The College Football Hall of Fame induction ceremony takes place on Tuesday at the Bellagio Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas.
It’s a special event that highlights new inductees and celebrates longtime football legends, so it was a no-brainer that one of the winningest coaches in college football history and NCAA record-holder would be inducted into the Hall of Fame, and Alabama’s Nick Saban was inducted this week.
Saban retired from Alabama after the 2023 season and closed out his career there with a 297-71-1 record. He’s the first coach in college football history to win titles at two different FBS schools since the start of the AP poll.
At the National Football Foundation, Saban spoke about his legacy and shared words of wisdom.
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“There was always a reckoning for what I did,” Saban said. “That helped me tremendously, I think, from an accountability standpoint, because my dad used to always say, ‘If you don’t have the time to do it right the first time, how you going to find the time to do it again?’
“We won an extraordinary amount of games when I was a Pee Wee player and a high school player that culminated in a state championship.”
He added that after every one of those wins, he got “chewed out pretty good by my coaches and dad.”
“After all those wins, I finally asked my mom once, ‘Why do I always seem to get reprimanded even when we win?’ She said, ‘It’s not about winning. It’s about you being the best you can be,'” Saban concluded.
Saban said that those lessons helped him “develop a process that helped a lot of other people be successful, helped us be successful and helped the people I worked with give us a chance to be successful. I’d like to thank them for that.”
Saban won 87.7% of his games at Alabama, according to research from Sports Reference. He was 206-29 and had 15 consecutive winning seasons with an AP No. 1 ranking, as well as nine SEC championships.
The coach has enjoyed success, but it wasn’t a given. He said that as a kid growing up in West Virginia pumping gas at his dad’s service station that “some of those lessons that I learned, it was beyond my imagination that I would ever end up here.”