College Football Elites, Part 1: What makes a ‘blue blood’?
By Dante Pryor
- Conference championships: 31 (last in 2018)
- 10-plus win seasons: 40
- Consensus All-Americans: 74
- Heisman Trophy winners: 2
- NFL players: 382
Alabama’s iconic coaches are known by singular names, “Bear” and Saban. They, like Oklahoma, are in the seven that have 900 wins as a program. Many regard them as the best football program in the history of college football. They are the Alabama Crimson Tide.
Although Paul “Bear” Bryant is the name most commonly associated with creating the Alabama dynasty, it was Wallace Wade who not only established Alabama as a national powerhouse but proved that Southern schools could compete with other programs from around the country. Wade won three national championships and two Rose Bowls before becoming Duke’s all-time winningest coach.
After Wade departed for Duke, he was replaced by Frank Thomas who led Alabama into the newly formed Southeastern Conference in 1933. Thomas had success from the start in the SEC winning their inaugural conference title. He would go on to win two national titles of his own along with four conference championships.
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A decade-plus of mediocrity, including a winless year in 1955, made the Alabama Crimson Tide search for a coach after the 1957 season. They found the coach that would bring them back to the national spotlight and made them one of the iconic football programs in college football history. That man was Paul “Bear” Bryant who allegedly got his nickname for wrestling a bear when he was 13 — he left Texas A&M to coach the Crimson Tide. What a career “The Bear” would go on to have.
When he retired, Bryant was college football’s all-time winningest coach with 323 wins. He’s one of a handful of coaches who is the all-time winningest coach at two different schools: Alabama and Kentucky. Of all Bryant’s accomplishments, he might be most famous for 1970. That year, the USC Trojans became the first integrated team to play in the state of Alabama. The extent of Bryant’s involvement is unknown, but we do know he had a hand in the Trojans coming to Alabama.
By the end of Bryant’s tenure in Tuscaloosa, he had a record six national championships and 13 conference titles to go along with the 323 wins.
The Crimson Tide has moderate success after Bryant’s retirement. Bill Curry, Gene Stallings and Mike DuBose all won SEC titles and Stallings won a national championship in 1992. It was former Michigan State, LSU and Miami Dolphins head coach Nick Saban who would propel the Tide back to its national glory. The run Saban and the Crimson Tide are on right now may only pale in comparison to Bryant’s run at Alabama.
Saban’s run can be linked to two important aspects of his program: his recruiting and his ability to hire assistants. Since 2008, the Alabama Crimson Tide has never had a recruiting class below fifth in the country. This includes a streak from 2011-17 where Alabama had the No. 1 recruiting class in the country. Saban has a reputation as a dogged recruiter, and if you can’t keep up you probably don’t work for him long.
In addition to being a relentless recruiter, he knows how to hire quality staff. Saban has said that he doesn’t want assistants without aspirations of being head coaches. That’s why he loses so many assistant coaches. There are currently 15 head coaches in FBS or the NFL who coached under Saban. Three of them he’s currently coaching against in the SEC in Kirby Smart, Jeremy Pruitt and Jimbo Fisher.
Much like legendary coach Bud Wilkinson, Saban believes in his system. He believes if you use the system, everything will take care of itself. Who are we to argue with the results. He is currently on a streak of 12 consecutive 10-plus win seasons.
During that time, the Tide have five national titles, six conference titles and nine division titles. All of this during the most difficult time to recruit and in the toughest conference in the country.