Information: for the great Alabama football coach, Nick Saban Field is a nice start but not enough.

the great Alabama football coach, Nick Saban Field is a nice start but not enough.

During a ceremony during halftime of the Crimson Tide’s game against South Florida on Saturday, the field at Bryant-Denny Stadium will be renamed in honor of the legendary Alabama football coach Nick Saban. Alabama’s future home games will be held at Bryant-Denny Stadium’s Nick Saban Field.
The renaming of the field was officially approved by the University of Alabama Board of Trustees on Thursday, and Saban described it as a “honor of a lifetime”. Renaming the field, however, is hardly a fitting tribute to the greatest coach in sports history.

The general public will continue to call it Bryant-Denny rather than Saban Field. Furthermore, no one is spit out the mouthful that is Bryant-Denny Stadium’s Nick Saban Field (also known as NSFBDS).

Saban’s accomplishments while covering games in Tuscaloosa are well-known to us. Six national championships, 201 victories, 10 SEC titles, 13 straight seasons with 11 wins, four Heisman Trophy winners, innumerable All-Americans, and first-round draft selections in 17 years. The man accepted a position with a massive houndstooth shadow and somehow left casting an even bigger shadow himself. Houndstooth fedora’s have been replaced by straw hats.

Saying that Saban would overtake The Bear 17 years ago would have been sacrilegious. After all, many people regarded Coach Bryant as the best college football coach of all time, and the Tide added houndstooth to their primary color scheme in addition to crimson and white. Taking Bryant’s name in jest is more likely to spark a fight than insulting a man’s wife.

It was unimaginable to anyone that Saban would leave Tuscaloosa more revered, even after he won the first of his six national titles there. There was some talk following the back-to-back championships in 2011 and 2012, but he was still only halfway to Coach Bryant’s total at Alabama. But in the end, he won one more, and then another, and another.

matching Bryant’s six national championships with the Tide and surpassing him overall if one includes the 2003 championship he earned at LSU.

Quite frankly, Saban ought to be named after the stadium. Name it Bryant-Denny-Saban Stadium, or Bryant-Saban Stadium (or Saban-Bryant to avoid the unfortunate shorthand) in honor of George H. Denny. Saban ought to own the stadium; Denny still has the chimes. It is the location that Saban (re)built, after all.

We all recall the dismal days of Tide fandom, which spanned from the Mike’s and Dennis era to the end of the Gene Stallings era. Alabama was no longer a major player in collegiate football. As a has-been, Alabama has the potential to become irrelevant in the modern era of college football, a fate that has befallen teams like Nebraska and Miami.

Rather than focusing on winning, Saban brought life to a once-dormant program and elevated Alabama to the top of the NCAA football standings, surpassing all others. Throughout the decade, he reinvented himself several times, moving from the ground-and-pound defensive juggernaut of the 2008–2013 Tide teams to the dynamic attacks that launched the careers of current NFL quarterbacks like Jalen Hurts, Tua Tagovailoa, Mac Jones, and Bryce Young.