Alabama Crimson Tide head football coach Nick Saban was inducted into the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame tonight. Saban took over the Tide in January of 2007 and quickly ushered in a new era of high tide. Low tide has rolled out to sea in the Saban era. He won his first BCS National Championship at Alabama in 2009 before dominating college football with back-to-back titles in 2011 and 2012.
The 2012 national title was especially sweet as it ended the Notre Dame and media season long propaganda of:
“OH MY GOD NOTRE DAME IS SO GOOD AT FOOTBALL!!! THEY ARE THE GREATEST COLLEGE FOOTBALL TEAM IN HISTORY! MANTI TEO IS THE GREATEST FOOTBALL PLAYER IN HISTORY. MANTI TEO IS THE GREATEST HUMAN BEING IN HISTORY.”
That was pretty much the garbage I had spamming my inbox all autumn long from Notre Dame Sports Information Department.
Thank you Nick Saban for SHUTTING THEM UP in the opening SECONDS of the National Title game.
“When you’re growing up as a kid, you always want to be able to do something of significance,” Saban said. “You hope that you can do something that affects people in a positive way and you leave some legacy at what you’ve done. Things like this make you realize that maybe you’ve done that, that your work has been recognized and that all the miles you drove in recruiting and all the family sacrifices that everybody had to make … it somehow makes you realize that it’s all worthwhile.”
Saban has won four National Championships in his past eight years coaching college football (LSU 2003), while also capturing four SEC Championships with coming at Alabama.
Saban, who will begin his seventh season in Tuscaloosa this fall, is a five-time National Coach of the Year. He is one of only four coaches in the modern-poll era of college football to win four National Championships, joining Paul “Bear” Bryant (Alabama: 1961, 64-65, 73, 78-79), Frank Leahy (Notre Dame: 1943, 46-47, 49) and John McKay (Southern California: 1962, 67, 72, 74). Saban is also one of three coaches in the poll era to win three national titles in a four-year span (Leahy and Nebraska’s Tom Osborne).
Saban has compiled a 154-55-1 (.737) record as a college head coach and has gone 61-7 (.897) in the past five seasons in Tuscaloosa, which includes a 35-5 mark in regular-season conference play. In 2012, the Tide reached the 10-win milestone for the fifth consecutive season under Saban. With another SEC Championship win and BCS National Championship Game victory last season, Saban is now 8-1 all-time in conference or national championship games.
Paul M. Banks is the owner of The Sports Bank.net. He’s also an author who also contributes regularly to MSN, Fox Sports , Chicago Now, Walter Football.com and Yardbarker
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