Urban Meyer reveals what makes Nick Saban such a great coach for Alabama

Former Ohio State and Florida head coach Urban Meyer recently appeared on Don’t @ Me with Dan Dakich and was asked about Alabama head coach Nick Saban. Some may believe Saban’s coaching greatness is largely predicated on acquiring the nation’s top talent, which Meyer disagreed with.

“Saying great players in unfair, there’s a lot of teams that recruit really well, and just check the rankings, sometimes teams don’t play very well. He does as good a job developing players and adapting to his personnel that I’ve seen. And the consistency, that’s extremely hard nowadays to be consistently great, it’s almost impossible what he’s done,” Meyer said.

Meyer also shared an anecdote from his coaching days about how through minimal film study he could tell the character of a team and what to expect from them in their matchup on Saturday.

“I tell this story quite often, when you’re getting ready to play a team one of the first things I would always do on a Sunday when I’m getting ready for the next team I start watching their special teams. And I knew after about an hour if we were in a street fight or if we were gonna beat that team, I knew within an hour because I would watch closely. First of all who was playing special teams and second of all how well coached were they, if their good players were on special teams and they were well coached, I knew this was a well coached and were in a street fight. And I would tell our staff that, you better be right on your game because this was gonna be a tough one,” Meyer said.

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Well that was every game for Meyer when he faced Saban, who’s known for putting his best players on special teams and for them to play with high effort. Saban and Meyer’s teams met four times during Meyer’s tenure at both Florida and Ohio State and split the series two apiece, two wins for Saban and two wins for Meyer in their ‘street fights’.

“There’s other games you’d get ready to play and you’d look at special teams, the good players weren’t playing, you can tell they didn’t spend much time on it, and if we just took care of business we’d beat that team and beat that team soundly. Every time you play a Saban team every position on that field is well coached,” Meyer said.

Meyer certainly knows greatness from his own coaching experience, and clearly recognizes and respects Saban’s as well.