Urban Meyer and Mark Richt.
Hugh Freeze’s exit means only 3 current coaches have beaten Nick Saban twice
It’s hard enough to beat him once. It takes a near Herculean effort to do it twice.
Photo by Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images
That’s the list of coaches still in the game who have beaten Nick Saban more than once. It’s hard enough to beat Saban once. Since he’s revved it up in Tuscaloosa in 2008, he’s lost only 13 times. He’s lost 19 times in total, but six of those came in his first season.
Saban’s last two regular season losses were at the hands of Hugh Freeze’s Ole Miss. (Freeze resigned Thursday night after Ole Miss learned from Freeze’s predecessor, Houston Nutt, that Freeze had called an escort service, with AD Ross Bjork indicating Ole Miss had found other concerns as well.)
Saban is particularly adept at the revenge games, so after Ole Miss beat Bama at home in 2014 during the Rebels miracle run to No. 3 in the country, as we tracked the goal posts throughout the streets of Oxford, no one thought they could do it again.
Then a year later, the Rebels pulled stuff like this in an upset win on the road:
Those games, plus a Sugar Bowl win, go down as the crowning achievements of Ole Miss’ brief, weird Freeze era.
Miami head coach Richt got the better of Saban twice while at Georgia. The first was when Saban was at LSU, and the other time while he was at Alabama in Saban’s first year. But Saban got his revenge, clobbering UGA twice since then and also beating the Dawgs in an epic SEC Championship.
Meyer and Saban have each beaten each other twice. Meyer has the distinction of doing it on the biggest stage when his Buckeyes beat the Tide in the College Football Playoff.
Richt and Meyer are no longer in the conference with Saban, and that means they’ll get fewer cracks at him.
With Freeze out, Auburn’s Gus Malzahn and Texas A&M’s Kevin Sumlin are the only coaches left in the SEC who have beaten Saban’s Bama even once.
And with both Bob Stoops and Tommy Tuberville stepping down from their jobs this offseason, Utah’s Kyle Whittingham, Iowa’s Kirk Ferentz, and Clemson’s Dabo Swinney are the only other current head coaches in college football who have beaten Saban’s Alabama at all.
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