“To be the man, you gotta beat the man,” Ric Flair says, and our sport’s made it pretty clear over the last decade who the man is, most of the time.
9 of the last 10 national champs have either *been* Saban’s Bama or *beaten* Saban’s Bama
And the other beat the Kick Six team.
Photo by Kevin Jairaj - Handout/Getty Images
Nick Saban has four national championships at Alabama. You knew that part.
Did you know five of the other six national champs had to beat Saban’s Bama along the way?
- 2007 LSU would’ve never made the BCS Championship without beating Saban’s first Tide team.
- 2008 Florida had to beat Alabama in the SEC Championship.
- 2009 Alabama beat Texas.
- 2010 Auburn needed a 24-point comeback to win the Iron Bowl. (The Tigers miiiight’ve snuck into the BCS title game at No. 2, but TCU was undefeated at No. 3.)
- 2011 Alabama beat LSU. (An LSU win would’ve added to this record, as LSU had already beaten Bama that year.)
- 2012 Alabama beat Notre Dame.
- 2013’s champs didn’t play Bama, but hang on a second.
- 2014 Ohio State knocked Bama out of the first-ever Playoff before beating Oregon.
- 2015 Alabama beat Clemson.
- And 2016 Clemson beat the Tide in the National Championship.
Nine of 10!
It gets even better.
2013 Florida State beat Auburn in the BCS title game, the same Auburn that needed one of the wildest plays in football history to wreck a potential Alabama three-peat.
And FSU’s head coach, Jimbo Fisher, is a former Saban offensive coordinator.
So the only national champ of the last decade whose players didn’t have to endure Saban in one way or another still had to come really dang close.
It gets even better even better.
Saban’s 2003 LSU won the national title, and he left for the NFL after 2004. That means 11 of his last 12 college teams directly swung the national championship. (We could go even further and argue undefeated 2004 Auburn should’ve made the BCS title game, if we wanted.)
You might’ve realized all this already, but I hadn’t until making another post that Alabama fans would like less than this one.
Either way, include this fact on the list of evidence that Alabama’s 2008-2016 run makes for the greatest dynasty in college football history, one that’s not even done yet. The Tide just turned in their highest-rated Signing Day of their seven-year streak of No. 1 recruiting classes.
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