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 disciple of Nick Saban didn’t seem like a ticket to greatness. Particularly in the early part of his tenure at Alabama, when schools were desperate to imitate Saban’s methods, some of the biggest names in his coaching tree, such as Derek Dooley, Jim McElwain and Will Muschamp, were unable to replicate his secret sauce when given the opportunity to coach SEC programs.

But with Saban now comfortably behind the ESPN desk, where he seems to spend most of his time criticizing the state of the sport or helping to rehabilitate the image of his fired friends, his influence on college football is inescapable.

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While Saban left the stage before the professionalized era of college football could erode his mystique, he found a way to continue dominating the sport through representatives who tailored his lessons to a model that Saban himself wanted little to do with.

“I think everyone learned a lot from Nick,” said Indiana coach Curt Cignetti, who was Alabama’s wide receivers coach during Saban’s first four seasons. “If you were serious about your career and wanted to be a head coach one day, you made great notes or great mental notes. I felt like after one year with Coach Saban, I had learned more about how to run a program than maybe the previous 27 as an assistant coach.”

Now, as we reach the College Football Playoff semifinals, Saban’s influence can be seen on multiple generations of coaches who have reached the pinnacle of the sport.

There’s Cignetti, 64, who has clearly borrowed Saban’s intensity, attention to detail and unwillingness to accept complacency from anyone in his organization.

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There’s Dan Lanning, 39, who learned at Alabama that you need to recruit the best players to build the best teams and has imported that philosophy to Oregon.

There is Mario Cristobal, 55, who has built Miami in the image of the Alabama teams that dominated on both lines of scrimmage.

Then there’s 41-year-old Pete Golding, who almost sounds like he’s doing a Saban impression (both in cadence and profanity) every time he steps in front of a microphone as Ole Miss’ new head coach.

And while they’re all different in terms of their X’s and O’s experience and what they borrowed stylistically from Saban, the one thing they all share is an insider’s view of how to build the kind of multi-layered, staffed organization that covered every base and turned Alabama into a consistent winning machine no matter which coaches or players came and went in any given year.

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“My time there opened my eyes to what college football had become, what it had become and the resources needed,” Cristobal said.

They are not alone. Seemingly every top program, but particularly those that met Saban’s peak either as a competitor or a cousin, have tried to copy Alabama with an army of analysts, personnel gurus and assistants’ assistants plus state-of-the-art facilities and inflated recruiting budgets.

Of course, it hasn’t always worked. Many former Saban assistants have arrived at coaching positions with great enthusiasm and have left a trail of costly acquisitions in their wake.

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

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That’s enough Saban-related success across the board to beg the question of why Alabama, which is 20-8 without a playoff win since Saban retired, doesn’t have a Saban acolyte in charge now.

But that’s a story for another day. Alabama is old news at this point, and Saban’s DNA is in all four teams playing for a shot at this national championship.

It doesn’t even necessarily matter how long your former assistants were there or how they got there.

Lanning and Golding represent the dozens of up-and-comers who came through the Saban system, hoping to learn its famous “process” from the inside.

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Golding was a defensive coordinator at UTSA who caught Saban’s attention in a chalk talk and subsequently spent five years at Alabama, helping the Crimson Tide win the 2020 national title. If you watch and listen closely, you can see echoes of Saban’s verbal tics with plenty of “aights” and hand movements as he makes his points.

“I think most people who have come through and been fortunate enough to be around Coach Saban understand, first of all, that the lifeblood of the program is recruiting,” Golding said. “And then you have to have solid schemes on both sides. You want to maintain stability within those schemes for player development. And there’s a toughness component, a competitive character component to holding these guys accountable and holding them to a high level. And I think that’s pretty consistent with whoever’s playing right now.”

Lanning’s time at Alabama changed the trajectory of his career. Although he was only with Saban for one year, he left a full-time field coaching job at Sam Houston State in 2014 to work at Alabama as a graduate assistant, which many would consider a step back in his career. But not only did it help launch Lanning into an assistant coaching job at Memphis, entering Saban’s world helped him land at Georgia for four years under Smart.

“I was going to take a pay cut to be there,” Lanning said. “When someone asked me why, I said, ‘I’m going to get my doctorate in football.’ And that’s what it felt like working for Coach Saban. Things I thought I knew, I realized I didn’t know anything about.”

Cristobal represents dozens of coaches who went to Alabama to, in many ways, rehabilitate their careers. Like Sarkisian, Kiffin and current Maryland coach Mike Locksley, Cristobal landed at Alabama as an offensive line coach and recruiting coordinator after six years at Florida International, where he had some success but ultimately fell victim to significant administrative and funding challenges. After four years, Cristobal left to be Willie Taggart’s co-offensive coordinator at Oregon, took over as head coach the following season when Taggart left for Florida State, and had enough success over four years to return to his alma mater.

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“If I could point out one thing that I valued most in terms of learning, it was reconfirming what I learned from Coach (Jimmy) Johnson and Coach (Dennis) Erickson, the guys that I had the opportunity to play for here, is that under no circumstances can you allow human nature and complacency to take over you and the people in your program,” Cristobal said. “That’s at all costs and it’s a daily struggle. When you wake up, that has to be the number one opponent that you have to attack with intent, with urgency and I would say that would be the most important thing.”

But perhaps the disciple most similar to Saban is the one whose time in Alabama barely registers a memory.

When he arrived at Alabama in 2007, Cignetti had been a longtime quarterbacks coach, rising through the ranks from Rice and Temple to Pittsburgh and NC State. Unable to put his career on track to become an FBS head coach, Cignetti took the job at D-II program IUP (Indiana University of Pennsylvania) earning $125,000, about half his salary at Alabama.

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Since 2019, when James Madison hired him, Cignetti has posted a Saban-like 77-11 record as head coach and has Indiana on the brink of arguably the most surprising championship in college sports given the program’s history as a perennial underdog.

For many years, it was an interesting hypothesis about what would happen if you imported Saban to a random program and not a juggernaut like Alabama or a place like LSU that had untapped potential.

Cignetti has essentially ended that debate.

“There are many disciples out there who are doing well,” he said. “And that’s why he’s the greatest of all time.”

Saban’s role in the sport these days is interesting because while he has a massive megaphone, he has largely chosen to use it as a signal against the Wild West of the transfer portal and NIL while engaging in dubious conflicts of interest surrounding certain coaching moves like advising Kiffin before he took the LSU job.

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The reality, however, is that Saban decided to become a television personality because his own dominance in the sport was waning. With the dramatic shift in recruiting and player compensation, he could no longer stockpile talent under the premise that being an Alabama player would unlock future NFL riches.

He was also 72 years old.

While Alabama may struggle to return to that level of success, this year’s CFP has made it clear that its influence on the entire sport will be felt for decades to come.