Nick Saban's true legacy is the countless number of lives he's changed

Trying to conceptualize Nick Saban's career feels like a ridiculous task that only a fool would even bother to try, like naming every single star in the sky. 

But as I get out my telescope, I'm in awe of the scope of what I see.  

This past weekend was the AFCA Convention, and I lost count at the number of times I heard coaches say something to the effect of "It's about the players." "We get to do what we do because of the players. "You want to win? Get good players."

So let's start there. Nick Saban is the greatest coach in college football history, and Nick Saban is the greatest coach in college football history because he had the greatest collection of players in college football history.

Saban signed 66 5-star recruits and 10 -- 10!! -- No. 1 classes in his time at Alabama, per Rivals.com. 

When Saban arrived at Alabama, the Crimson Tide roster was down enough that they didn't have a player taken in the 2008 draft. When's the next time you think the NFL won't have interest in a single Alabama player? 2090?

Saban produced 43 first round picks and 122 draft picks, and counting, in his time at Tuscaloosa. When it's all said and done, Saban could have stocked three full teams' worth of rosters with his players and his players alone. 

Hopefully, someone out there will calculate the total amount of NFL money earned by Saban's former players, and that number will be in the billions. There's simply no telling the number of families whose stories were forever changed because Nick Saban recruited their son, their future husband, their future father and grandfather, to play football for him.

And as I feebly attempt to accomplish the impossible, that's the thought that settles into mind: the number of lives changed because Nick Saban coached college football.

You're undoubtedly familiar with this quote, uttered by then-Alabama chancellor Robert Witt: “Nick Saban is the best investment this university has ever made.” Witt said that in 2013. That was 11 seasons and four national championships ago. How much has that investment appreciated in the past decade-plus? Can such a thing even be calculated?

Let's expand the picture a bit further. 

When Saban won his first national championship at LSU, the SEC had not won a national title in four seasons. The ACC, the Big 12, the Big East (Grandpa, what was that?) and the Big Ten had all sipped champagne more recently than the SEC. Again, when's the next time that's going to happen?

When he returned in 2007, the SEC was in Year 2 of what would become a 7-year run of national championships. The conference by that time was first among equals, and Saban's presence helped the conference separate into something else entirely, a one-member club existing in a middle ground between the NFL and the rest of college football.

Not only did Saban make the University of Alabama more valuable, he made the rest of the conference more valuable simply by association. A degree from the University of Mississippi or the University of South Carolina means something in 2024 that it didn't in 2004.

Now, let's zoom the telescope out even further. It was his 2011 team hop-scotching over a 1-loss, Big 12 champion Oklahoma State into a rematch with LSU that forced college football out of the BCS and into the College Football Playoff. 

For more than a century, a true playoff was off limits in college football -- until Nick Saban made it so. And now Saban exits the year before a true 12-team bracket takes form. Maybe all this would've happened anyway, but Nick Saban made it happen now.

So, there's my attempt to name every star in the sky. All this one man did was change hundreds of families' lives, forever change the fortunes of a university, a conference, and a sport. 

Here are a few of my favorite individual stars:

-- Alabama spent at least one week as the AP No. 1 team in every season from 2008 to 2022.

-- From the beginning of the 2008 season until his retirement, by my count Alabama played all of seven games out of the national championship picture. 

-- I firmly believe the mark of a true champion is what it takes to beat him, and from 2008 on every Alabama loss felt like a national event, down to the end. A list of program that would call wins over Nick Saban's Alabama among their most monumental victories of their modern histories: Auburn, Clemson, Florida, Georgia, Florida, LSU, Michigan, Ohio State, Ole Miss, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Texas A&M, ULM and Utah. That's all. 

Saban's case as the greatest coach in college football history is so locked-tight that it's basically inarguable. It's never been harder to win a championship than it is right now, and no one's ever won more of them than him. His peers are not in this sport, but others: Belichick, Jackson, Wooden.

But his impact is even greater. No one did more to advance the cause of personal development within modern American culture than Nick Saban. "It takes what it takes." "The illusion of choice." "Mediocre people don't like high achievers and high achievers don't like mediocre people." 

This clip summarizes Saban's legacy more than any this 90-second clip below. If humans still occupy the earth 300 years from now, an aspiring painter can watch that clip and ask herself if she's truly putting in the work to become the best painter she can possibly be. Nick Saban was the poet laureate of getting your ass in gear.

And so that's Saban's legacy, in my mind. My words are painfully insufficient to summarize a career we'll never see again, so I'll leave it to those whose lives he changed.