It finally happened.

The inevitability we all convinced ourselves wasn’t inevitable, especially after Nick Saban put together his finest coaching job in winning the SEC championship in 2023, occurred Wednesday when the Alabama head coach retired.

The 7-time national champion went out an SEC champion for the 11th time, and did so on his terms, despite the Crimson Tide’s heartache of a College Football Playoff semifinal loss to eventual national champion Michigan. There was no slow decline, as befell legendary coaches like Bobby Bowden at Florida State, Saban’s good friend Steve Spurrier at South Carolina, or Bill Belichick in New England, who joined Saban in retirement on Thursday morning. There was just a once indefatigable coach who,  despite enjoying the job more than ever, became fatigued.

Terry Saban’s statement to social media said it all, really: The “process” will never go out of store, nor will the “relentless pursuit of a worthy goal.”

Saban was relentless, and his process as close to perfection as one gets in sport or life, really. Saban’s meticulous and yes, tireless pursuit of excellence was the embodiment of the old southern adage “Do your best until your best is better,” and the result was the greatest dynasty in the history of college football.

“To be a champion, you better be relentless. You better be recruiting or your program is dying. You better approach every day understanding that what you can control is how hard you work, respecting that someone else is working really hard, too. What Coach Saban gets and what we try to do is understand how recruiting relentlessly is the foundation of everything else. You better approach that with humility,” Georgia head coach Kirby Smart told me at SEC Media Days.

Smart, who takes over Saban’s mantle as the “king of college football” just a month and a week removed from Saban halting Georgia’s march to a 3-peat, is the best recruiter still in the sport and, as the quote above suggests and 2 national titles demonstrate, Smart learned that from the king of recruiting, Saban.

Saban’s recruiting prowess shines through 6 national championship trophies at Alabama and through the numbers — 17 consecutive top-5 recruiting classes, including the No. 1 class in the 247Sports Composite every season from 2011-2017, then again in 2019, 2021 and 2023. Including the 2024 class (which ranked 2nd nationally), Saban signed 75 5-star players (according to various recruiting services) and 282 4-star players in his 17 recruiting classes.

The talent has produced championships and laid the foundation for Alabama being the top destination for the nation’s elite players. Talent begets talent, and Saban’s Tuscaloosa football factory produced 44 first-round draft picks, the most for any coach at a single school by 11 picks. Joe Paterno, who coached at Penn State 28 more years than Saban was at Alabama, is 2nd all-time, with 33.

“It’s the lifeblood of the sport. Recruit or die. It comes just before talent retention, which is a big part of all this too now, of course. But we live in a talent acquisition world, whether football or a law firm,” Clemson coach Dabo Swinney, one of the only thorns in the Saban dynasty’s side, told me this past summer.

Saban’s process for recruiting started with meticulous talent evaluation, but it focused on 1 state more than any other: Florida.

Saban signed 28 5-star recruits from Florida — more than one-third of his total haul of 75 5-stars. The names include 2015 Heisman Trophy winner Derrick Henry, a lifelong Florida Gators fan whom Saban thieved from under the Gators noses in tiny Yulee, Florida, by, as Derrick Henry tells it, promising Henry he would “get an opportunity to play running back and become a NFL running back” at Alabama. That worked especially well given the fact then-Florida coach Will Muschamp recruited Henry as a linebacker, wondering if he was too big and plodding to be an elite college running back.

Henry’s choice to wear crimson is but one example of the many, many future stars and pros Saban plucked from the Sunshine state, much to the chagrin of the Gators, Seminoles and Hurricanes, who combined to win just 2 national championships in Saban’s 17 seasons on the Capstone after winning a collective 7 in the 17 seasons prior to Saban’s arrival.

Sometimes correlation is causation. This is one of those times.

Other star Floridians for the Crimson Tide include Broward County’s Calvin Ridley and Jerry Jeudy, whom assistants Billy Napier and Mario Cristobal, along with Saban, coaxed to Tuscaloosa despite a family of Hurricanes fans; Miami Northwestern star Amari Cooper, who grew up with 1 poster on his wall: of Hurricane superstar Sean Taylor; Booker T. Washington Pensacola star Alex Leatherwood, who was twice an All-American and picked Alabama over his lifelong team, the Gators, despite personal pleas from Booker T. Washington alum Emmitt Smith. Winning these recruiting battles, plus countless others for talents at football farms like St. Thomas Aquinas in Fort Lauderdale (Dallas Turner, among others) and IMG Academy in Bradenton (too many to list), laid the foundation for nearly 2 decades of Alabama dominance.

While Saban’s ice cold grip on South Florida thawed in recent years, with Turner the last shining star from the area to pick Alabama (over his childhood favorite Florida, among others), the mark Saban left on Florida recruiting changed the state forever.

Always a hotbed of talent, the majority of the state’s blue chips stayed in-state at one of the “Big 3” prior to the Saban era. Saban changed all that and, in many ways, Kirby Smart has perfected it, landing a host of future national champions and stars, from James Cook to Jalen Carter to Tyrique Stevenson to Carson Beck, from Florida.

Saban’s retirement is a game changer in too many ways to encapsulate one article.

The largest long-term domino effect, however, might come in recruiting Florida.

Smart will continue to clean up, and as long as Ohio State sticks with Ryan Day and his relentless recruiters on staff, the Buckeyes will ink big time Florida talents of their own annually.

But what of Mario Cristobal, an instrumental assistant for Saban, or Florida’s Napier, who have established relationships in the state and who understand the importance of sealing the home state borders to program vitality? What of Mike Norvell, who has relied heavily on the portal but could see a change with Saban no longer around to contend with?

The door is open to the state of Florida’s elite talent again, and they can’t all end up in Athens.

Recruiting doesn’t guarantee victories. In the end, you still have player egos to manage, which is harder and harder in the age of instant gratification and the transfer portal. You still have to oversee a coaching and support staff, which at most elite programs approaches 40 people, if not more (Alabama had 54 in 2023). You have NIL to contend with and collectives and media obligations.

But this is still a talent acquisition sport, and no state has more talent than Florida.

That’s why 3 in-state programs could win 7 national titles from 1989-2006. That’s why Florida could revolutionize the SEC, winning 7 conference championships from 1990-2000. And that’s no small reason why Nick Saban could dwarf almost all of those accomplishments, building the greatest college football empire the sport has ever known and sustaining it in an age of unprecedented change.

The door is open in Florida again, even with Smart constantly lurking.

Can the Gators, Seminoles, or Hurricanes open it?