Nick Saban's fingerprints are all over this CFP field
- - Nick Saban's fingerprints are all over this CFP field
Dan Wolken January 7, 2026 at 1:35 AM
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Believe it or not, there was a time when being a Nick Saban disciple did not seem like a ticket to greatness. Particularly in the first part of his Alabama tenure, when schools were desperate to mimic Saban’s methods, some of the more prominent names on his coaching tree like Derek Dooley, Jim McElwain and Will Muschamp could not reproduce his secret sauce when they got their chance to run SEC programs.
But with Saban now comfortably on the ESPN desk, where it seems like he spends most of his time either railing on the state of the sport or helping rehab the image of his fired buddies, his influence over college football is inescapable.
While Saban left the stage before the professionalized era of college football could chip away at his mystique, he has found a way to still dominate the sport through proxies who have adapted his lessons to a model that Saban himself wanted little to do with.
“I think everybody learned a lot from Nick,” said Indiana coach Curt Cignetti, who was Alabama’s wide receivers coach for Saban’s first four seasons in Tuscaloosa. “If you were serious about your career and wanted to be a head coach one day, you took 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 I maybe did the previous 27 as an assistant coach.”
Now, as we reach the semifinals of the College Football Playoff, you can see Saban’s influence on multiple generations of coaches who have reached the top 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.
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’s Mario Cristobal, 55, who has built Miami in the image of Alabama teams that dominated on both lines of scrimmage.
Then there’s Pete Golding, 41, who almost sounds like he’s doing a Saban imitation — both in cadence and curse words — whenever he steps in front of a microphone as Ole Miss’ new head coach.
Nick Saban may be retired from coaching, but his fingerprints are all over this College Football Playoff field with the coaches remaining. (Brandon Sumrall/Getty Images) (Brandon Sumrall via Getty Images)
And though they’re all different in terms of their X-and-O expertise and what they borrowed stylistically from Saban, the one thing they all share is an inside view of how to build the kind of multi-layered, staffed-up organization that covered every base and made Alabama a consistent winning machine no matter which coaches or players came in and out in a given year.
“The time there opened my eyes to what college football had grown into, what it had become and the resources necessary,” said Cristobal, who spent four seasons as an assistant under Saban.
They’re not alone. Seemingly every top-level program, but particularly those that encountered peak Saban either as a competitor or a cousin, has tried to copy Alabama with an army of analysts, personnel gurus and assistants to assistants on top of the cutting-edge facilities and bloated recruiting budgets.
It hasn’t always worked out, of course. Plenty of former Saban assistants have arrived at head coaching jobs with big hype and left a trail of expensive buyouts in their wake.
But when you look at the entire breadth of the sport, Saban’s coaching tree is now undeniable, stretching from Kirby Smart at Georgia to Steve Sarkisian at Texas to Lane Kiffin at LSU to Brent Key at Georgia Tech along with up-and-comers like newly hired Cal coach Tosh Lupoi and Charles Huff at Memphis.
It’s enough Saban-connected success across the landscape to raise 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 all over the four teams playing for a chance at this national championship.
It doesn’t even necessarily matter how long his former assistants were there or how they arrived.
Ole Miss head coach Pete Golding was a defensive assistant to Nick Saban while at Alabama. (Michael Allio/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images) (Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
Lanning and Golding represent the dozens of up-and-comers who passed through the Saban system, hoping to learn his famous “process” from the inside.
Golding was a defensive coordinator at UTSA who caught Saban’s eye at a chalk talk and subsequently spent five years at Alabama, helping the Crimson Tide win the 2020 national title. If you watch and listen to him closely, you can see echoes of Saban’s verbal tics with a lot of “aights” and hand motions as he makes his points.
“I think most people who went through and were fortunate enough to be around Coach Saban understand, No. 1, the lifeblood of the program is recruiting,” Golding said. “And then you’ve got to have sound schemes on both sides. You want to keep stability within those schemes for the development of players. And there’s a toughness component, a competitive character component to hold these guys accountable and hold them to a high standard. And I think that’s pretty consistent with whoever is playing right now.”
Lanning’s time at Alabama changed the trajectory of his career. Though he was only with Saban for one year, he left a job as a full-time, on-field coach at Sam Houston State in 2014 to work at Alabama as a graduate assistant, which many would consider a backward career step. But not only did it help launch Lanning into an assistant coaching role at Memphis, getting into Saban’s world helped him land at Georgia for four years under Smart.
“I was going to take a pay cut to go be there,” Lanning said. “When anybody asked me why, I said, ‘I’m going to get my doctorate in football.’ And that’s what I felt like working for Coach Saban. Things I thought I knew, I realized I didn’t know anything.”
In this 2015 file photo, Alabama head coach Nick Saban talks with offensive line coach Mario Cristobal on the sidelines during a game against Ole Miss. (Michael Chang/Sports Illustrated via Getty Images) (Michael Chang via Getty Images)
Cristobal represents the scores of coaches who went to Alabama to, in many ways, rehabilitate their career. Like Sarkisian, Kiffin and current Maryland coach Mike Locksley, Cristobal landed at Alabama as offensive line coach and recruiting coordinator after six years at Florida International where he had some success but ultimately fell victim to significant funding and administrative 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 was successful enough over four years to come back to his alma mater.
“If I could just put my finger on one thing that I valued the most in terms of learning, was reconfirming what I learned under Coach [Jimmy] Johnson and Coach [Dennis] Erickson, the guys I had a chance to play for here, is under no circumstances can you allow human nature and complacency to take over yourself and the people in your program,” Cristobal said. “That’s at all costs and it’s a daily fight. When you wake up, that has to be opponent No. 1 that you have to attack with intent, with urgency and I would say that would be the most important thing.”
But perhaps the most Saban-like disciple is the one whose tenure at Alabama barely registers a memory.
Curt Cignetti and the Indiana Hoosiers battered Nick Saban's Alabama replacement, Kalen DeBoer, and the Crimson Tide in a 38-3 blowout. (Luke Hales/Getty Images) (Luke Hales via Getty Images)
By the time he got to 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 a path to becoming an FBS head coach, Cignetti in 2011 famously took the job at D-II program IUP — Indiana University of Pennsylvania — making $125,000, about half of his salary at Alabama.
Since 2019 when James Madison hired him, Cignetti has posted a Saban-like 77-11 record as a head coach and has Indiana on the verge of arguably the most surprising championship in college sports given the program’s history as a perennial loser.
For many years, it was an interesting hypothetical about what would happen if you imported Saban into a random program and not a monster like Alabama or a place like LSU that had untapped potential.
Cignetti has essentially ended that debate.
“There’s a lot of disciples out there 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 huge megaphone, he has chosen to use it largely as a signal flare against the Wild West of the transfer portal and NIL while engaging in dubious conflicts of interest around certain coaching moves like advising Kiffin before he took the LSU job.
The reality, though, is that Saban chose to become a TV personality because his own dominance in the sport was waning. With the dramatic shift in recruiting and player compensation, he could no longer horde talent on the premise that being an Alabama player would unlock future NFL riches.
He was also 72 years old.
While Alabama may struggle to ever get back to that level of success, this year’s CFP has made it clear his influence across the sport will be felt for decades to come.
Source: “AOL Sports”
