Nick Saban uses NSFW description of how he built defensive game plans

Legendary head coach Nick Saban is widely regarded as the best college football coach of all time. In order to earn this moniker, two things must ensue: winning and winning. And he did both of those things.

In 28 college football seasons across four different programs (Toledo, Michigan State, LSU and Alabama), Saban boasted a 292-71-1 record with seven National Championships. The key to some of these championship runs were vaunted defenses, and he humorously went into detail of how he built those game plans during Friday’s edition of ‘The Pat McAfee Show.’

“One thing that I thought was really important because you say sometimes you can’t stop the run and sometimes you can’t get off the field on third down,” Saban started. “I was never one of these guys that tried to make it simple. I was a whole part whole guy.

“To use Pat (McAfee)‘s terminology, I would take a bucket of s**t, throw it on the wall, see what stuck, pick up the s**t and then threw it up there until it all stuck. So it might take longer for some guys than others but that’s the way I approach it because we wanted to be able to make adjustments in the game.”

This philosophy certainly worked for the head coach, as it resulted in a lot of wins and a boatload of defensive players drafted into the National Football League. Some standouts include Houston Texans DE Will Anderson Jr., Denver Broncos DB Patrick Surtain II, Baltimore Ravens DB Marlon Humphrey and Dallas Cowboys DB Trevon Diggs.

Nick Saban wants Power leagues to unite behind joint media rights agreement

Along with taking to the ‘Pat McAfee Show’ to explain some of his philosophies, Saban also called on the Power Four conferences to come together and collectively bargain a single media rights deal with multiple television properties (much like the NFL does) earlier this month. Of course, with each Power Four — or five if including the rebuilding Pac-12 — currently signed to highly lucrative media rights deals through the early 2030s, a joint renegotiation would be challenging and unlikely in the near future.

“The second thing is, we need to change the metrics of every conference (having) their own TV (media deals),” Saban said. “We need to have more of a NFL model where we have all the major conferences do a (joint) TV deal and just like the NFL, make sure there’s a good game on every Sunday that people are going to be interested in watching. 

“And then we’d have more good games, because only the Top 70 teams would play each other. And you’d have to play those teams. So you’d have better games to watch, (it’d be) better for the fans, create more revenue for the schools and it’d just be better for everybody.”

Whether or not any of Saban’s suggestions ultimately come to pass is not yet clear. But college football fans everywhere are just happy to see someone being proactive about fixing their favorite sport.

On3’s Alex Byington contributed to this article.