Nick Saban was asked to name the four best teams in college football. He said Georgia, Notre Dame, Miami and Ohio State.
He coached Alabama for 17 seasons and won six national championships there. He did not include them.
Why that matters more than the list itself
Plenty of analysts have left Alabama out of their top four this season. None of them built the program that made Alabama the default answer to this question for a decade and a half.
Saban has been careful since retiring. He is complimentary about Kalen DeBoer’s situation when asked directly and avoids anything that reads as a shot at the people running his old building. Which is exactly what makes a simple four-team list, offered without editorializing, land harder than a critique would have. He was not asked to assess Alabama. He was asked to name the best teams and the name did not come up.
The list is defensible
Georgia is the current AP No. 1 after winning 20-17 at Alabama, a result that is itself part of the case Saban is making. Kirby Smart’s team went into Tuscaloosa and won, and Smart celebrated with a belt.
Notre Dame has won 16 straight games, most recently a 58-7 rout of Stanford. Miami routed Clemson 41-13 and hosts an unbeaten in-state rival. Ohio State plays at defending national champion Indiana on Saturday in a top-five game.
You can quibble at the margins. Indiana is 5-0, the reigning champion, and has Josh Hoover throwing 17 touchdowns without an interception, and leaving the champs out of a top four while including the team that has to go play them is a defensible-but-arguable choice.
The more interesting omission is still Alabama. The Tide beat Mississippi State 56-23 and have looked like a good team. Good is the problem. For 17 years under Saban, Alabama was in this conversation whether it deserved to be or not, because the brand did the arguing. Saban has now removed the brand from the equation personally.
What he actually did
There is a version of retirement where a legendary coach becomes a professional booster for his old program, grading it on a curve for the rest of his life. Saban is not doing that, and this list is the clearest evidence yet.
He spent his career telling players that the standard is the standard and that nobody gets credit for a name on a helmet. Asked to apply that standard to the helmet he made famous, he applied it.
It is also, bluntly, a useful thing for the sport. The committee has spent years being accused of weighting Alabama and Ohio State by reputation. The man most responsible for building one of those reputations just publicly declined to use it.
Georgia, Notre Dame, Miami, Ohio State. Four teams, none of them his. Nobody is going to accuse Saban of being soft on this one.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.