the time he came to Alabama in 2007, Signetti was already a longtime quarterbacks coach, having risen through the ranks at Rice and Temple to go to Pittsburgh and North Carolina State. Unable to push his career toward becoming an FBS head coach, Signetti took the job at D-II program IUP (Indiana University of Pennsylvania) for $125,000 per year, about half of what he was making at Alabama.

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Since James Madison hired Cignetti as head coach in 2019, Cignetti has compiled a 77-11 record similar to Saban’s, making IU almost the most surprising champion in college sports given the program’s long history of underdogs.

It’s been an interesting what-if for years, what would happen if you plugged Saban into a random program instead of a monster like Alabama or a place with untapped potential like LSU.

Sinetti essentially ended the debate.

“There are a lot of disciples who are doing very well,” he said. “That’s why he’s the greatest of all time.”

Saban’s role in the sport today is interesting because while he has a huge megaphone, he has chosen to use it primarily as a flare against the Wild West of the transfer portal and the NIL, while engaging in questionable conflicts of interest surrounding certain coaching moves such as advising Kiffin before accepting the LSU job.

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But the reality is that Saban chose to become a television personality because his own dominance in the sport was waning. With massive changes in recruiting and player compensation, he can no longer amass talent on the premise that being an Alabama player will unlock future NFL riches.

He was also 72 years old at the time.

While it may be difficult for Alabama to return to that level of success, this year’s CFP selection has made it clear that his impact on the sport will be felt for decades to come.