Nick Saban Says Kirby Smart Used Strategy for Hiring Young Coaches Against Him

For nearly two decades, Alabama head coach Nick Saban has established a tradition of excellence, winning six national championships with the Crimson Tide and consistently producing top-tier NFL talent.

But Saban’s success in Tuscaloosa, Ala., has not been a one-man spectacle. The longtime Crimson Tide coach takes pride in providing young coaches with an opportunity to grow in the sport. That tradition—a lesson he learned from Patriots coach Bill Belichick—has been a big asset in establishing Alabama’s winning culture.

Some of Saban’s most noteworthy assistants who are now head coaches include Georgia’s Kirby Smart, Ole Miss’s Lane Kiffin and Oregon’s Dan Lanning. In a Thursday appearance on The Pat McAfee Show, Saban revealed that he wanted to hire Lanning after he completed his graduate assistant tenure at Memphis. 

However, Smart—a former assistant who has captured consecutive CFP national championships in each of the last two seasons at UGA—beat Saban to the punch and hired Lanning as the Bulldogs’ defensive coordinator prior to him becoming the head man in charge in Eugene, Oregon. Saban told McAfee that one of the drawbacks of having so many great assistants as coaches is their ability to hire former staff members before he can.

“I was ready to hire [Lanning], and two days before I was going to hire him, Kirby [Smart] hired him,” Saban said. “So it kind of messes up your game plan a little bit. … They kind of know who the guys that you’ve had in the organization are the good ones. And they end up snatching them up before you get a chance to.”

As Saban seeks to keep elevating the Crimson Tide program, it is likely that his former assistants will continue to adopt his coaching philosophy.