O'Gara: Nick Saban's retirement means college football needs a new king, and it's Kirby Smart
Nick Saban retired as the best coach in the history of college football. Period.
Seven rings, 10 national championship appearances and 11 SEC titles. It’s a résumé that’s unmatched.
The debate following Wednesday’s bombshell news shouldn’t be whether Saban is the best of all time. He earned the right to stand alone in that discussion, which should’ve been put to bed when he passed Paul “Bear” Bryant to get ring No. 7.
Nah, the debate is about who the new king of college football is.
For my money, it’s not the guy who stood atop the college football world on Monday night (are we sure Jim Harbaugh would be around long enough to accept that?). It’s definitely not Dabo Swinney, AKA the guy who treats the transfer portal like reluctance to get on TikTok. You can’t be the king of the sport if you’ve never won a Playoff game, so that rules out Lincoln Riley, Brian Kelly, James Franklin, Dan Lanning and basically all but a handful of coaches.
There’s only 1 choice for the new king of college football — Kirby Smart.
Smart checks every box. He’s suddenly tied with Swinney as the active leader in national championships with 2. He consistently signs top-2 recruiting classes and, unlike Swinney, he believes in the transfer portal … or at least enough to address roster needs.
King Saban passing the torch — or rather the crown — to Smart just feels right.
So what if Smart is only 48 years old? He might not be the elder statesman of the sport, but he’s now the second-longest tenured coach in the SEC. Even crazier? He’s the only active SEC head coach who has a conference title under his belt.
But this isn’t just about being the king of the SEC. That’s not up for debate, and if you think it is, tell me about all of Smart’s regular-season losses in the past 3 years. That’s right. They don’t exist.
What does exist is someone who appears to be the closest thing to Saban that we’ll see.
That’s not just because, as South Carolina coach Shane Beamer said, Smart’s Georgia “literally implemented everything Alabama did, from the weekly schedule with the coaches to the practice schedule to the weight room program to whatever … A lot of stuff we used even had the Alabama logo on it and was copy and pasted with the Georgia logo on it.”
Saban’s passing of the torch goes well beyond that. It goes to Smart’s maniacal pursuit of perfection. This is the guy who pulled a Saban by avoiding going totally off the grid with a trip to Italy and instead spending 5 days in Mississippi being a travel baseball dad. That’s Smart.
We can debate whether Smart will have the staying power that Saban did, but it’s not an equal discussion. The year-round calendar has changed the sport drastically. With the transfer portal and an expedited recruiting calendar, this isn’t the same sport that it was 10 years ago, and it’s definitely not the same sport it was half a century ago when Bear Bryant would take 6-8 weeks to travel to California to golf with USC coach John McKay.
There’s no doubt that the new demands of college football impacted Saban’s decision. Instead of recruiting his own roster or navigating NIL waters, he can now go spend time being a grandpa or he can relax in his new $17.5 million home in Jupiter, Fla. The possibilities are endless. The motivation to continue coaching, at age 72, was not endless. Not for Saban.
In the same way that Saban could chase Bryant, Smart can always be motivated by his pursuit of Saban. I’d argue that Smart’s 1-5 record against Saban will make that nearly impossible for him to ever bridge that gap, but who knows? If Smart and Georgia are indeed the team of the 2020s in the way that Saban’s Alabama was in the 2010s, that discussion can be revisited.
(By the way, I just called Georgia the team of the 2020s even though there have been 4 SEC Championships played in the 2020s … and 3 were won by Saban.)
Maybe Smart is chasing a ghost and retiring with a better legacy than Saban is impossible. That’s me saying that, though. Not him. Fortunately for Georgia fans, Smart isn’t wired like that. It’s what got him to this point. That is, the owner of a 9-figure contract with 2 national titles and 7 consecutive top-7 finishes. Life is good for Smart.
It’s wild to think that when Smart joined Saban’s Alabama staff in 2007, the latter became the first $4 million coach in the history of the sport. In 2024, we’ll have at least 6 SEC head coaches and 8 nationally who make at least $9 million annually. Go figure that Swinney is the only coach who earned more than Smart in 2023.
But being the king of college football isn’t about money. It’s not just about wins against Saban, either. If that were the case, Hugh Freeze would have a better case than Smart.
This is about being the face of the sport in the way that Saban was for nearly 2 decades. Before Saban took over at Alabama, you could debate if that was Bobby Bowden, Urban Meyer, Steve Spurrier or even Jim Tressel. Once Saban got it rolling, that was no longer a debate.
Saban was the only thing that stood in Smart’s way from getting it rolling in the same way at Georgia. In the past 7 seasons, Smart has 5 losses against Saban and 6 losses against everyone else. The only active head coaches — excluding assistants — who have a victory against Smart during that 7-year stretch are Gus Malzahn (now at UCF) and Tom Herman (now at FAU). Telling, that is.
There were plenty of people on the outside who probably breathed a sigh of relief on Tuesday when the biggest coaching news in decades dropped. Auburn fans had to be ecstatic, as were LSU fans. Whether they’ll admit it or not, a Tennessee program with 1 win against Saban’s Alabama probably lit a figurative cigar.
But for Georgia, Saban retiring means that there’s a new reign in college football.
King Kirby is here.