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WATCH: Tim Tebow on Nick Saban’s dominance of former assistants: ‘Copycats are never as good as the original’
By Dave Holcomb
Published:
It’s usually better to be original. According to Tim Tebow, the same goes with football coaches.
WATE 6 reporter Jordan Crammer asked the Florida legend and SEC Network analyst how Nick Saban has managed to dominate his former assistants to the tune of a 14-0 record. As he usually does, Tebow provided an intense response.
“When they try to do everything the way they did it,” he told reporters in Knoxville Friday. “It’s hard to do it as good. You didn’t come up with it. Someone else did, so you’re just a copycat. Copycats are never as good as the original.”
Nick Saban is 14-0 when facing former assistants.
Today, I asked Tim Tebow what it is about the Alabama HC that makes him such a difficult opponent, even for those who know him best. #SECNation #Bama pic.twitter.com/h03mgmlTUJ— Jordan Crammer (@JordanCrammer) October 19, 2018
To be fair to Saban’s former assistant, nobody — not even Tebow’s former coach Urban Meyer — has built a program as dominate as Alabama. Others such as Meyer, Pete Carroll and a few others have come close, but they haven’t matched Saban in championships. So, it’s not quite fair to compare the former assistants with perhaps the greatest college coach of all-time.
Having said that, Tebow also laid out a way a former assistant can leave Saban’s shadow to become more than a copycat.
“If you can learn from them and say, ‘You know what. You did this, but I’m going to do this. And I’m going to learn from you, but adapt it and take it to the next level.’ Then I think you have something special.”
Dave covers SEC football for Saturday Down South.
