Nick Saban: Hall of Fame?

What are the criteria? Wins? Longevity? Titles?

 

And Paterno coached a long time but doesn't have a ton of wins to show for it

 

Everything...

 

Yeah, if you're a coach who wins a national championship or a player who wins the Heisman, you're pretty much guaranteed to be in the College Football Hall of Fame.

I think Saban and Spurrier are 1-2 in some order in the SEC since Bryant. That part's easy.

As for if Saban is better than Bryant, I'd say not yet, but he could/will be before he's done. Bryant not only never had to play in an SEC championship game, but the SEC was not nearly then what it is now. And even then, because of the goofy SEC scheduling format, Bryant's early teams hardly ever played Ole Miss and his later teams hardly ever played Georgia. If he could beat Tennessee and Auburn most years, he was home free for an SEC title. Alabama had some wars with Georgia Tech early in Bryant's tenure, but then Bobby Dodd pulled the Jackets out of the SEC in the mid-60s, partly because of his contention that Bryant taught "brutal" tactics (which he probably did).

That said, an advantage Bryant has over Saban (and just about anyone else), is that his teams won multiple championships in two distinct eras of football. He won in the pre-integration, single-platoon era, and the post-integration, free-substitution era. No one, not even Bud Wilkinson or anyone from Notre Dame, did that.

But I agree that if Saban adds a title or two before he's done, he'll have eclipsed Bryant. Never thought I'd be saying that, but it's true.

 

Other things to consider about Saban... LSU hadn't won much for a long time before he got there. I think the 2001 title was the first in 15 years, the Sugar Bowl win was the first in a couple decades and the national title was the first in 40+ years.

Also, wasn't his last season at MSU the school's best record since the 1960s?

 

LSU had three winning seasons in the 90s and hadn't beaten Alabama in Baton Rouge since 1969 before Saban got there. They were also losing top recruits like Marshall Faulk, Reggie Wayne and Kordell Stewart to out-of-state schools, an unthinkable idea now.

Saban changed all that.

 

Wasn't Faulk Prop 48 or something like that? I thought I remembered there was some strange story as how he wound up at SDSU.

 

I have to admit, I had an agenda other than discussing his College Football Hall of Fame merits when creating this thread.

 

Could be. He's from an absolute shithole part of New Orleans, so his high school academic experience probably wasn't good. The story I always heard was that LSU offered him only as a DB, but that could have been a face-saving attempt on Faulk's part.