College Football Playoff: 5 reasons Alabama wins 2017 national championship

2. Nick Saban 

Bear Bryant is a legend, and the Bear casts a long shadow, but Nick Saban has passed Bryant as the best to ever pace the sidelines in Tuscaloosa. Saban also has a strong case to be considered the greatest in the history of the sport.

Saban has five national championships to his credit, all coming in the last 15 years. Bryant had six in a span of 19 seasons, though three of them were shared. Saban shared one, but that’s no longer a possibility given the College Football Playoff.

Therefore, the era in which Saban coaches, which includes a longer season, conference championship games and bowls in which every championship-caliber team is forced to play one another to win a title, is a more competitive atmosphere. There are also scholarship limitations, an increasing number of transfers and a host of other factors.

Of course, past performance is not a guarantee of future results, but Alabama is in no danger of Saban regressing as a coach. He’s still one of the fieriest, most competitive people in college football, with incredibly high standards for himself, his coaches and his players. No one out works him, or out recruits him, and very few can match up X’s and O’s like him.

Saban is still very involved in game planning (particularly on the defensive side of the football) unlike some of the others often cited in the G.O.A.T. debate, such as Joe Paterno and Bobby Bowden, who were largely figureheads by the time they turned 65, as Saban did last year.

He’s got a great coaching staff that puts players in a position to succeed, as well as a program (i.e. process) that runs like a well-oiled machine, and most importantly, Saban has built the most talented roster in America.