It’s safe to say that former Ohio State coach Urban Meyer and Alabama coach Nick Saban will go down as some of the top coaches in college football history. And there’s clearly plenty of mutual respect between the two coaches, who have faced each other several times.
In a recent interview with Don’t @ Me with Dan Dakich on Outkick, Meyer revealed what he believes makes Saban such a great head coach.
“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,” Meyer said of Saban. “And the consistency, that’s extremely hard nowadays to be consistently great, it’s almost impossible what he’s done.”
Meyer also revealed why he feared Alabama’s teams under Saban. It wasn’t the Crimson Tide’s offense, defense, scheme or players – it was their special teams.
“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.”
Despite Meyer’s fear of Saban and Alabama, the two were relatively evenly matched – at least when they faced off against each other. In their four head-to-head matchups, both coaches are 2-2 against each other.
