Jan 02, 2026
3 min read
Hours before the start of the College Football Playoff quarterfinals on Thursday, Nick Saban, 74, sat on the stage ESPN built inside the Rose Bowl, in the corner of the end zone, in Pasadena, California.
A few hours before the start of Thursday's College Football Playoff quarterfinal game, 74-year-old Nick Saban sat on ESPN's stage built into the Rose Bowl, in the corner of the end zone, in Pasadena, California.
After Saban retired from Alabama in 2024, won more national championships than any coach in college football's modern era, and began working as a television commentator, his perspective on game days changed.
But as the playoff results show, his influence on what happens between the lines remains as strong as ever.
Miami, Oregon, Indiana and Ole Miss are the final four teams making the College Football Playoff, and they all have one thing in common: Their coaches once worked for Saban.
Miami, coached by Mario Cristobal, beat national champion Ohio State in Wednesday's quarterfinals.In next week's semifinals, the Hurricanes will face Ole Miss, which hired former Alabama defensive coordinator Pete Golding for the top job last month — after another former Saban assistant left the school.
On the second semifix, Oregon, instructor, I Pahma's first weapon Winter, a member of Saban's Sabz, a member of 2007.
Although Ole Miss lost, former Saban assistants will be present in the playoff semifinals, as their opponent was Georgia, whose coach, Kirby Smart, was Saban's longest tenured coach at Alabama.
Known for his hard-to-impress demeanor, high standards and competitiveness — he once said that winning one national title cost him a week on the recruiting trail — Saban developed and enthusiastically followed a team-building "process," no details.The principles that led to Saban's one title at LSU and six at Alabama came down to his assistants.
"This minangang is an important part of my journey," Cignetti told reporters this week, referring to Indiana's 38-3 quarterfinal win over Alabama, Saban's old program, on Thursday.
"I learned a lot from coach Saban in terms of organization, standards, stopping complacency," Cignetti said.I would not be where I am today without my time under Nick.
Education like no other
Cristobal was already a head coach when he served as Alabama's offensive line coach and recruiting coordinator from 2013-16.Still, getting what he once described as a "doctorate in football" under Saban reshaped how Cristobal thought about running a program.
The Crimson Tide won a championship and played another game during Cristobal's tenure, and when he became Oregon State's coach in 2018, Cristobal mimicked every detail of the team's offseason -- from how they lifted weights to how the staff defined job descriptions -- unlike his experience at Alabama.
His time in Tuscaloosa also carried over to Miami.
"That's how you win games this time of year when you can dominate the line of scrimmage and your guys did a great job of that," Saban told Cristobal during ESPN's "College GameDay" on Thursday, the morning after the Miami win.
"Well, I mean, that's one of the biggest lessons you learned during your time at Alabama, right?" Cristobal responded.
Georgia's matchup with Ole Miss is the clearest illustration of Saban's continued influence on the sport two years after leaving the band.Lane Kiffin turned to Saban, his former coach at Alabama, for advice a month ago as he was deciding whether to stay as coach at Ole Miss or go to LSU.
"So that's why I'm here," Kiffin said during his introductory press conference in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
To replace Kiffin, Ole Miss immediately promoted Golding, who during his tenure as Saban's defensive coordinator from 2018 to 2022 was hired with the camp: "Hey, I work for the greatest coach of all time."
Then Goulding, in his second game as a head coach, pulled off the upset of Georgia and the taller Smart.
Beat Alabama using lessons from Alabama
Lanning was an assistant at Alabama in 2015 before eventually working for Smart at Georgia.Lanning said he was impressed by Saban's ability to accept input from anyone with good intentions, regardless of their position in the staff hierarchy, and how rigorously he followed his routine.
Saban can mean "Robotic," Lonning says the last year.However he can change its nature to add progressive behaviors.
"There's a lot of people that come off the field. (Saban's coaching) Some people are very successful and some people aren't," Lanning said. "I feel like people that maybe aren't very successful. They're trying to be Nick, you know, Nick being Nick, you know, Nick, coach Saban being himself every day."
“And that's what I appreciate and what I learned from him: when you get your opportunity, you have to be yourself.But you have to be the definition of consistency if you want to be in this profession for a long time.”
Saban had a long history with Cignetti when he hired him as Alabama's receivers coach and director of recruiting in 2007. Cignetti's father, Frank, was the coach at West Virginia when he hired Saban as an assistant in 1978. In 2009, Alabama won its first national championship in 17 years thanks to the C's.
When Cignetti left Alabama in 2011 to become the head coach at a Division II school, two spots lower in the NCAA rankings and a world away from Alabama's prestige, Saban said he thought Cignetti was making a professional mistake.But Cignetti quickly won there and moved up the ranks by repeating the quick turnarounds at his next three schools before landing at Indiana in 2024.
As a school in the four strongest NCAA conferences, it's a huge opportunity — but also a historically difficult job.The Hoosiers enter the season with the most losses in NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision history, and have not won a postseason game since 1991.
However, on Thursday from outside his home in Pasadena, Saban watched Cignetti's side beat Alabama 38-3, their second post-season defeat in school history, to continue one of the most notable coaches in college football history.The victory was both encouraging and symbolic after a long time in college football that "did not cover the body and strategy" of the Crimson program.The tide that entered the championship a long time ago.Following Saban's retirement in 2024, Alabama selected his successor Kalen DeBoer, a highly successful coach but not a student of Saban.
"I probably think about (working for Saban) every day, to be honest, because he had a big impact on my growth and development," Cignetti said this week.
"I think from a philosophical standpoint, the program we have here is probably more similar than Alabama," he said.
