Nick Saban claims 2019 Alabama team was one of his best teams ever

Oh what could’ve been? As college football’s first-ever seven-time national championship-winning head coach, Nick Saban doesn’t have a lot of regrets or even reasons to second-guess his time in Tuscaloosa. But that doesn’t stop the legendary former Alabama coach from reminiscing about the one that got away.

Saban’s Crimson Tide played in six College Football Playoff national championship games across seven memorable seasons between 2015-21, winning three of his six total NCAA titles during that historic span. The lone expectation, of course, was a disappointing 2019 season that was inexplicably derailed by the devastating hip injury to superstar junior quarterback Tua Tagovailoa in mid-November that year.

While Alabama managed to bounce back a year later to win Saban’s sixth and final national championship during the challenging 2020 COVID season, that 2019 setback still stings the 73-year-old coach two years into his post-retirement career as an ESPN analyst. Mostly because he knows that was arguably Alabama’s most talented roster in years.

Nick Saban: Alabama’s 2019 squad was ‘one of the best teams we’ve ever had’

“The 2019 team had all those guys on it when Tua go hurt — that may have been one of the best teams we’ve ever had,” Saban said Friday during his weekly appearance on The Pat McAfee Show from inside Vanderbilt‘s FirstBank Stadium in Nashville. “And when Tua got hurt, we lost to Auburn with Mac (Jones) playing when he probably wasn’t ready to play. But that was one of the best teams that we ever had and they never even got into the Playoffs.”

To say that 2019 Alabama roster was loaded would be an understatement. The following April, the Crimson Tide had nine players drafted in the first three rounds of the 2020 NFL Draft, including Tagovailoa — a midseason favorite to be taken No. 1 overall — going No. 5 to the Miami Dolphins just five months out of surgery. Joining Tagovailoa as first-round selections were offensive tackle Jedrick Willis (No. 10, Cleveland Browns) and receivers Henry Ruggs III (No. 12, Las Vegas Raiders) and Jerry Jeudy (No. 15, Denver Broncos). Future multi-year NFL starting DBs Trevon Diggs and Xavier McKinney were also selected in the second round. A year later, Alabama had eight more players taken in the opening two rounds of the 2021 NFL Draft.

Tagovailoa’s season-ending injury occurred just one week after the Tide experienced its first loss of the 2019 season, a hard-fought 46-41 defeat to eventual national champion LSU in Tuscaloosa. Despite Tagovailoa’s injury, Alabama still easily beat host Mississippi State by three scores the following week and then rolled over FCS opponent Western Carolina a week later in the first-career start for Jones.

But with a trip to the SEC Championship Game on the line in the Iron Bowl a week later, Jones threw a pair of costly interceptions and rival Auburn managed to hold of for a 48-45 upset in the always-difficult Jordan-Hare Stadium. The loss ended Alabama’s chances of making a sixth consecutive CFP appearance, and ruined any shot the Tide had of winning back-to-back national titles twice under Saban.