SAN JOSE, Calif. — It was 85 degrees in Tuscaloosa, Ala., on Aug. 18, and Nick Saban was feeling the heat.
Midway through training camp, many of Alabama’s younger players had not progressed as Saban had hoped. A talented linebacker for the Crimson Tide, the defending national champion, had recently sustained a severe knee injury, and the prior season’s starting right tackle had broken his foot.
“We don’t have enough depth, especially on defense, to afford to be able to lose those kinds of players,” Saban told a group of reporters.
Then Saban was asked whether the lack of progress among the more inexperienced players worried him.
And that’s when Saban, this era’s most successful college coach and recruiter, snapped. His expletive-tinged remark went viral online.
“You just think we, whatever happens, we just” — um, spit — “another player,” he said.
“‘Everything’s going to be perfect,’” he added facetiously. “All of our fans think that. You all think that — that’s what you write about, that’s the message you send out there.”
Five months later, Saban is one win away from his seventh national title. The No. 1 Crimson Tide (14-0) will face No. 2 Clemson (14-0) in Monday night’s championship game. So in fact, everything has been perfect, or very close to it, with Alabama conjuring new, great players, seemingly out of thin air, whenever they were needed.
Of all the work that has positioned Alabama to secure its sixth national title in 10 seasons — recruiting young stars, developing N.F.L.-caliber players, evolving schemes, managing games — the most unheralded might be the program’s extraordinary depth. It stacks top-ranked recruiting classes, one on top of the other, over and over and over, nearly every year.
In an era when college football seasons can stretch to 15 games, increasing the risk of injury, and when rules restricting player transfers have been loosened, depth has become the ultimate weapon separating the best from the very good.
Somehow, the highest-rated prospects in the land appear to be O.K. with that.
“There’s been a major, subtle shift in college football in the last five years that the elite schools are using to their advantage,” said Gary Danielson, a CBS Sports analyst. “Crowded depth charts are no longer a hindrance to recruiting.”
Brandon Huffman, the national recruiting editor for 247Sports, a high school scouting site, pointed to Rashaan Evans as a vital precedent. A linebacker ranked No. 1 in his high school class at the position, he forsook offers from elite programs where he would have started immediately and chose Alabama, where he did not start until the College Football Playoff of his junior season. After his senior year, Evans was a first-round N.F.L. draft pick in 2018.
Future prospects notice such developments, Huffman said. They see that paying their dues for a couple of years at Alabama and starting only a season or two can be worthwhile down the line.
“That,” Huffman said, “is why Alabama does what Alabama does.”
Deionte Thompson, a first-team All-American safety who did not start until his junior season, said he had chosen Alabama because he came “from a winning background” and did not want to be “someplace where I was miserable losing.”
“I was able to grow so much during the time from me not being a starter to me being a full-time starter now,” he said. “I wouldn’t trade a moment.”
Not surprisingly, Clemson, the other dominant program of the College Football Playoff era, also hogs talent, creating depth rivaled only by Alabama’s. At the start of this season, Clemson replaced its starting quarterback, a senior who led the team to a conference title and a playoff berth last season, with a freshman: Trevor Lawrence, who by some measures is considered the highest-ranked recruit ever.
“Those top programs, you’re going to have competition,” said Joey King, who was Lawrence’s high school coach in Georgia. “I’ve always been leery of coaches who guarantee them a chance to play. Offer them a chance to compete. That’s what Trevor wanted.”
For Saban and Alabama, the most dramatic jettisoning of an established player happened during last year’s national championship game.
Held scoreless through halftime, Alabama’s offense trotted out its backup quarterback — a true freshman, no less — to replace Jalen Hurts for the second half. He proceeded to throw three touchdown passes, and the Crimson Tide won in overtime. It was as if Saban had spent the entire season giving minimal playing time to this reserve, a slinging southpaw named Tua Tagovailoa, on a dare.
Now Alabama players know that even a two-year starting quarterback like Hurts is not safe, not even in the middle of his second consecutive national championship game. They also know that should Tagovailoa struggle Monday night, Saban will turn to Hurts, as he did during the Southeastern Conference title game last month. Hurts came in for a struggling and injured Tagovailoa and led Alabama to a come-from-behind victory.
Because Hurts, a junior, completed his bachelor’s degree last month, he could transfer after this season and play immediately elsewhere. Crimson Tide fans need not worry. The new backups to Tagovailoa, the runner-up for the Heisman Trophy, will most likely include the fifth- and eighth-highest ranked prostyle quarterbacks among high school seniors, including Tagovailoa’s younger brother.
Alabama has made countless other substitutions that have barely been noticed, because of how seamless they were.
Take the two players whose injuries so agitated Saban in August. The right tackle, Matt Womack, was a rising junior, and his two replacements, Alex Leatherwood and Jedrick Wills, were five- and four-star recruits, ranked first and eighth in their class. They have been useful contributors on Alabama’s second-ranked offense.
And Chris Allen’s injury could have depleted Alabama’s depth at linebacker. Except the starting unit is monstrously talented, and the backups include a former walk-on who has been with the program nearly six years, as well as a four-star recruit who is a redshirt junior. As for the future, the freshman linebacker Eyabi Anoma is rated as Alabama’s fourth-best recruit ever (Julio Jones, the Atlanta Falcons’ star receiver, is No. 3).
How does Alabama do it? The trick seems to be having no trick at all: telling prospects that they will receive the opportunity only to compete, but not necessarily to play.
“He’s not a big promise guy,” Billy Napier, the Louisiana-Lafayette coach who spent four seasons overseeing Alabama’s wide receivers, said of Saban. “He’s very crystal-clear about expectations.”
According to Alabama coaches, recruiting this way produces a virtuous cycle. Players are inspired by the knowledge that they will see elite competition not only against other teams 12 or 15 days a year, but also every day in practice.
“The amount of work relative to the amount of competition is a huge margin,” Napier said. “There’s a year-round plan for player development, often about how you practice against competition behind or in front of you at your position. Accountability and responsibility goes with that. Here comes a new wave of 45 players every year that are the most talented in the country, so there’s no room for complacency.”
Tosh Lupoi, the co-defensive coordinator, said that Alabama “can only put 11 individuals out there. Those individuals are going to be the best players for that specific package.”
Fighting to be one of those 11, even more than the games themselves, “is the ultimate stage of competition,” Lupoi added. “And I think that helps us perform on Saturdays.”
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